Returning / Composting: a sermon at the end of Creation season

Bible readings

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, 16-20

For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven:

² a time to be born and a time to die;
a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted;
³ a time to kill and a time to heal;
a time to break down and a time to build up;
⁴ a time to weep and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn and a time to dance;
⁵ a time to throw away stones and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing;
⁶ a time to seek and a time to lose;
a time to keep and a time to throw away;
⁷ a time to tear and a time to sew;
a time to keep silent and a time to speak;
⁸ a time to love and a time to hate;
a time for war and a time for peace…

¹⁶ I saw under the sun that, in the place of justice, wickedness was there, and in the place of righteousness, wickedness was there as well. ¹⁷ I said to myself, “God will judge the righteous and the wicked, for he has appointed a time for every matter and for every work.” ¹⁸ I said to myself with regard to humans that God is testing^[b] them to show that they are but animals. ¹⁹ For the fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and humans have no advantage over the animals, for all is vanity. ²⁰ All go to one place, all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again.

John 12:²⁴ [Jesus said:] ‘Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain, but if it dies it bears much fruit. ²⁵ Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.’

Reflection

We have come to the last Sunday of this Creation season, through which we’ve been following the ‘growing cycle’: starting with ‘planting’ (and the tiny seeds that can make more difference than we often imagine), then thinking about ‘tending’ (and patient ‘attending’), then celebrating ‘harvesting’ (and ‘sharing’ the abundance with generosity and justice). And now, as the season turns like the growing cycle itself, we come to ‘returning’ or ‘composting’.

To help us enter into this theme, into the natural processes of dying, decay and decomposition, here’s a poem, written by the poet Merrit Malloy, to accompany the Kaddish Yatom (a Jewish hymn of praise to God recited by those who mourn, for 11 months after a bereavement).

When I die
give what's left of me away
to children
and old men that wait to die.
And if you need to cry,
cry for your brother
walking the street beside you.
And when you need me,
put your arms
around anyone
and give them
what you need to give to me....

Look for me
in the people I've known
or loved....

Love doesn't die,
people do.
So, when all that's left of me is love,
give me away.

(Merritt Maloy, ‘Meditations before Kaddish: 1’)

Those beautiful words of gift and grace in the midst of dying and death, are perhaps words for this Autumn season that we’re entering into. It’s not many weeks away that we will mark All Saints and All Souls Days, and remember with love those we will no longer see, and remember the gifts that they have given us. But at the end of this Creation season, those very human words of gift and grace in the midst of loss remind me also of one of the ‘mother tree’, the biggest and oldest of the trees in its part of the forest that, over the course of its life, through its underground root systems and mycelial networks, has been feeding and nourishing the trees around it. Even in its dying, death and decaying, those roots systems remain, and what remains of its nutrients are fed to the other living trees that continue to grow.

It’s an image of that last phase of the growing cycle that reminds us that no end, no death, no decay is just an end. That it is in the endings that new life is nourished and nurtured. And among the many gifts this offers us, are at least three bits of wisdom.

The first is that we’re invited to embrace our limitedness. That includes our mortality: we ‘remember that we are dust, and to dust we shall return’, as the Ash Wednesday liturgy has it. But also to embrace our limitedness in our taking up of space, in our physical capacity, and in our consumption of stuff, of fossil fuels, of electricity. Embracing our limitedness might feel inevitable, but I want to suggest it’s also radical. Because it contradicts the fantasy of endless growth that our politicians suggest needs to be the reality of our economic systems. It’s a fantasy, and a deadly one for our world. There’s no way that our economy can continue to grow and grow, when that growth is dependent on extracting resources and using more and more energy. And so the gift of the dying mother tree and the compost heap, is first to invite us to ‘hallow’ our limits, to acknowledge them as holy.

