Why don't you sell your mother?

Text: Genesis 2: 4b-23

You may have noticed we heard only a portion of that story that begins in the second chapter of Genesis. What we heard might be thought of as just the set-up for the steamy drama that follows -- you know, how the crafty serpent enters the scene, talks Eve out of what she knows, and so she picks the fruit of the forbidden tree, tempting Adam with a bite of the apple (did you know there’s never any mention of an apple!) and the next we know they’re hiding behind fig leaves having suddenly become embarrassed by their naked bodies. And on the story goes, having become known as the “Story of the Fall” …as though it was an explanation of how evil came into the world, establishing this powerful linkage between sex and sin … all of which are messages that have been laid upon the text over time.
In part it’s what happens when the first part of the story is overlooked in favour of getting on to the so-called real action. So this morning we take some time to linger with the first two scenes, noticing what comes to light when we slow it down and consider with carefulness the details that are by no means incidental to the rest of the story, let alone to the unfolding of our lives.

So what is there to notice?

Did you hear it … or see it? that before God forms the human creature there is the earth … as yet no plants, no growing things for, as the story goes, God had not caused it to rain upon the earth and there was no one to tend it … but there it is, fertile soil, full of potential ready to nourish life. First there is earth.
And then we hear, “and the Lord God formed the human being from the fertile soil.” This is where attending to the Hebrew language allows us to see all the more … to see the “family resemblance” that’s intended here between the soil and the human creature.

We catch a little bit of the connection in English through the words human and humus -- but in Hebrew there’s even more. The word for human being is adam; and the word for fertile soil adama … both words are related to adom, meaning ruddy. So picture the brownish red earth, that thin rich loam covering the hill country where the early Israelites settled … and so even more you see the relationship … the brownish-red skin tone of both the people and the earth … adam made from adama. [1]

It’s hard to miss it, isn’t it … our primal connection with the earth, with the soil. This is what’s at the heart of this story … our story; this is what we are given to know: we are creatures of and with the earth.

Just hearing myself say those words, I have this flash of when I was a kid living in Alberta. And even though I loved the snow of winter, there was the absolute thrill when the snow melted enough to expose the grass; there’d be water flowing in the street, worms along the curb-side, and we’d get to abandon our boots for shoes. There was joy -- there’s no other word for it! -- there was joy in reconnecting with the earth that had been hidden for a long time, deep under the snow. You can hear something of the same experience in a poem by Wendell Berry where he writes this …

Through the weeks of deep snow
we walked above the ground
on fallen sky, as though we did
not come of root and leaf, as though
we had only air and weather
for our difficult home.
But now
as March warms, and the rivulets
run like birdsong on the slopes,
and the branches of light sing in the hills,
slowly we return to earth.  [2]

I wonder how you may have known that connection with the earth, with the soil, in a visceral way? …that sense of how it is we belong to the land.

As the Genesis story moves on, in the very next breath, we have God breathing this earth creature into life, with God’s own breath. So not only do we have this picture of God on hands and knees in fertile soil, creating the human creature, but we have God breathing into this creature the breath of life … you can’t miss it, can you?  God coming close with care … and not just as close as breath … but imparting God’s own life-giving breath. Just as the earth is of God, so we are of God --gift of God’s giving.

And then we hear: “God planted a garden in Eden … and there God put the human creature.” Twice we hear it … that God placed the human creature in the garden. Something I came upon last week caused me to pause with this where I wouldn’t have thought to pause before. Ruth Valerio, an ecologist, activist, mother, writer, Christian (all beautifully wrapped into one!) she says “it’s easy to think that place is trivial, incidental to who we are, but I want to say that it isn’t. We are not disembodied beings; we are located. Place is a central part of what it means to be human.” And then she quotes Simone Weil, “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. Uprootedness is by far the most dangerous malady to which human societies are exposed.” [3]
Think about how that speaks to the crisis facing refugees …and the crisis facing people who have no place to call home.

Without likening my experience to theirs, I’m recalling a sabbatical leave I had some years ago, when Bev and I were going to be on the road for 4 months. And I remember in the time leading up to our departure feeling unnerved … unravelled. It wasn’t that we were heading into unfamiliar territory. It was all about not being rooted, “in place” -- where would home be? It concerned me … how would I be, how would I find my bearings, how would I be in my being without home? “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” I get it.

It seems God gets that about us too! And so God places the human creature in the garden … to till it and keep it, we’re told. In fact the Hebrew word for till could also be translated “work” … not only to work on or with the soil, but to work for, as in serving the soil’s needs. The word for keep is the same word used in relation to a flock or a brother … as in to care for or protect; even more often the Hebrew word for keep is translated as “observe” … and so to watch and learn from, and to uphold. So not only is the human creature placed in the garden, but we are given by God a vocation … to work and serve the garden, preserve and observe it. You can’t miss it, can you --this call to be in touch with the land.

