A Time to Grow

Lenten Lessons from the Garden to the Table

Kara Eidson

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780664267049
• eBook ISBN: 9781646982271
• Topic: Theology & Religion

From Eden to Gethsemane to the garden in which Jesus was buried and raised, our story of faith wanders through much fertile soil. But in our current world of fast food and to-go meals, we often do not make time to explore where our food comes from and how we break bread together. Journeying through the season of Lent with this in mind, A Time to Grow encourages readers to slow down, move through the painstaking process of growth, and end together with great feasting and celebration of the resurrection. Themes of soil, water, light, time, fasting, feasting, and more guide the way from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday. Readers will explore the intricacies of how faith is required to produce food and how that faith can lead us all to feast at the table on Easter morning.

Additional elements are included to enhance communal spiritual practice for small groups or the entire congregation during Lent. These elements include sermon prompts, liturgies with communal responses, altar art ideas for decorating worship spaces, and prompts for children's time in worship.

Ash Wednesday

SOIL

Joel 2:1–2, 12–17; Matthew 6:1–6, 16–21

Blow the trumpet in Zion;

sound the alarm on my holy mountain!

Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble,

for the day of the LORD is coming, it is near—

a day of darkness and gloom,

a day of clouds and thick darkness!

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Yet even now, says the LORD,

return to me with all your heart,

with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;

rend your hearts and not your clothing.

Return to the LORD, your God,

for he is gracious and merciful,

slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love,

and relents from punishing.

Joel 2:1–2a, 12–13

“Whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

Matthew 6:16–21

Cultivating Soil

As any gardener or farmer can tell you, the most important part of growing anything is starting with the right soil. The devoted grower can give a seedling the perfect conditions of water and light, but if the soil is bad, nothing will grow. To the outsider without a microscope, except for a couple of earthworms, a bare patch of soil appears to be dead and lifeless. In a lot of ways, this is true. Soil is largely comprised of decomposed matter from formerly living things. However, the best soil also teems with life (microbes, good bacteria, worms, etc.). What appears dead is a living thing.

In most places, the cultivation of good soil requires a great deal of care and attention. There are a few exceptions to this rule, but for the most part, healthy soil doesn’t just happen—it requires work. Earth needs to be properly turned over or tilled, the right nutrients need to be added, and crops need to be rotated. Sometimes soil even needs a season of rest to restore and replenish—farmers refer to this as letting a field “lie fallow.”

Industrialized agriculture has led to mass soil depletion across the United States.¹ In order to continue producing plants on this depleted soil, mass agriculture must add large amounts of chemical fertilizer (which is not conducive to human health or the health of our planet). Simultaneously, vast quantities of animal manure are washed into our watersheds every day. This is both a waste and an environmental tragedy; my favorite fertilizer in my garden is the manure produced by my chickens.

My husband and I recently moved, and while we were excited about our new house and land, we were sad to leave behind our peach tree, blueberry bushes, blackberry vines, and strawberry patch. However, our real grief stemmed from leaving behind the soil in our garden. We had worked hard for ten years to create the perfect growing environment in our raised garden beds—composting, adding chicken manure, turning things over by hand, and cultivating the perfect environment for worms. The soil in those garden beds was the result of years of hard work, using techniques that modern technology might lead us to forget.

I observed one such method for fortifying soil when visiting my grandparents, long before I understood what I was witnessing. My grandparents didn’t have a garbage disposal. For a long time growing up, I thought the bowl sitting next to their sink to collect food waste (peels, inedible portions of fruit and vegetables, eggshells, etc.) was simply a way to reduce the amount of trash that had to go to the curb. When I was growing up, all of that stuff went down the garbage disposal at our house. While I understood that the bowl at my grandparent’s house was emptied onto a compost pile, I didn’t understand that this was one way my grandfather improved his garden. I didn’t understand that all the “waste” was being recycled back into the ground. I also didn’t know, until much later in life, that every few years he would clean out a friend’s horse barn and then work those massive amounts of horse manure into the soil of his garden, thereby fortifying it for yet another few seasons. And so, in a tradition that skipped a generation, my husband and I have been composting at our house for quite some time now. The addition of chickens to our home stepped up our composting—they produce excellent fertilizer. The results speak for themselves; each summer and fall we reap another bountiful harvest.

Composting at home or in our churches significantly cuts down on what goes into our landfills. When food is deposited in landfills, it does not receive enough oxygen to break down in the same way it will in a compost pile, and it produces massive amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas. Composting can help cut down on a family or a community’s carbon footprint.²

I went through a period of incredible spiritual darkness a few years ago. One day my spiritual director asked me if I could think of an image for what I had learned through that dark time. My response? “Chicken shit.” She looked a little taken aback. I assured her, “That’s the image—chicken shit.” My chickens produce a lot of waste. Every few weeks I remove their waste and place it on the compost pile. If I place it directly on the garden, it will kill everything right away. But if I remove all that manure, let it rest for six months, and then apply it to the garden, I likely won’t have to put fertilizer on that patch of garden for the rest of the year.