The second gift of composting and decay is to invite us to a discernment of holding on and letting go. Remember those words from Ecclesiastes. There is a time for everything, says the writer. It’s an invitation to discern what time it is, for us, for each aspect of our lives and our world. Is it a time to hold on, or to let go? What are the things we need to let go of? And when we let them go, can we let them go mindfully and carefully, in the spirit of the poem I read at the beginning. And I’m not just talking about the profound things of life, but also the little, very mundane stuff. What do we recycle? What do we throw ‘away’? Because we know that, actually, there’s no such thing as ‘away’. It all goes somewhere, whether to landfill in this country, or shipped across the world – out of sight, out of mind. How might we be more mindful, then, of our throwing away? The compost heap reminds us that much of what we throw ‘away’ might be better kept close to home, contributing to making good soil, or recycled in other ways. But what about the stuff that toxifies: the sewage pumped into our rivers, the plastic found in fish in the oceans? Discernment in our letting go, as well as in our holding on, in our reusing and recycling, as well as in our throwing ‘away’, is needed for the health of our world, as well as for ourselves.

And then a third bit of wisdom: an invitation to value what is so often discarded. Those of us who were doing Morning Prayer on Hodge Hill Common a couple of weeks ago had a moment of enlightenment when Soobie shared something she’d just learnt about slugs. She’d seen some slugs clustering around some dog poo on the cycle path. She went home and googled it, and discovered that slugs eat dog poo, and excrete it in the form of good, rich soil! Isn’t it fascinating that some of those creatures that we think are a pest, that we’d much rather avoid, some of those things that cause in us disgust, incomprehension, or indifference, turn out to be needed parts of our ecosystem, creatures that detoxify and renew the earth! In your average compost heap you’ll find earthworms, beetles, flies and all kinds of microscopic microbes that together turn our everyday discards into something good and life-giving.

And as well as what we throw away, let’s also be mindful of who get treated as ‘throwaway people’. Who have society and the systems we live within decided are ‘human waste’, that we are better off without? Pushed to the edges, treated as worthless, barred from our shores, incarcerated in our prisons? The parable of the slug reminds us that there is no such thing as a worthless creature, human or otherwise.

And so, today, we’re invited to a returning. A letting go and embracing our limitedness. A discernment about what we throw away and where it goes and what happens to it and to where it goes. An appreciation of those creature-kin we would rather avoid and forget about.

But it’s also an invitation to a breaking down, a composting of our own lives. A breaking down of the parts of our lives that are invested in the systems of our world that bring death and destruction. It’s an invitation to enter what one writer has called ‘the dark night of the soil’. And as well as a breaking down within us, it’s an invitation to a breaking down also of those systems themselves. A breaking down of what African-American womanist activist bell hooks calls ‘white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’. It’s a bit of a mouthful, but it names those systems that we’re entangled in that bring death and destruction to human beings and to our earth. Or what, in a pithier phrase, the womanist poet Audre Lorde calls ‘the master’s house’. If, as Lorde says, ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’, then the decomposers of our world, those that we would rather avoid, are quietly, unseen, working away at crumbling those structures, bringing them down and decomposing them, in spite of us.

And in that is good news. Because, as Jesus reminds us, when the grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, when it breaks down and breaks open, that is when new life begins. A new life in the humus, the compost, the leaf mould, the decaying that is also the stuff of beginnings. A new life in the dust, in the earth, that is also the place of renewal: of soil, of soul, of society. The invitation at the end of the growing cycle is to a decomposition, a composting, a death, a dying, a letting go, that is also, as Jesus tells us, and shows us in his own death and dying, the beginnings of resurrection, for us and for our world.

And so to end with a blessing: for those of us for whom the breaking down of decomposition is scary; but also for those of us who have lived with being ground down, broken down, broken open, at times, or maybe over our whole lives.

‘Blessing the Seed’

I should tell you
at the outset:
this blessing will require you
to do some work.

First you must simply
let this blessing fall
from your hand,
as if it were a small thing
you could easily let slip
through your fingers,
as if it were not
most precious to you,
as if your life did not
depend on it.

Next you must trust
that this blessing knows
where it is going,
that it understands
the ways of the dark,
that it is wise
to seasons
and to times.

Then -
and I know this blessing
has already asked much
of you -
it is to be hoped that
you will rest
and learn
that something is at work
when all seems still,
seems dormant,
seems dead.

I promise you
this blessing has not
abandoned you.
I promise you
this blessing
is on its way back
to you.
I promise you -
when you are least
expecting it,
when you have given up
your last hope -
this blessing will rise
green
and whole
and new.

(Jan Richardson, Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons)