Lying fallow
Link to video: https://www.facebook.com/stlukesferndale.org/videos/530087977956178
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
Jan 17, 2021—Epiphany 2B
1 Samuel 3:1-10(11-20); Corinthians 6:12-20; John 1:43-51
“Follow me,” says Jesus. “Come and see,” invites Philip. Come this way, travel this way, and see what you might become. Nathaniel is amazed by what Jesus knows about him. It seems miraculous, and makes him wonder what other power is in this person; what else might he know? A few chapters later, Jesus promises Nathaniel re-birth: the kind of change that makes everything new! Come and see, indeed!
When brought together with one of my favorite psalm verses, the invitation to place ourselves in God’s hands to be healed and re-made sounds out clearly. “For you yourself created my inmost parts; you knit me together in my mother's womb. My body was not hidden from you, while I was being made in secret and woven in the depths of the earth” (Ps 139:12,14).
God’s own hands knit us together and formed us, while we were in our mother’s womb. In the womb. Yes, our connection with God is THAT embodied: blood cells and neurons and flesh and bone. God knows us and connects with us on every level. Which means the question of being reborn is not simply a spiritual idea. As is made perfectly clear in Corinthians, our spiritual connection with Christ also reflects what happens in our bodies.
(Now, to be fully accurate, I should note that when Paul talks about the Body, he also ALWAYS means the community, and offers a concern for ways in which our communal life is not healthy. But here, today, I want to concentrate on our individual, physical bodies).
Because there is much that taxes our physical selves, right now. Eleven months of pandemic life has brought stresses that have added to and amplified whatever stresses we already faced. We are extra worn down. We are extra aware of the proximity of illness and death. We desperately want to see a light at the end of the tunnel, and need some way to hold strong if it doesn’t come as quickly as we’d like.
And so, here, today, it is helpful to hear Paul’s words, which scholar Melanie Howard calls “a timely reminder that in caring for our bodies, we honor our own spiritual union with Christ.” That, in fact, our body and our spirit belong to Christ, and in admitting this, we give ourselves to Christ’s life-giving desires for both.[i]
Which brings me to an invitation from Episcopal Bishop Steven Charleston, who speaks so clearly into this time of the year and this time in history, and who is so grounded in what happens when our bodies and spirits are allowed to rest in Christ.
“Now comes the time of endings,” he observes. “For centuries all of our cultures have marked it. It is the fallow season, the time when the Earth sleeps. Its beauty is a stillness, a quietness that settles over life like snowfall and brings all things to their completion before the regeneration of Spring. Therefore this is a profound moment to consider those things in our lives that we need to bring to a close. In each of us there are the loose ends of life, the wear built up over years of hard use. Bad memories, old arguments, lost chances, hurt feelings, family disputes: now is the season to do a little spiritual inventory, to find those loose ends, and to let go of what we do not need to carry into the next chapter of our story. Let that part of the past stay here. Let it sleep in the snow. And with a lightness of heart turn to face a fresh beginning, a new year of hope, the call to a change you have long needed and deeply deserve.”[ii]
We are weighed down by so many things. Different for each of us, though this worldwide pandemic has laid common burdens upon us as well. And like gravity, their weight can feel like a force of nature. Can feel like they are what anchors us and defines us, without which we would simply cease to be. But, as Bishop Charleston has pointed out, that is not true of all of them.
If we can stop, and allow ourselves to sink into what it means to be fallow, we might learn things. Rest a while, and allow yourself to be still. Not focused on growth and productivity for now. Imagine yourself as a field, owned not by you, but by God. Know that you have produced much in the past, and will produce more in the future. But for now, it is winter, and all that is in you must rest. What is good and life-giving will draw strength from this rest. Most of what is not, will simply die off (perhaps becoming compost for other good growth; perhaps just fading away).
If you rest like this, it might well become clear which parts of you are truly part of what God knit together in your mother’s womb, and which are not. Which challenges are yours to carry, and which are things that are preventing life and growth and health. If nothing else, you could probably use the rest. Could use the reminder that your life has always belonged in the hands of God.
If rest seems impossible, it probably means that there are parts of you that fight back against the idea that your life belongs to God. As Barbara Brown Taylor suggests: you perhaps do not wish to give up the idea of being a “self-made man;” you still see this as something to brag about. You want to keep going, you HAVE to keep going, in order to prove your worth. In order to earn your place. In order to be enough, to be better, to be admirable, to be beloved.
But this aspiration to meritocracy denies several key biblical concepts. It denies that we are all beloved, simply by being children of God: formed by hand, breathed into by the Spirit, knit together in our mother’s wombs. And it denies that we, body and spirit, belong to God. Which means our job is not to amass credit and honor so as to set ourselves apart and above our brothers and sisters. And it is not to bemoan the ways in which we fall short. It is to place ourselves in the hands of God, in the womb of God, in the possession of God, and allow that to form us. To find out what begins to germinate, when we let ourselves lie fallow in this way. To notice those things that are not connected to new life, and let them fall away. And to let God’s growth deepen and begin within us as we lie fallow. As we rest. May it be so. Amen.
[i] Melanie Howard, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/second-sunday-after-epiphany-2/commentary-on-1-corinthians-612-20-5
[ii] Bp Steven Charleston, FaceBook post 12/10/2020