Compost the Church

Everything is Crumbling, and maybe that's a good thing.

The church is dying. Or at least the institution we often call “the church” seems to be in decline. (Don’t believe me? Stop by almost any four walls with a steeple on a Sunday morning or read anything by Ryan Burge.)

This terminal condition often raises concern among Christians (and especially pastors), leading us all to try every variation of CPR we can imagine in hopes of bringing this thing back to life (or at least keeping it on life support for at least one more generation).

But what if the church dying is a good thing? (I mean, isn’t death an essential moment in the whole Christian story?)

Rather than trying to revive the church, instead we should compost the church.

Think about it.

Compost isn’t just the thing we use to grow something new. Compost is the result of other things that have died that create the conditions for something new to come to life.

When you hold an apple in your hands you are not just holding an apple but all the things that died and became compost to make it possible for this apple to exist.

New life does not emerge in a vacuum but is the direct result of the things that have come and died before.

Abundant life is possible, but only because of the reality of the broken branches, soggy leaves, composted food, and dirt. (And water and sun and someone to weed the rows — the metaphor just keeps going!)

My friend Ashley Dargai writes about this sort of thing quite often, prophetically and pastorally declaring that “everything is crumbling.” But rather than seeing this as the end of the world, it just might be the possibility of a new one to continue to emerge.

I could write more, but I had the chance to talk a bit about all this on a recent interview with Day1. So push play and enjoy!

Ok, still here? Want to read the full sermon that this conversation grew out of? You can read it below or click here to hear me preach it!

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It’s a big wooden box filled with broken branches, soggy leaves, and a little bit of dirt.

This is the current state of the newest garden bed in our backyard. It joins three others, maybe even a few more that we hope to build, for our third season of backyard gardening.

We will be adding fresh topsoil, burying seeds, planting starters, staking trellises to help tomatoes and peas and cucumbers climb and grow.

And before long these boxes of dead leaves and decay will be overflowing with abundant life.

Seriously, we always have way more cherry tomatoes than we know what to do with.

I know Jesus is talking about sheep in this text, but he has me thinking about spring and summer in my backyard and those rabbits and chipmunks that come to steal and kill and destroy and the garden that insists on flourishing with life, with life abundant.

Something that right now looks like death and decay is just a few short months from being filled with overflowing and abundant life.

Now if I could preach this whole sermon in a single sentence, it would be that one: Something that looks like death and decay has the potential to be filled with overflowing and abundant life.

But back to Jesus, specifically, what exactly is Jesus talking about here in this John 10 text?

Now John 10 is the traditional “Good Shepherd” reading that we hear this fourth Sunday of Eastertide, an ongoing season of resurrection. Though in this year’s reading we don’t quite make it to the good shepherd phrase-- just the metaphor about sheep and a gate and thieves and bandits.

So it’s easy to hear this chapter as if Jesus is offering one of his stump speeches, a sermon like the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew or the Sermon on the Plain in Luke. But this little Ted Talk is the final scene in a story that begins in the previous chapter, chapter 9 where a man born blind receives his sight.

You know that story, Jesus and his disciples had been walking along on a Saturday, they noticed the man. The disciples paused, assuming the man’s condition was the result of his own sin or the sin of his parents, right? Jesus spits in the dirt, wipes the mud on the man’s eyes, and sends him to the pool of Siloam to wash -- a startling scene for everyone involved, especially the man who had the mud smeared on his face!

The man goes. He washes. And he sees.

The community is stunned. “Is this the same man who used to sit and beg? No, it must be someone who looks like him right?”

The man ends up before the religious leaders who, rather than celebrate the miracle the man is experiencing, criticize Jesus for failing to observe the Sabbath.

“How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?”

The religious leaders bring in the man’s parents, questioning them about their son and what had happened. And eventually the religious leaders drive the man out where he once again meets Jesus.

And it is here, talking with the man whose sight has been restored and with the religious leaders still listening in, that we find ourselves hearing this text, John 10, as Jesus talks about sheep and gates, shepherds and thieves and bandits.

You see the miracle is not just that a man’s sight has been restored, though that certainly is an image of abundant life. But this is a man whose entire life had been cut off from his community, blind from birth casting him ineligible to enter the inner temple courts for rituals, with religious leaders quick to turn to Leviticus to keep him from drawing near.

Interesting how religious leaders have a long history of proof texting their prejudice. This could even be why he ended up before the religious leaders after his sight was restored, the customary necessary evaluation to see if he is now eligible to join his community in this religious space.

But rather than letting the man in through the gate, the religious leaders continue to steal and kill and destroy, driving the man away.

The miracle isn’t just sight restored—it’s community restored. The “wholeness” we see is not a change in the man’s eyesight but a change in the community, not a change in how the man sees but a change in how he is seen by others, one that had been excluded is now able to step in. Resurrection is not just about what happens to one person but what happens to all of us as a result, community being restored.

And so the religious leaders listening in would be rightly offended, as Jesus is commenting on the events that had just occurred, this man following the voice of Jesus, the shepherd who leads him to abundant man, this man leaving the religious leaders, the thieves and bandits who seek to steal and kill and destroy.

But there’s more because when we zoom out even further we see that this chapter John 10 is the very center of John’s gospel and it’s part of an ongoing commentary about life, about eternal life.