And so we begin to see this beautiful reciprocating relationship woven into God’s creation … where we are critical to the care and well-being of the land, and the land is critical to our nourishing and flourishing in body, mind and spirit.

I wonder if you’ve heard of Clarence Jordon … that farmer, New Testament scholar, Baptist minister, co-founder in the 1940’s of Koinonia Farm, an inter-racial farming community in Georgia. Not only was it the place in which bold and loving relationships were formed and strengthened; it was a place under threat of violence by the Klu Klux Klan and others. In one of his sermons Clarence explains why he hasn’t yet left the land that is this farm. Listen to this
…
“Fifteen years ago we went there and bought that old run down eroded piece of land. It was sick. There were gashes in it. It was sore and bleeding. I don’t know if you ever walked over a piece of ground that could almost cry out to you and say ‘heal me, heal me.’ I don’t know if you feel the closeness to the soil that I do, but when you fill in those old gullies and terrace the fields, and you begin to feel the springiness of the sod beneath your feet, and you begin to feel that old land come to life, and when you walk through an old pine forest that you set out in seedlings, and now you see them reaching for the sky, and you hear the wind through them; when you walk a little further over a bit of ground … and you go on over a hill where your children and all the many visitors have held picnics and you walk across a creek that you’ve bathed in the heat of the summer and men say to you “Why don’t you sell it and move away?” they might as well ask, “Why don’t you sell your mother?” Somehow God has made us out of this old soil, and we go back to it, and we never lose its claim on us. It isn’t a simple matter to leave it.” [4]

“It isn’t a simple matter to leave it.” And yet what do we see going on around us right here these days? Daniel was describing being at the park with Peter last week, encountering another parent with her child, having moved here from Vancouver. “Almost all the young parents I meet these days,” Daniel says, “have come here from Vancouver … priced right out of their neighbourhood. Who can afford to live there?” And so there’s this rupture happening in people lives … uprooting from the community they were part of. “It isn’t a simple matter to leave it.” And the rupture isn’t only in their lives but in the life of the place … the place that once knew the hum of life is vacated, abandoned.

Last week I got this postcard add in the mail from real estate agent Darren Day … the headline: “bringing you out of town buyers since 1994” … “#1 for home sales over a million dollars.” You too could “sell your home for more than the local market is willing to pay,” he encourages. As blatant as that. And then the by-line at the bottom: “what a difference a day makes.” Some difference alright. And this with the full knowledge of the collapse of communities in Vancouver and already how people are priced out of living right here in our neighbourhood.

The move from serving and preserving the land to flipping the land is a deadly move. It is to do violence to the integrity of that divinely inspired reciprocating relationship between us and the land. To allow the land to become a commodity for selling, for greed -- well … “you might as well ask, ‘why don’t you sell your mother.’”
What was given to the human creature in our Genesis story is a vocation --not the land. Ours is to tend it … to watch over it … to uphold it … for its own sake and ours … that the land and we and future generations might live well.

What would it mean for us to stand our ground … to know ourselves placed, planted, grounded, connected … that we might live out our holy calling to protect and preserve, to learn from and to love this land?

I want to come back for a moment to that image of God on hands and knees in the fertile earth, caring, creating, loving … and charging us with the same sacred work … a work we can only engage in by coming close -- to the land, and close to each other … close enough both to see how we are wounding each other and close enough to love and heal each other. As it turns out, there’s really no such thing as loving abstractly … and so it seems to me we begin right where we are, and instead of simply passing through this place, we find ourselves entering into it … coming to know it.

What would shift in us if we committed ourselves to see this neighbourhood with the eye of our heart, to hear this neighbourhood with the ears of our heart?
What would shift in us in our relationship with this place, with this community of God’s beloved … what would shift in our way of being
as we live into our calling to be about loving this place with God’s heart?

What does that already look like for you … for us?

As God continues to breathe us into life, what if we sincerely prayed O God enlarge our hearts … that your love may flow freely in and through us for the sake --for the goodness --of this place you so love.

[1] Ellen F. Davis, Scripture, Culture and Agriculture - an agrarian reading of the Bible, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2009, p.29.

[2]  Wendell Berry, "Return to Earth"

[3] Ruth Valerio, “Where Are We?” May 3, 2013

[4] Clarence Jordon, sermon excerpt, cited in Making Peace with the Land, by Fred Bahnson and Norman Wirzba, Intervarsity Press Books, Downers Grove, Illinois, 2012, p. 81.