The Farm (Sermon)

“The Farm”

Psalm 19

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

2/7/16

         One of my favorite places on earth is The Farm. For me, The Farm is about 260 acres of sandy fields and thick pine forest down in Screven County, GA. Most of The Farm, which has been in my wife’s family for about sixty years, sits on the north side of Captola Road about two miles from Double Heads and four miles from Ditch Pond – if that helps. Now, if you rode by The Farm today, you would be underwhelmed. Like so many places and people, it becomes remarkable only through relationship.

         I am wannabe progeny of The Farm, but for those who actually call The Farm home, those two words can reach deep into your being. When two Farm-raised strangers meet, they often share an immediate bond. They see, feel, and understand things that folks like me, who grew up in The Subdivision, will never fully appreciate. The Farm speaks and teaches a language for which there are words, but for which words are not always necessary.

          “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims [God’s] handiwork…There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth.” (Psalm 19:1, 3-4)

         The psalmist declares that the creation itself is The Farm. The earth speaks a language of invitation and admonition, of celebration and lament. And like the sun, faithful in its “rising…from the end of the heavens, and its circuit to the end of them,” this Earth Farm speaks a dependable, durable truth. It leaves nothing out of its enlightening reach.

         For the psalmist, that language is also heard in the perfect, soul-reviving “law of the Lord.” It seems to me that the Church has often treated the law like corporate farming has treated the land – not as a gift to be stewarded but as a resource to be exploited as a means to wealth and power. But God does not give the law to Israel so that the people might claim exclusive rights to the One who “set a tent for the sun” in the heavens. God gives the law for the same reason God calls Abram: So that “in you all families of the earth will be blessed.” (Genesis 12:3c)

         During the exile in Egypt, the Hebrews begin to forget their unique vocation. God calls Moses to lead them back toward blessing – back to The Farm. God does not intend the law to serve as a fence to separate sheep from goats, but as the topsoil of blessing. From this fertile loam God feeds them both on the rich harvests of relationship. Forgiving all its rigidity and even brutality, the Mosaic law becomes God’s structured declaration that the experience of being blessed is inseparable from the act of living as a blessing for friend, enemy, and earth alike.

Humankind demonstrates a short memory for blessedness. The psalmist’s “fear of the Lord” refers to a creature’s response of awe before the Creator. But this holy fear often gets replaced with the treacherous fear of neighbor, a fear that reduces us from a blessing to a scourge slashing and burning its way not to relationship, but to power. And power is not a farmer and a neighbor. Power is a slave owner and a competitor.

In his NY Times bestseller, Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, Stephen Ambrose describes the agricultural practices of Lewis’ and Jefferson’s home state of Virginia. His stark picture destroys any romantic images we may have left of plantation life at the turn of the 19^th century.

“No member of the Virginia gentry [stooped to] plant or harvest with their own hands,” says Ambrose.¹ Their principal concern was to get more land, not to care for what they had. In many cases, trees were not even harvested. They were girded and left to die in place. This allowed sunlight to reach through the lifeless, leafless branches to the shallow plantings of tobacco below. Within three years, tobacco’s demands depleted the soil, and the land was abandoned.

“Tobacco culture,” says Ambrose, “represented an all-out assault on the environment for the sake of a crop that did no good and much harm to people’s health as well as to the land, not to mention the political and moral effects of relying on slavery for a labor force.”²

Suddenly, westward expansion becomes a kind of mudslide, the dis-graceful, improvident, and inevitable result of greed and excess.

Even the learned Jefferson remained blind – perhaps willfully so – to the alternative that lay right under his nose.

Again, quoting Ambrose: “German immigrants, farming in the Shenandoah Valley, had a much different relationship with the land...[Not having been granted land by England], they had bought their land, in relatively small holdings. Coming from a country with a tradition of keeping the farm in the same family for generations…they were in it for the long haul, not for quick profit. They cleared their fields of all trees and stumps, plowed deep to arrest erosion…used manure as fertilizer, and practiced…crop rotation. They worked with their own hands, and their help came from [family]…No overseer, indentured servant, or slave – men with little interest in the precious undertaking of making a family farm – was allowed near their fields.”³

Having come to Virginia by way of Quaker and Amish communities in Pennsylvania, these Germans farmed by following a much more gracious “law.” Their love of neighbor and respect for the land illustrate the difference between “blessed to be a blessing” and “to the victor go the spoils.”

Not all of us have experienced farm life as such. And I imagine that many of us feel grateful for that. But we are all family on The Farm, God’s here-and-now Kingdom being revealed through spirited relationship with this earth, this soil, this water, this sky, this town, these neighbors sitting with us in this moment.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” says Proverbs. (Prov. 9:10) Four verses earlier we read this: “Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immaturity, and live.” (Prov. 9:5-6a)

Long before Bethlehem, the table of grace was being set. And now the Harvest, the gifts of of unfettered grace, lie on this table before us.

“More to be desired are they than gold…sweeter also than honey.”

¹Stephen E. Ambrose, Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, Simon and Schuster, 1996. p. 32.

²Ibid., p. 33.

³Ibid., p. 33.