Good Clean Dirt

“ But that on the good ground are they, which in an honest and good heart, having heard the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience. ”

As I kid I learned something about dirt. When you are camping above 9,000 feet in the pristine wilderness of the High Sierra, where man has hardly set his foot nor left his waste products, it's okay if you've dropped your s'mores on the ground beside the campfire. You can still pick it up and eat it, after brushing off a few ants and pine needles. What's left on the sweet, steaming treat will not harm you: it's just good clean dirt.

Dirt is the subject of Christ's remarkable parable of the sower. He doesn't really describe the sower, the seed, nor the crops being grown. He's talking about the dirt: hard-packed wayside dirt, uncultivated rocky dirt, weed-choked dirt, and good clean dirt ready to grow anything. With some of the top 2% off all agricultural soil in the world sitting to the west of us here in Chico, we have no excuse for being ignorant about dirt.

The most probable meaning of the dirt in Christ's parable is an individual soul who is either ready or not to receive the word of God to his or her soul's benefit and salvation. But as parables may be seen on several levels, I seek to apply the image of good clean dirt today to an entire church, acreage made ready for planting, a farm for the cultivation of many souls, becoming a field ripe to harvest.

Let's go church shopping in our minds a moment. And please don't think of any specific churches locally or otherwise: I mean only to create typical, but hypothetical, churches. Like this one advertised in the paper here: “Come Grow with Us!” It pictures a mammoth facility, a campus really, with a photo of thousands seated in an auditorium. We see it's signs, its edifice right off the freeway at the town's busiest intersection. If you like lots of people, it's got to be the church for you!

Lots of people make lots of footprints in the earth, creating a well traveled but hardened road. Not a field for planting anything really, because its patterns have all been set. Its success is also its limitation, because it has already figured out how to get people and keep them in their seats. The best new books on church growth, best preaching techniques, best picked and paid pastoral staff are all employed here. Don't suggest changing a thing. The Lord is at work here. It's obvious—look at the size of our choir!

Or maybe this fine looking one. The artist's rendering of the building looks beautiful. “Victory over Sameness” the pastor's sermon title in the church pages this week. I see good-looking people going, fine attractive people with big smiles. “Come hear the joy!” in large yellow letters on a blue banner hung over the entrance we see as we drive by. Every message ends with an altar call, and so many souls come forward to be saved.

Joy is a real Christian byproduct, but it may be fleeting if the deep work of the Spirit isn't done, nor serious time spent directing our attention to our sinfulness, mourning our departures from the path and really changing from what we were. Without the deep changes, the word of God only goes so deep, and then it runs into those rocks, the unredeemed nature of humankind that lay there from our origins and will not allow roots to penetrate. The true joy of discovering God dies and its appearance only may be artificially kept up and on the surface.

Now look at this great congregation. “Meet Christ and Be Enriched!” is this Sunday's sermon from its pulpit, as a church filled with the products of a wealthy land and it's faith-filled prosperity enlarge the outlook of it's people and the signs of God's great blessing on every head. The parking lot is filled with Beamers and Benzes—well done! God is so good to us.

The luxury level of our culture today is sought less in platinum and pearls, and more in high-tech gadgets and cars, bigger homes and stuff you can get at Fry's Electronics. Ever go into one of those? Whatever the stuff, and however that may translate to a church, in palatial uptown posh cathedrals or vast halls boasting gigantic projectors with multi-media centers, we get lost in them. The word gets lost to the production and feeding the meter is by far the more important task.

But what is this poor little country church? No ads, no great building, no show or fine clothing, not even many people. They really don't get it, do they? How is the glory of God shown in such a simple unadorned image? How can it be the field of the Lord, when it lacks a couple thousand members? We don't hear joyous shouts, and no Escalades in back. What's the draw? Why would anybody stop here?

The word of God goes forth, and the Sower sows His seed in all the congregations that are called by His Name. Which church is ready to receive it? Which church will bring Him a plentiful harvest? Soil fit for planting must be dug up, turned over, cleared of rocks and other large impediments and regularly weeded to keep out competing plants. This good clean dirt may be said to have no character in itself. The old hard-pack was cynicism, upheld by the many who have seen the failure of unpopular religious movements. The old rocky state was its un-repented and un-redeemed nature, unwilling to give up the stones of sin down deep, but looking good for show. The weeds are another show, that of wealth and worldly success.

Good clean dirt has to give up all three and lose so much to be ready for God's word to take deep and lasting root. When it's ready for sowing, the best dirt is repeatedly overturned, broken, colorless and lacking of all self-importance. Now the sower scatters his precious seed over it, and that word sinks deep. The empty soil gladly receives it and the seed happily springs forth with new life.