The spiritual lesson I was sharing with my spiritual director was this: Beautiful and bountiful produce grows, quite literally, out of shit. Through God’s grace, beautiful and bountiful things can grow out of life’s most horrible moments, even the moments that are absolute shit. Sometimes those moments can turn into the most beautiful spiritual fertilizer we can imagine. As the chorus of Lisa and Michael Gungor’s song “Beautiful Things” expresses, “You make beautiful things out of dust, you make beautiful things out of us.”³

We have become detached from the natural order of the world. We place chemicals we can’t even pronounce on our plants to make them grow while we shun the most basic designs in nature. Livestock create, as natural by-products, some of the best fertilizer available. Many talented gardeners I know who garden in the city still get cow patties (lumps of dry cow manure) from their friends in the country and steep the cow patties in water. It goes by different names (my husband’s grandmother calls it “manure tea”), but these excellent gardeners water their garden with the liquid produced from this combination. Raised in the suburbs—I’m a “city girl” through and through—I would have once turned up my nose at cleaning up after my chickens. I loved the idea of keeping chickens in my backyard, but I was hesitant about the prospect of shoveling all that manure. When I realized that chickens produce gardening gold (in addition to their nutritious eggs), it completely changed my attitude.

Barren Soil

At our old house there was a patch of bare earth in the backyard for almost eight years. Despite my husband’s tireless administrations, we never successfully grew any grass in that back corner by the fence. Since we don’t know the entire history of that little piece of land, there are a million things that could have been wrong with the soil back there. One spring I had an idea. I went out with a shovel and turned over the entire corner of the yard where nothing would grow, and then I flung handfuls of wildflower seeds across the entire area. We figured that nothing else had grown back there; we didn’t have anything left to lose. Much to our surprise, the wildflowers took root, and that back corner of our yard was the most beautiful part of our garden that summer.

Sometimes our lives feel a lot like that soil: a barren patch void of life, where nothing good will grow. We have all felt that way at one time or another. This is part of the cycle of the human experience.

On Ash Wednesday we are called upon to lay bare our souls. We are called to recognize the stark reality of human existence: “From dust you have come, and to dust you shall return.” Not only do we repent of our sins and cry out to God in anguish, but we mark religiously that we are made of dust and that one day our very bodies will return to the soil from which they have come.

Every year, I offer ashes at the back of the sanctuary or worship space with the traditional language, “From dust you have come, and to dust you shall return.” But I also remind the congregation prior to this time that the word “repent” literally means “to turn around.” After they receive ashes at the back of the sanctuary, I invite them literally to turn around and receive the grace of Communion at the front of the church. It is a beautiful way to give people the sense of physically turning around as they are called to spiritually turn around as well.

The prophet Joel is unique among his prophetic counterparts. There are only a few prophets that historians are unable to place based on historical context in their prophecy, and Joel is among those few. The book seems to have been written after the exile, after the people of Judah have returned from Babylon; however, there are not enough clues in the text to give a definitive answer on the time frame. Additionally, while many of his prophetic counterparts emphasize repentance as turning away from evil and toward justice, Joel’s focus on repentance is concerned with turning toward God in worship. Joel calls for the blowing of the trumpets because the day of the Lord is coming near—and in Joel’s prophecy, the coming of the Lord is not a good thing. But Joel warns the people that they may be spared the wrath of God if they turn toward God in communal worship.

The text makes clear that the precipitating event for Joel’s prophecy was an ecological disaster, followed by an economic one (a simple “a + b = c” equation in an agrarian society). A great plague of locusts devastated the harvest, and the land was left in crisis. While some prophets lay a charge against the people of Israel for a specific unfaithfulness that led to their calamities, Joel’s prophecies make no such accusation. Instead, the overarching theme of Joel is a call to the people to draw closer to God by gathering together and worshipi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Ash Wednesday: Soil (Joel 2:1–2, 12–17; Matthew 6:1–6, 16–21)
• First Sunday of Lent: Order (Genesis 2:15–17; 3:1–17; Luke 4:1–13)
• Second Sunday of Lent: Life (Genesis 15:1–12, 17–18; Mark 8:31–38)
• Third Sunday of Lent: Water (Psalm 63:1–8; John 4:5–42)
• Fourth Sunday of Lent: Light (1 Samuel 16:1–13; John 3:14–21)
• Fifth Sunday of Lent: Restoration (Ezekiel 37:1–14; John 11:1–45)
• Palm/Passion Sunday: Time (Luke 19:29–40; Luke 22:66–23:56)
• Maundy Thursday: Remember (Exodus 12:1–4, 11–14; Luke 22:14–20)
• Good Friday: Fast (John 18:1–19:42)
• Easter Sunday: Feast (John 20:1–18)
• Resources for Worship Leaders
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Excerpt from Lent in Plain Sight, by Jill J. Duffield