Text: Luke 10:38-42

Speaker: Sarah Zwickle

I am grateful, and delightfully surprised, to find myself here today, gathered in this place with you.  My name is Sarah Zwickle. My husband Adam and I lived in Columbus from 2009-2014 as graduate students at OSU, new parents, and neighbors. Our daughters are 14 and 11 now! Time is a swift current. We still very much connect with this congregation, receive your news and prayer requests, and worship via zoom, now from East Lansing, Michigan.

Writing has been my creative expression for years. Speaking is harder. So before I begin to speak these words I’ve prepared, here’s a compost prayer:

May these words settle on each of your internal compost piles, break down into gifts that grow like wildflowers, that transform into what is nourishing and loving. In compost nothing is wasted, not even words, all are incorporated back into the whole. Amen.

Have you come across any snowdrops admiring the snow with their delicate, bowed petals? A crocus or skunk cabbage just beginning to reach towards the sun? We are balancing on the fulcrum of a seasonal teeter totter (what a great word) as it tilts back toward the sun. The cold soil is still keeping most of this season’s growth plans a secret, but Earth’s great inhale, held all winter, is at the very tip top of its exhale, ready to breathe out new life and warmth. Light, plant fibers, and wings are starting to stretch, to lengthen, or in Old English, to lencten, to Lent.

Let’s take a deep breath in through the nose.

Hold the breath for 3 seconds—like a little winter.

Now slowly release inner warmth from your body into the air around you—like newly hatched spring—lengthen your breath, your heartbeat, and your imagination.

Now imagine…in the corner of a garden, behind the barn, and in Rubbermaid bins in my garage are cold, still compost piles. As we tilt and days lengthen, the piles begin to stir. On the surface, our eyes tell us nothing is happening. But if we skim a teaspoon of compost from that same surface, and peer at it through a microscope, we will find as many wild, colorful, and busy microbes as there are people on the surface of the Earth—billions! Compost is waking up to break down last year’s old life into warmth, moisture, and new aromas—organic elements ready to reunite with the soil they came from and grow life.

Imagine Jesus as a master composter. With Luke, it’s not too much of a stretch because in story after story we see Jesus gather raw materials of human experience and compost them back into their elemental essence:     love. Every time he recognizes people who are outcast, sick, hurt, and ignored and eats with them and folds them back into community, he is practicing compost. In every story he tells about finding what is lost in the wild of our lives he practices compost. And when he tells stories about seeds, rain, manure, trees, and raven feathers as a way to help us imagine the Kin-dom of God, he is practicing compost.

We all have leftovers that need composting, the embodied messiness of relationships with each other, ourselves, and Earth. What if, instead of burying them or throwing them away in despair, we gather them, sit with them, and watch as they inevitably transform into the very ingredients we need to move towards wholeness? What if we approach the season of Lent and its deep, quiet transformations, with a playful, imaginative spirit and learn to compost?

I invite you into three stretches, three Lenctens, of the imagination today in scripture, nature, and a future hope.

First Stretch: Scripture

First, let’s imagine ourselves into the layers of scripture for this week. We’ve been to the wild with Jesus to better understand his, and our, creative and communal spirit. This week we’ll reflect on different types of preparation for change: about Martha, who is working hard, and Mary, who is sitting still. This scripture is as familiar and comfortable as a favorite pair of slippers, and it has sat with me and probably a lot of you, for a long time. I realized this week that the very first time I was asked to give a sermon was in an English village called Adderbury where I was a youth pastor in 2000, and the passage I talked about was this one. Back then, just out of college, the contrast between Martha and Mary was interesting to me because I believed that working hard and worthiness were positively correlated. More of one, more of the other. Happiness was earned. Joy a reward for sacrifice. This easily translated to how I operated as a Christian, too. Holidays weren’t really good unless sleep was lost, something burned, and everything cleaned twice before guests arrived. Martha and I were on the same page here. And there was Mary, just sitting while Martha skirted around her with dishes and leftover food. It was me asking Jesus the question, do you not care? It was me with the request, tell her to help me. But let’s pause just a moment before walking again in those favorite, well-worn scripture slippers.

Here we are, many Marys, sitting, listening, singing, praying, and thinking, like Martha, that we have so many things to get ready for next week. Meals to eat, clothes to wear, beds to sleep in. Not to mention the larger events of life, the perpetual preparation for births and birthdays, holidays, graduations, prom, weddings, anniversaries, surgeries, and funerals. There is so much work to do. If we started now and never stopped, it still wouldn’t be enough.

In the middle of her endless work, Martha speaks, and Luke quotes her directly. These are words to pay attention to. First, she expresses an important need to be recognized for her care. Like so many who tend to the needs of human bodies, Martha knows transformative care takes work, practice, skill, and even mistakes. It takes preparation that often goes unnoticed. Words, gestures of gratitude reciprocate that care like a deep breath. The next words she speaks are difficult for a culture that values self-reliance. “Help me.” These are words, at their core, of vulnerability spoken out loud, and they are just as brave as Mary’s sitting.

Working to change a habit, an injustice, inhabiting our ever changing bodies, and witnessing the swift changes in the habitats that all of life on Earth depends on is overwhelming. How can we possibly prepare for these changes? For every scenario?

Can just sitting really achieve anything worthwhile?

Imagine: Rosa Parks sits down in the front seat. Freedom Riders sit at lunch counters and in waiting rooms. A seed sits into an empty hole in the soil until covered in darkness. Gandhi sits and spins. Martin Luther King sits with students in Atlanta and Nelson Mandela sits in prison. Mary sits on the floor with Jesus, and Martha joins her. They all spent time preparing to sit, present, with pain, war, fear, climate change, and violence is a powerful act of courage, of imaginative and effective action.