“I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly” is one of the 42 times we hear the word “life” in John’s gospel. That’s as many times in this single book as all three other gospels combined.I did the math to find out for sure.

And when Jesus talks about “life” in this gospel it’s always connected to “eternal life,” a phrase we can easily grow numb to, hearing it from every street preacher and seeing it waved on signs at sporting events. And too often we reduce eternal life to a “get out of hell free” card, something we hope to turn in someday.

But when Jesus talks about eternal life he would be drawing on a vision his listeners would recognize—a world made whole, the Hebrew phrase tikkun olam, the repairing of the world. This “age to come” is not so much about waiting for something in the future but more about bringing that ideal future into the present.

What if eternal life had less to do with the duration of life someday and more to do with the quality of life right now?

What if eternal life is less about how long life lasts—and more about how fully it’s lived now?

“I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”

Not someday far in the future after you die. But this abundant life begins here, it begins now.

And this is when the text, and specifically these words of Jesus, begin to look like an optical illusion, at least that’s what I’ve seen these days, we’re invited to see this same truth in two ways.

Now I’m thinking here of the infamous duck-rabbit image, if this wasn’t a podcast I would hold it up so you could see it. But you know the one, if I hold it one direction you see the bunny rabbit with the ears sticking up and when I rotate the image suddenly there is a duck with it’s bill sticking out. Sometimes we can fixate on seeing just one but when we know how to look at it we realize that both are always present.

So what’s that second image we see her in this text, in these words of Jesus?

Well if the way of Jesus is one that brings abundant life, then the way of Jesus must also be one that works to dismantle systems that perpetuate overwhelming death.

It is not enough to simply focus on cultivating life. We must also weed out that which brings death.

It’s not enough to plant new seeds and watch them grow. We have to tend the soil so that growth and life can thrive and be sustained.

It’s easy to talk about life, to preach about heaven, to focus on someday and ignore the hell that consumes too many people today.

We have to read it both ways: Bring abundant life; end overwhelming death. Especially when the systems and structures of death are too often justified in the name of Jesus.

You know it’s the way of Jesus when it leads to life, to life abundant. But too often people act in the name of Jesus and they steal, kill, and destroy. You can’t love your neighbor and then steal them from their family and their home. You can’t love your neighbor and drop bombs on their power plants, bridges, hospitals, and schools. You can’t love your neighbor and ignore the groans as we destroy the earth in the name of industry, capitalism, and progress.

Resurrection is not limited to Easter Sunday, but resurrection is something we are invited to experience all year long. And in this season of Eastertide, these Sundays between Easter and Ascension, the texts invite us to realize that resurrection keeps happening, as eternal life becomes life abundant here and now, community restored and systems of death dismantled.

Now we began this whole homily with the anticipation of abundant life in the garden beds in my back yard. And we are going to end with another garden in the town just down the road.

Flint, Michigan - less than 30 minutes south on I-75, the town where both my kids were born, and a city most known, at least in the past decade, for its horrific water crisis. For a decade over 100,000 residents were unable to drink the water from their faucets. This is not abundant life. This is overwhelming death, their very health stolen and destroyed.

Too often these are the stories we remember -- stories of overwhelming death and despair, stories of the thief and bandit who breaks in to steal, kill, and destroy. But even in the midst of undrinkable water, there are stories of abundant life.

“We don’t only grow vegetables, we grow values.”

This is what one Flint resident said about their community garden.

In a place where the challenges of population and job loss, limited access to health food, and abundant vacant land exists, these gardens build community, improve public health, maintain vacant land, and empower residents to make a difference in their neighborhoods.

One garden, across the street from the local hospital, the very one where my kids were born, had been abandoned after the hospital staff lost capacity to maintain it. But in 2015, the first years of the Flint water crisis, a group of volunteers revitalized the garden to produce over 1,700 pounds of produce, distributing it primarily to low income neighbors who had come to rely on the garden’s fresh produce to supplement their daily diets. The families that benefit from the fresh produce volunteer in the garden, helping to cultivate the ground that literally sustains them. And in the midst of homes that are abandoned and demolished, these gardens create green spaces in a city, life abundant, life overflowing, in the midst of overwhelming death.

Another garden became a joint project for a group of apartment complexes, it began when a single resident started clearing the land alongside an overgrown and unsafe path near the buildings. And it wasn’t long until others joined in, uncovering fruit trees and grape vines that had been there the whole time, life growing in the midst of despair. Working together they planted these gardens, beautified the space and grew over 1,900 pounds of food to share among one another and their neighbors.

Despite different takes on life and even different takes on gardening, they were able to build something truly beautiful and productive.

Resurrection, it turns out, is a community project.

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”

The way of Jesus is the way of abundant life and it must resist every system and structure and individual that perpetuates overwhelming death. We cannot let this world go to hell, waiting around to be beamed up to a spaceship called heaven (or Mars, whichever comes first I guess). We must cultivate the ground so that life overflows and the weeds of death are uprooted; we must hear - and help others hear - the voice of Christ calling us through the gate that leads to wholeness, to community, to life abundant; we must join God and the people of God everywhere in bringing heaven to Earth, eternal life now for a world that finds itself in hell; we must practice resurrection.

Amen.

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Wow, you made it all the way to the very end? Amazing!

As a reward, here’s a link to see what Ashley (remember her? – my “everything is crumbling” friend) wrote about this same text in a recent post.

What does abundant life feel like?