Good clean dirt is what a church must become in order to be used by God at all. The byway is where so many are, but their doctrines have been founded on population, success measured in numbers and there is no room for disturbing that ground. The rocky plot seeks quick and easy justification, the joyful exterior without the deep work of repentance. That weed-choked quarter looks green and abundant, but there will be no useful fruit from there. God looks on the ground and knows so much better than we do what part of His kingdom is His church that is ready to grow His word abundantly.

Thirty years ago, a small break-away movement formed what might have quickly become a national Anglican church, but soon fragmented into three competing camps. The betrayals and accusations are no longer important, but these three had their origins at the consecrations of four bishops in Denver, 30 years ago tomorrow, under Albert Chambers, retired bishop of Springfield, Illinois, the only Episcopal bishop in America still brave enough to give the new movement its Apostolic Succession and validity as an Anglican body without the baggage of PECUSA's slow but inexorable departure from the faith.

We left the Episcopal Church, but brought our sins with us. We weren't ready. Hard-packed, hard-bitten soil; shallow, naïve delusions of grandeur; and sadly even a rush for the money, for Episcopalians were always well-heeled—these traits made good clean dirt hard to find in us. We needed time as wilderness, and we got it.

+Robert Sherwood Morse set the marching orders with a stirring sermon in St. Louis the autumn before, as Moses encouraging the children of Israel to leave the fleshpots of Egypt and come with him out on the desert. We have been on the desert now 30 years. Last Friday, Joshua took over as Moses retired fully from our part of that original vision, the Anglican Province of Christ the King. The Most Reverend James Eugene Provence was seated with honor as our second Archbishop.

Present also were bishops from the Anglican Catholic Church and the United Episcopal Church of North America, the two other strands of those Denver consecrations, giving and receiving honor and cooperation in Christian love. No better sign of a completed preparation of the land for planting seed have I witnessed in my nearly 30 years with this movement. The hard-bitten cynicism is gone. We are not a popular movement. The old sins of the Episcopal Church are gone. Our sins have been purged through great suffering and sacrifice. The wild aspirations of a wealthy church, financially able to conquer with cash has long gone, the testators mostly dead. We're just us now, the children of that earlier, brave generation, standing in the path of Moses, ready at long last to enter the Promised Land.

I mix too many metaphors, perhaps, but the land is the thing. And every heart must examine itself, seek God's guidance for change and preparedness, and rid itself of any personal greed. So too must every congregation, every diocese, and each province do the same in this new day. I see great hope in the things I have witnessed this week. Are we ready to emerge?

The Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin is making news by being the first diocese and bishop together to leave the Episcopal Church (TEC). Bishop Schofield, an acquaintance of mine, and a brave man, is leading his church under new jurisdiction, that of the Southern Cone in Argentina, in order to maintain, if he can, communion with Canterbury—that's the primary reason he didn't join us. (We broke from the Compass Rose long ago, and believe an American church is perfectly valid without international recognition.) In Fresno, the first volleys of what I predict as a long and bitter political and legal contest between TEC and Bishop Schofield have predictably been fired.

In contrast, a new peace reigns over the once divisive churches of the Denver/Chambers consecrations and a long uncompromised expression of Christ's ageless religion is being practiced in humility among us. As our new Archbishop expressed on Thursday, we are not the entire church, the only church, nor could we be. Our unique strength and special offering lie in our relatively small size, and our faithfulness to what has always been the Anglican way. Our worship, our tradition, the beauty of music, art, vestment, ceremony, the exaltation of God through a formal directed and united act of praise inspires even the unchurched to believe in a God who is worthy of high worship, and more. Plus we are small, and therefore we are family. Greater numbers may create community , but family can only be found where everyone knows each other, loves and lives in close formation, suffers together and supports one another. Other images and paths of churches work—or don't work, God knows—elsewhere. But we now understand why God has seen fit to maintain us, even so small and unknown, until now. We are dirt : Good Clean Dirt. If we gladly suffer the process of preparation, overturning, breaking down, painful removal of old ways of sin, and humbly accenting to no worldly recognition, we can be planted by God with His own Hands, the word of God to produce a hundredfold.

In 30 years, we have learned to suffer gladly. We have suffered fools, but no longer. We have suffered lies, but no longer listen. We have suffered sacrifices made to God of former security, priests walking away from rich posts and pensions into a firestorm of hostility, congregations willing to leave their properties behind to follow not bricks and mortar, but God Himself. We needed the time to prepare. I believe we are today what you don't brush off the s'mores around the campfire. At this altitude, nothing has defiled it and you can eat it without fear. It's just dirt, good clean dirt. Ready for the word. Just say the Word, Lord. We have no other agenda. Sow your seed.

PFH+