Lent 3B 7
Mar 2021
I like to grow heirloom vegetables. Maybe it is in the names; green beans with names such as Autumn Zebra and Beurre de Rocquencourt. How about Dragon Tongue or Iroquois Skunk? Would I want to even try that bean? You see it is not just the bean that counts; I could buy an F1 hybrid and get good yields and disease resistance (and I do buy and use hybrids.) The reality for me is in the uniqueness of the beans; their history. They all have a story to tell. Iroquois Skunk originated with the Iroquois centuries ago and are one of the most beautiful purple to black mottled beans you could imagine. I would grow them just to look at them. How could you resist Rouge Vif D’Etampes, literally the vivid red of Etampes (France), or Cinderella pumpkin?
The stories that go with the seeds could often be best sellers. Some seeds were smuggled; most carried along to bring a bit of home with an immigrant. In the United States, many of the varieties of corn, beans, and squash we use yet today can be traced to native populations. In the Mesquakie settlement, they have been growing many of their bean, squash, and corn varieties for generations.
Okra was brought to this country by people from west Africa; the seeds may well have been carried by enslaved people across the Atlantic on the slave ships. I saw at there are at least 76 varieties of what is now my most favorite vegetable. My first exposure to okra was when my father accidentally bought a can of it instead of whatever vegetable he had intended to buy. As Yankees, and midwestern Yankees to boot, we opened the can, heated it, and tried to eat it. I don’t like eating slime and the okra was a bust. It was not until years later that I had fried okra, and now I have learned to sautee, bake, and make that quintessential southern dish: gumbo. I love okra. The plants in my garden grow to 10 feet and are very sturdy and hard to pull out in the fall after they die. The are sturdy enough to be the pole for the pole beans.
What I never do any more is buy tomatoes when they are not fresh and in season here. I grow and can my own and refuse to get food that is out of place and out of time. In the Torah, there are numerous of purity laws, including laws concerning food. All have one thing in common: they seek to prevent the consumption of food that is out of its element. For instance, shellfish are not to be eaten because they dwell in the water and do not have scales. The same goes for catfish. Lobsters and crawfish walk on the bottom of bodies of water and water dwellers should swim. They don’t belong. Herbivores must chew their cud, and so forth and so on. Blood is life and so you must not eat anything that contains blood; to God alone belongs the lifeblood.
I changed much of how I viewed food and how I used food after reading Barbara Kingsolver’s book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Keeping your food sources local and, even better, growing at least some of your own, counts for a lot in solving the crisis of climate change. But perhaps more importantly it builds relationships: I know where much of my food originates. The family farm down the road is where I buy a CSA (community supported agriculture) share that provides me with things I cannot grow in my small garden space; I even have talked to the farmers who raised the pork and beef I consume.
Most of us do not think of beans and corn as community builders, but they are. Down in Georgia a veteran named Jon Johnson started Comfort Farms, named after a fellow serviceman killed in combat. It is a place where vets of all ages can come and learn to garden and become seed savers of heirlooms, all the while helping them to heal from trauma. All on 20 acres. Johnson believes heirlooms have stories to tell and stories that should be preserved.
Everything and everyone has a story, even the 20 some varieties of collards that were tested last year!! I figured collards were collards, but the variety in form and even function astounded me.
It is easy to put our trust and our beliefs into a system that seems to be appealing. In Jesus time the temple was such a system. The second temple had been present in Jerusalem for some time and by all accounts it was a place that would inspire awe. It was also said to be the place where God dwelled, at least in some fashion, and the place where right worship occurred. Around that worship a system had been developed, an enterprise of sorts. You could not use Roman currency so that had to be changed for temple currency, otherwise it was an offense to God, or at least to the temple priesthood. Then you had to have an appropriate animal sacrifice; blood was life and the giving of life was required in sacrifice to God. The system had been in place for a very long time and I would suppose folks just figured that was the way it was, like we take taxes and Social Security for granted. On a grand scale we take capitalism for granted, even though income taxes and Social Security have not been around all that long and even capitalism has existed for a very short time in human history.
Enter Jesus. He was clearly in a mood today. Drove out the cattle and the sheep and the doves. Wow. Imagine the scene in front of the temple; I suspect traffic was backed up quite a ways as the folks who were in charge of the livestock tried to round them up. I am not sure how the doves would have been corralled. Folks would be angry and confused; livelihoods were in jeopardy, chaos reigned.
People had lost sight of why they were at the temple: to encounter God and experience the holy. Worship, and more importantly, encountering God had become defined by a checklist of do’s and don’ts.
Then something astounding happened. Jesus says he will raise up the temple in three days once it is destroyed. This is what we call a paradigm shift; the temple is no longer the needed ingredient for worship. The needed ingredient is Jesus. We do not need this building; the pandemic has shown us that much. This building is just that: a building, good for many purposes but it is not how we encounter God. We encounter God in our prayers and praises, in our study of Holy Scripture and in our proclamation and in the face of our neighbors and even those we do not want to like.
We encounter God in the streets; even on the Zoom screens!! Some of the most meaningful worship I have had this past year has been during our Thursday Evening Prayer
We encounter Jesus in the face of others, in the lives of others.
Monsanto provides the lion’s share of corn seed to farmers and charges them by the seed. The corn is grown not to provide grain for humans, but to provide the raw ingredients for ethanol and all sorts of corn by-products that the market economy demands. In Iowa we have some of the richest soil in the entire world, although we are letting it flow to the Gulf of Mexico at a rate that will deplete all of it in about 60 years. But more to the point, we are not feeding ourselves. We are a net importer of food.
Our agricultural system is as broken as the temple system of Jesus’ time and has taken us far from the source of our being. Look at how the workers in food processing bore so much of the brunt of this pandemic. It is important to understand the system and why that happened.
Church systems have come and gone since the time of Jesus and at this very time we have before us an opportunity to rethink our faith and how we practice it.
What do we need? What do you need? What is feeding you? I suspect the modern day versions of the money changers, the polity and the Robert’s rules of the churches, are not where you find your longing and your needs met. When Jesus cleansed the Temple he started a revolution by another name and of another sort.
Follow me, he said. Nothing about priests or temples. I will lead you to a place of rest, a place where your soul may be restored and you will find peace. It is a place where there are no hybrids, only heirlooms and the stories they hold.
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