Spiritual Composting

When I was a little kid, my parents were friends with a group of Christians who did their best to live as fully into the Gospel call as they could.

They grew vegetables to give away to the hungry, founded and staffed community outreach ministries providing clothing and other assistance, and they generally saw a direct throughline between the worship and discipleship formation in which they were engaged and the transformation of the larger, local community of which they were a part.

It was only as an adult that I realized how different my experience of growing up in such an active Christian community was from my friends’ and peers’.

Many of my friends had only experienced the more negative aspects of the institutional church—the hypocrisy, the scandals, the shallowness—the fear driven approaches to religious control that couldn’t be more opposed to the good news of Jesus Christ.

It’s not that I haven’t experienced these destructive aspects of organized religion myself—I have—and I share my friends’ lament and frustration that such shadows too often pass for gospel in the public square.

The difference is that because my own faith was nurtured in an environment where the promise and pull of the gospel was alive and flourishing, I developed a certain resilience to many of the destructive forces that might derail my own journey of discipleship.

The seed of my fledgling faith was planted in the rich soil of community action, authentic worship, and meaningful friendships.

This week, as I pondered the parable of the sower, and the hope we have for bearing fruits of transformation as followers of Christ, my thoughts went back to times spent at Don and Dot Spencer’s house—friends of my parents.

The Spencers had a large backyard garden, with rows and rows of exceedingly healthy tomatoes, beans, greens and other vegetables.

The reason that garden and those plants were so fruitful was because of the large compost pile that Mr. Spencer tended.

Through a combination of natural decomposition, time, and regular care, the waste from the kitchen and the lawn were transformed into the most fertile soil I had ever seen.

I remember turning the compost pile so the microbes and microorganisms could get oxygen, the steam and heat that rose from the pile while we watered it, and I loved getting to spread the rich, loamy, finished soil among the plants in the garden.

Composting is a process that seems far removed from the concrete of this city.

But more and more I’ve come to believe that this parish of St. Paul’s, and in fact, the wider Church is called to attend to the process of spiritual composting.

We are called to do our best to enrich the soil in which the seeds of transformation grow and to collaborate with the graceful and natural actions of God that produce abundant fruits for the healing of the world.

How do we do this in a practical sense?

If we look back at the parable of the sower, we see that this collaboration is about developing resilience through fertile soil.

While we might scare the birds away with scarecrows, clear the field of rocks, and uproot the harmful thorns that choke the word, ultimately our focus should be on the overall spiritual soil quality of our community.

We help generate good soil when we reflect on Scripture together and put its wisdom into actual practice in our lives.

We participate in spiritual composting when we share life with one another, and we begin to see this community’s purpose as beyond the perpetuation of its own existence and toward active service in the world.

The oxygen of the Spirit enters into our lives when we do the challenging work of turning the compost pile of our souls, and when we invite God’s way to guide us individually and communally.

This can be scary individual work, and the same heat that allows transformation can be uncomfortable and sometimes unbearable when we feel isolated and alone.

But as those who have known the blessing of the good soil of this community of St. Paul’s, we know that we are never alone in attending to this spiritual work.

And the more we share each other’s burdens and celebrate each other’s joys—the more we encourage one another to let the false divide between worship and action dissolve—the more we take the transformational relationships that God graces us with here as a pattern for meaningful living in the world—the more fertile soil for fruitfulness is generated among us.

The Sower has sown these seeds of the gospel among us, within us, and beyond us.

Our challenge is to both do the personal work of spiritual composting and tend to the social work of collaborating with God in community transformation.

When we do that work simultaneously, we become more resilient to hopelessness and despair, and we see the good soil of our lives and our community as something which produces fruits that can be shared as widely as possible.

May the seed of faith find purchase in the fertile soil of your lives this week and may the fruitfulness that arises from it help generate rich soil in which the hope and faith of others may grow.