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Sermon December 11, 2022
The Rev. Rebecca S. Myers, MSW
The Church of the Nativity and St. Stephen’s
Third Sunday of Advent
https://lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Advent/AAdv3_RCL.html
Audio: /documents/Eucharist__December_11__2022
Video: https://youtu.be/abswLnFr_Uk
The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,
the desert shall rejoice and blossom;
like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly,
and rejoice with joy and singing. Isaiah 35:1-2a
“Around 3,000 years ago, farmers settled on the fertile Loess Plateau in western China, a region about the size of France. By the 7th century, the rich soils were feeding about one quarter of the Chinese population. But intense pressure on the land eroded the soil. By the 20th century, desertification had condemned the remaining population to poverty. “It was a desperate place,” says Juergen Voegele, an agricultural economist and engineer at the World Bank who first visited the region in the mid-1980s. But that would soon change.
Voegele returned in the 1990s to lead a major 12-year World Bank project to help restore dirt to healthy soils on a vast scale. “This was absolute desert. A few years later the whole thing came back,” he says. “We saw birds, butterflies, insects – the whole ecosystem began to recover. Even after hundreds of years of complete devastation, the seeds were still in the ground and things began to happen very quickly. We did not expect that.”
By 2009, and the programme’s end, approximately 920,000 hectares had been restored of the 65,000,000-hectare region in western China.”
What I just read you is from an article online about soil regeneration. In 2020, I saw a documentary called “Kiss the Ground.” The documentary is about all kinds of ways that tending to our soil…our dirt… can regenerate our earth, especially during climate change. Some of the portrayals, of which the Loess Plateau was one, were amazing. The places that had been turned from deserts back into fertile soil were so lush. The desert had truly blossomed abundantly.
As an aside, yes, deserts have their own kind of life, yet one issue facing us is the continued desertification of our land through drought, inappropriate farming practices, and deforestation. A google search says that nearly 1/5 of the world’s land is threatened with desertification. And this means people will be forced to move to more suitable places to live.
Our reading from Isaiah prompted me to remember this wonderful solution. Soil can be regenerated. Land that currently cannot sustain life can once again be productive and restored. This information creates hope and even joy in what can happen…in restoration.
And so it is with our readings today. Today, the third Sunday of Advent, is Gaudate Sunday. Gaudate means rejoice! We rejoice, because we are over halfway to Christmas. We are reminded that new life and a new way of living came into the world. We may have made a mess of it along the way and still don’t always do our best, but we can rejoice. We can feel joy. The earth that God created for us to live upon is truly amazing if we just take our time to work with it.
And the same is true of us, isn’t it? We become parched, dried out, used up in ways sometimes. We call it burnout. Sometimes it happens because we isolate ourselves from the things that give us life. Sometimes we isolate ourselves from God and Jesus Christ or the people and things that keep us connected to God. We forget the spiritual practices that are the foundation of our life.
And sometimes our communities become dried out and used up. The spirit seems gone from them, too.
But just as the scientists discovered when they worked to restore the land in China and just like the vision in the Isaiah lesson we read today, new life is still possible. As the scientists said, the seeds of the abundant and lush environment were still in the ground. They were still in the dirt. And when tended properly, the entire ecosystem was restored.
So it is with us. The seeds for joy…the seeds for abundant living are inside of each of us. They just require continual tending and nurturing.
During this time of waiting and watching, let us remember and maybe initiate those ways of living that bring joy, blossoming and abundance.
Amen
https://rethink.earth/turning-desert-to-fertile-farmland-on-the-loess-plateau/
Kiss the soil https://kisstheground.com/
