Holy Ground
Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren
Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – April 23, 2023
Holy Ground – Exodus 3: 1-12
After I had preached a few sermons at my first pastorate in rural Iowa, one of the many farmers in the congregation pulled me aside to share what he impressed upon me was extremely important information for an Iowa preacher to understand.
That was the important difference for a farmer between the words: dirt and soil.
Dirt is dead and unwanted. It’s a good word for what you clean off your clothes, hands, or boots at the end of the day. Soil on the other hand is a precious resource from which food and crops may grow. It requires careful cultivation, and its health is an increasing focus of many farmers. If I wanted to continue using agricultural references in my sermons, he kindly underlined for me, that was a distinction I’d want to start getting right.
Moses is employed in the field of agriculture in today’s story. At the beginning of Exodus chapter 3, he is out tending the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, leading them, the text says, beyond the wilderness to Horeb, understood as the mountain of God.
In Exodus chapter 2, just before the chapter we read today, Moses left Egypt in trouble. He was on the run after murdering an Egyptian slave master. But I suspect he was also on the run from a feeling of rage and helplessness in the face of the overwhelming suffering of his people: the enslaved ancient Israelites.
We live in a time of overwhelming trouble, too. Racism and violence are still far too prevalent. What’s more, human actions have now imperiled the health of our planet in ways that many of us often feel helpless to address.
Since 1750, humans have pumped 1,000 gigatons of carbon into the air. To put it mildly, we’ve discovered that’s a bad thing for the health of the planet. It’s warming up our atmosphere at a rate that is causing glaciers to melt, sea levels to rise, mass species extinction, mass famine for human populations, and severe weather patterns. We are already experiencing a climate in chaos, and unless we take effective collective action, the worst is yet to come.
Climate scientists are clear that effective collective action includes reducing our emissions or the amount of carbon we continue to pump into the air through the use of fossil fuels. But most climate scientists are also clear that reducing emissions globally is very complicated and that reducing emissions alone still leaves a legacy load of carbon in the atmosphere. We’ve put it there over the course of centuries, and left unaddressed, it will continue to cause problems for decades if not centuries to come.
God called Moses to action from a burning bush. If you ask me, I’d say our call to faithful action today is coming in the form of massive increasingly destructive wildfires among other disasters. We may wish we could hide, too, but unfortunately for us there is no metaphorical Midian we can escape to–unless of course you count one billionaire’s still far off dream of populating Mars.
No, I’m afraid we’re stuck with this atmosphere and with this earth under our feet. In the wilderness on the mountain of Horeb from a burning bush God calls to Moses: “Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” How holy do we consider the ground on which we stand?
Most farmers I know are convinced of the importance of soil. But these days the stuff has a whole new fan base, as evidenced in the documentary I recently finished watching called “Kiss the Ground,” available now on Netflix. In it, celebrities, scientists, and farmers wax emotional while sharing the good news of this one big, long word: biosequestration. If you’ve never heard that one before, you might want to practice saying it with me: biosequestration.
So, the word bio means life. And if you sequester something you trap it. This documentary makes the claim that since reducing carbon emissions is not enough on its own, what we need is technology that will take that legacy load of carbon out of the atmosphere and put it back in the ground where it came from. The good news is that the technology we need to do this is actually millions of years old. Biosequestration is what trees and other plants, especially plants with good long roots, already do. They take the carbon out of the air and put it back in the ground to feed the micro-organisms living in the soil.
Like my dear Iowa farmer told me. Dirt is dead. It’s been exposed to air so much those precious micro-organisms have all died off. The rain runs right off dirt. If it’s going to grow anything, new micro-organisms need to be pumped back into it–often in the form of fertilizer. But keeping a live root in the ground can transform dirt into soil. It can capture carbon and feed the micro-organisms and draw the rain down into the underground water table. Healthy, rich soil is the fertile ground from which food and crops can grow. Now, we are learning, it can also be the fertile ground that keeps our air clean and our planet livable.
It may be easy to consider majestic mountains, soaring eagles, leaping dolphins, or dramatic sunsets and be moved by the beauty of Creation. But for those of us who believe that this earth is a gift from God that sustains life and is worthy of our faithful stewardship then we may want to take seriously how holy is the very ground on which we walk.
From that holy ground, God called Moses to action. But Moses needed convincing. If you read chapter 4, you may come to the conclusion that Moses was afraid to do what God asked. He makes excuses and finally simply asks God to send someone else. But God doesn’t let Moses off the hook. God says, no, I am sending you. But God doesn’t send Moses alone and God sends with Moses miraculous powers.
In the United States today, those of us who want to take collective action on climate change are far from alone. Studies have shown that the vast majority or 66-80% of US citizens favor climate policies and action.[1] If you wonder where all those people are, you should see how busy the Earth Day Celebration at Hawthorne Hill Nature Center gets. And if you don’t want to feel alone, you can make plans to visit the Earth Summit to be held at Elgin Community College this coming Saturday, April 29th. Or you could join Elgin’s Sustainability Commission which is working on a number of local projects. Or join another local community organization focused on the health of the planet, including our own Highland Avenue Green Team.
God isn’t going to send someone else. It’s going to take individual and collective action to turn around the damage humans have caused to our planet. But I trust that God does not call faithful people to action alone and that God is still working wonders with us.
· Those wonders include the natural processes of our planet and the simple miracle of a tree.
· Those wonders include the simple miracle of farmer after farmer planting cover crops or taking up whole systems of regenerative agriculture, which not only produce more but draw down carbon in the process.
· Those wonders include the simple miracle of backyard gardeners choosing native plants with deep roots that they know support the health of the planet by supporting the health of the soil and actually pulling carbon out of the air right here where they live.
· Those wonders include any one of us who will dare to take off our shoes and sink our toes into this holy ground we call earth.
I hold close to my heart the morning over breakfast when my son Noam told me, “Mom, I can’t wait for the time when we have a national holiday celebrating how we fixed the planet and overcame climate change.” I can’t wait for that day either. I won’t sit on my hands expecting it to come. But I do trust that God is still doing wonders and God is still calling faithful people to action, including you and me.
May it be so. Amen.
[1] “Americans experience a false social reality by underestimating popular climate policy support by nearly half”, Nature Communications, August 2022. As shared by Kane County Climate Action Plan’s consulting team: Pale Blue Dot LLC.
