Text: Luke 14:15-24
Speaker: Mark Rupp

When I was growing up, one of my chores as a child was to take our leftover food scraps and chuck them into the cornfield that surrounded our country home. I don’t think my parents ever considered this “composting” in any sense that we think of it now, but there was at least a sense that these scraps would serve a better purpose in the field where things were growing than in the garbage bag that got taken away. 

But the thing was, as far as quasi-composting, this was an easy chore. Not only did it not require the sifting, aerating, turning and patient attention that we’ve been talking about with actual composting, we also did not do any kind of sorting with what got thrown into the field. Banana peels? Sure. Bones? Why not? Peach pit? Of course. 

I’m not sure if the farmer who owned the field ever knew we were doing this, and in retrospect, this may have just been well-intentioned parentally-sanctioned littering. Sure, we weren’t throwing pop cans and plastic bottles out there in the field, but I’m not convinced we were doing much more than keeping our garbage can from smelling bad.

Our sub-theme for today is “Gather,” and this week I’ve been thinking about the gathering that takes place with composting, but also about the reality that not everything belongs in a compost pile if it is going to be the life-giving space that it has the potential to be. 

In order to think about the potential that composting has and what lessons it can teach us, I think it can be helpful to think about what is, perhaps, the antithesis of a compost pile and name a simple truth: a compost pile and a landfill are not the same thing.

They may both hold what we throw away, but they operate on entirely different logics.

A landfill is designed to preserve. Trash is compacted, sealed off from air and light, buried in layers. The goal is containment. Isolation. Delay. In a landfill, a plastic bottle can take at least 450 years to break down. A disposable diaper may linger for centuries. Something like an aluminum can may sit there for 200 years. And food, which we might assume would simply rot away, often decomposes very slowly in a landfill because it is deprived of oxygen. Instead of becoming soil, it produces methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

A landfill is not about transformation. It is about storage. It is about keeping the unwanted out of sight. It is about maintaining things as they are for as long as possible.

A compost pile, by contrast, is built for change. It depends on air, moisture, heat, and the constant work of microorganisms. In the right conditions, a banana peel might break down in a matter of weeks. Leaves and coffee grounds can become rich soil within the measurement of months rather than decades or centuries. What was once recognizable becomes something entirely new.

The difference is not just time. It is intentionality.

In a landfill, things are compacted and cut off from relationships. In a compost pile, things are exposed to one another. They mingle. They break down together. They release what they were so that something fertile can emerge. And the end result requires diversity within this mingling if it is to live into its potential. 

And here is the crucial part: not everything belongs in a compost pile.

Materials that are too synthetic, too chemically treated, too resistant to decay will not transform. They remain intact, stubbornly themselves. Compost requires a certain kind of vulnerability. It requires matter that can soften, that can be entered into by bacteria, fungi, and worms; matter that can relinquish its previous form.

A compost pile is not a landfill. A landfill is where things go to be buried and forgotten. A compost pile is where things go to be changed. But for that to happen, what enters the pile has to be willing, in a sense, to let go of its current form. It has to soften. It has to break down. It has to release what it has been in order to become something new.

Things that are too rigid, too hard, too determined to remain exactly as they are do not make good compost.

That difference between a landfill and a compost pile has been sitting with me this week as I’ve read Jesus’ parable in Luke 14.

A man gives a great banquet. The invitations go out, the table gets set, and everything is ready. And then the excuses start rolling in.

“I’ve bought a field.”
“I’ve bought five yoke of oxen.”
“I just got married.”

On the surface, they are reasonable excuses. Life is busy. Responsibilities are real. But in the logic of the parable, these excuses are not about scheduling conflicts. They are about what we cling to. These excuses are about being so invested in what one has acquired, secured, and defined as one’s life that there is no room to receive an unexpected invitation.

The host responds in a way that is deeply revealing. He does not cancel the banquet. He does not scale it back. He does not let the table sit empty.

Instead, he tells his servant, “Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.” And when the servants return to tell him that there is still room, the host implores them to, “Go out into the roads and hedges and compel people to come in, so that my house may be filled.”

This is not just a story about hospitality. It is a story about who is willing to come. And about what kind of heart can receive an invitation that disrupts everything.

In the world of Jesus’ first hearers, banquets were not random gatherings. They were carefully curated social events filled with social meaning. You invited people who could invite you back. You reinforced status and strengthened alliances. You made visible who belonged and who did not.

Earlier in this same chapter, Jesus has already told his listeners not to invite friends, brothers, relatives, or rich neighbors, but to invite those who cannot repay them. So when he tells this parable, he is doubling down on this message with a parable that flips on its head this social system that thrives on reciprocity, control, worthiness.

The ones who decline the invitation are not bad people. They are responsible. They are secure enough with their lives and their investments. But perhaps they are also too settled. Too invested in maintaining what they have built to risk their lives being rearranged by the feast.

And so the invitation goes out to those who have less to lose. Those whose lives have already been disrupted. Those who are accustomed to being on the outside.