Transformation begins when we sit, present to each other and all of Earth’s creatures.

Jesus’ response to Martha’s important request is an invitation to discover the other side of preparation: presence. Martha, he says, Martha, let your deep longing, your sincere desire to heal, provide, and care for what and who you love become a tired, broken container. Come and sit with us. Breathe in, then out. Empty the distractions and worries for now, be filled instead with breath, with stillness, with transformational possibility and the many things become the one thing, the inner transforms the outer.   Both are needed.   These two sisters embody the rhythm of work and stillness that Jesus practiced so often: that preparation for the Kin-dom of God is work, and preparation is also presence.

Scripture tends to speak to us in voices that we know, refractions of meaning bounce off people, events, and words unique to our lives and experiences, which is why coming back to them, turning them over and then letting them sit is so important. They take on a new  richness and depth—like soil that’s been given beautiful, aged compost. Each time I come back to this story, I realize how much I’ve composted it with the leftovers of motherhood, aging, being a neighbor, and paying attention to how Earth prepares for transformation, too.

Second Stretch: Nature

What do a bird, a butterfly, and compost have in common?

They all formed within containers specifically made for transformation—delicate, intricately-designed vessels of change. An egg, a chrysalis, and a compost container. And all 3 of these “shells” share something in common, too: they are designed for breath and mystery.

Each of these remarkable holders of life has a kind of protective barrier that separates, but doesn’t completely cut off, the inside from the outside. A thin place. Eggshells are ceramic like and made of crystallized calcium, but they have as many as 17,000 tiny pores on their surface to let oxygen in and carbon dioxide out. A chrysalis is made from cuticle-like cells similar to our fingernails. The entire being, because all of it has become one thing, breathes through tiny, closable holes on the sides called—wonderfully—spiracles. Compost containers need to be permeable, too, to let in oxygen and release carbon dioxide. They do this simply, like an egg and a chrysalis, through holes we work to provide that will shield tender leftovers from rain and critters without suffocating them, like straw or the spaces between pallet boards or burlap. A well designed compost container will conserve moisture, but not too much, will let air flow, but not too little.

And a last little connection: most of the decomposers inside compost piles are permeable, too. Worms dissolve oxygen through their skin, bacteria and fungi respirate through membranes.

Now for the mysterious part. Transformation happens within these containers, in the dark, unseen and for the most part unknown. Orange yolks evolve to fluffy chick or flippered turtle. Plump caterpillars, earthbound, dissolve and emerge with wings! And kitchen scraps, yard waste, and manure reduce by half in volume after just a few days and continue to change until they look and feel like nothing like they were before! Like compost piles, we need the balance of work and stillness. Mundane and miraculous. Stillness and change. Many things and one thing. Martha and Mary.

The nature of a compost container is not to anticipate every individual leftover, but to be a space prepared to welcome and transform whatever life gives us. Change, which happens all the time, needs containers, whether eggshells, silk sleeping bags, or human bodies.  The stillness inside will carry us on waves of breath and mystery into the next phase of life—like notes becoming a new melody, or played on a new instrument, but still singing. When we make room for these spaces, in our backyards and in our hearts, they don’t have to be for compost. It might be a favorite blanket, a beloved tea cup, the dog snoring next to you, or a meditation cushion. Whatever it is that balances work with stillness and welcomes all parts of life without judgment or fear. What if we created cocoons of comfort to incubate new possibilities as we sit, receptive to new ideas and energies, reaching and lengthening our imaginations into new variations of relating to each other and the Earth. What would happen?

Third Stretch: Future Hope

These are words I wrote to my daughters, a kind of invocation for their future, that I want to share with all of you.

My daughters and friends, this is what I want (need, long, ache, desire, hope, dream, live, lose, die, sit down, and love) to tell you:The Cottonwoods fill the air with enough fluff to make a thousand soft beds for you to fall sweetly into sleep, but the week they coordinate this with the sky passes in the flash of an eye, it passes as sweetly as your upturned face, the look just before your eyes open in the morning. The aspens will flash on their petioles, be-jangled by wind that bears the tiny fluff of future giants on its breath. The birds and caterpillars, they nest and spin now. See! Look! Feel what the world is asking you to notice, to delight in, to navigate by so you can begin to understand the mystery you were born from and into. Do not work too hard to be so hard. Soften. Kind-en. Find the tender, balanced spot where your mistakes have already worked into the soil, tilthily, humorously, and humus-ly, where experience and imagination are two hands that plant compassionate seeds into the soft, warm ground that your inevitable tears will water. These wonders of wonders arrive when your body is still, receptive, a moth’s feathered antennae on an open channel to Earth waves, and they will lead you from beauty to beauty as you question what and who you are for. The life you have, it is your life. The death and loss you experience, it is the same. It is not your fault or yours to fix or to prevent. We are here to ride the wind as iridescent strands of new beginnings just born from a season’s end, in order to bring us back into vulnerability with ourselves and the Earth we inhabit, we need, we must, remember. Listen to. Return to. And Love. Amen.

You may have noticed scraps of paper on the welcome registers. Each week, after the silent reflection, there will be time for “Composting Our Troubles.” Use the slip of paper to write or draw any concerns, pain, sadness, fear, or questions, give it a one-fold, and bring it up during the response song to begin to make a compost pile. We will continue to gather them over Lent and see what grows/transforms on Easter Sunday and beyond.