If the kin-dom of God is like a banquet, it is not a private dinner party for the well-established. It is a table where those who have been told they do not belong are gathered in.

And maybe that is where compost comes in, because compost is not neat. It is not completely within our control. It is not curated for appearances and perfect Instagram photos. It is a messy mingling of what once was separate. Carrot tops and eggshells and leaves and coffee grounds all breaking down together. None of them remains exactly what it was. They give themselves over to a process that is larger than any one of them.

The banquet in this parable is not a polished, exclusive affair. It is more like a compost pile than a country club. It is a place where the boundaries that once defined worth are loosened. Where those considered scraps are gathered in and revealed to be essential to the flourishing of the whole.

But here is the hard truth: you cannot compost something that refuses to break down.

If my heart is like a tin can, a plastic bottle, or even a peach pit, hard and impermeable, I may receive the invitation and still never truly enter the feast. I may cling so tightly to my identity, my property, my status, my sense of who deserves what, that I cannot be changed by the presence of those I would rather avoid or the people and things that I might prefer stay out of sight. 

God’s invitation to us all is to have hearts that resist being hardened and, instead, remain hearts soft as soil. 

Soil that can receive what is given. Soil that allows death to become life. Soil that knows it is made up of countless others who have gone before.

Soft soil is not weak soil. It is living soil. Alive with microorganisms, dynamic and relational.

In the parable, the invited guests are, in a sense, those who resist being changed. Those who hold on to the form their life has taken and are unwilling to be transformed in ways beyond their control. Their lives are so tightly packed with stuff and obligations that nothing new can take root. The invitation to the banquet just runs off the surface.

But those in the streets and hedges and the lanes and the far-flung roadways? They have already been turned over by hardship. They know what it is to depend on the generosity of others. They are perhaps more ready to receive a feast they did not earn.

And now we find ourselves in a week when the news has been filled with the outbreak of war. Images of bombed cities and families fleeing. Leaders digging in their heels and declaring the impermeable difference between us and them. Each side insisting on its righteousness and asserting its identity. Each side willing to destroy in order to solidify who they are.

War is, in many ways, the opposite of composting. It is an attempt to fix identity in place by force. To say, “We will not be changed. We will not yield. We will not soften.” It is the hardening of hearts at a national scale.

Violence seeks to dominate. Composting invites transformation.

When we refuse to recognize our ecological interdependence, and when we deny that our flourishing is bound up with the flourishing of others, we create something more like a dump than a garden. We pile up grievances. We bury our fear. We cover our complicity. Not only does nothing good grow there, its toxic nature leeches down and becomes a problem for future generations. 

The parable of the great banquet calls us into a different kind of imagination.

It asks us to imagine a host who refuses to let the table remain half empty. A host who keeps widening the circle. A host who does not give up when the expected guests decline. It asks us to imagine a community formed not by mutual advantage but by shared participation in grace.

And it asks us, quietly but persistently: Will you come? And if you come, will you allow yourself to be changed?

To gather is not simply to assemble. It is to make room. It is to recognize that I do not complete the feast on my own. It is to trust that what I relinquish will not be lost but transformed.

In our community, we confess that following Jesus means refusing the way of violence. But peace is not just the absence of war. It is the cultivation of conditions where life can flourish. It is the patient, humble work of softening hardened ground.

This good work we are called to do is about choosing conversation over conquest. It is about creating shared tables rather than fortified borders. It is about attempting to see the image of God in those we have been taught to fear.

It can be so easy to allow our hearts to become hardened. But the invitation of the Great Host is to allow our hearts to remain soft as soil.

This does not mean we become passive in the face of injustice. Composting is not passive. It is not my childhood chore that lacked any real intentionality or purpose. Composting is an intentional partnership where we help create favorable conditions and forces beyond what we can see meet us there to do their work. Composting is heat and friction and chemical change. It is costly. Things lose the shape they once had. But in losing their shape, they gain new purpose.

To have a heart soft as soil is to be willing to let our certainties be turned over. To let our privilege be broken open. To let our anger decompose into something that can nourish courageous action.

It is to gather with those who are different from us and trust that the Spirit is at work in the mixing.

The banquet is ready. The table is set, but there is still more room. The invitations are still going out into streets and hedges, into refugee camps and border towns, into our own neighborhoods and pews. The question is not whether there is room. The question is whether we will cling to what we have bought and built, or whether we will come with open hands and softened hearts.

May we resist the temptation to become a landfill for bitterness and fear. May we choose instead the messy, holy work of composting faith. May we gather. May we soften. May we trust that in God’s abundant economy, nothing given in love is wasted.

You may have noticed scraps of paper on the welcome registers. In a moment, after the silent reflection, there will be time for “Composting Our Troubles.” You are invited to use the slip of paper to write or draw any concerns, pain, sadness, fear, questions, or maybe naming the ways our lives have become hardened. Give it a 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.

And so, my hope for us, my friends, is that our hearts would be ready to receive, ready to release, and ready to be transformed for the healing of the world.