God Does the Work
Gospel Reflection Matthew 16:13-20
It all started with an oak tree on their landed farm called Knepp. The oak tree wasn’t doing well; it was one of those really old oak trees that England has here and there, hundreds of years old. The oak tree specialist sparked everything. He told them that the fertilizer and pesticides that their crops depended on were killing the oak trees, just a little at a time. At the time, they were heavily in debt, as the clay soil didn’t produce, yet Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie depended on the subsidies that the government paid them for their crops. And so begins the story based on a book of the same title. Wilding, it’s called, by Isabella Tree, and it was made into a PBS special that I watched a few weeks ago.
“What can be done?” Tree and her husband ask themselves. It turns out, there was a whole lot that could be done. And because nothing was off the table, they began to wonder. What was their land like hundreds or even thousands ago? Could they replicate that? They tried. They bought free-roaming English longhorn cattle, Exmoor ponies, Tamworth pigs, and deer and they left it alone, seeing what would happen. They called it the “Knepp experiment.”
They were not without challenges. Their fellow farmer neighbors were not happy. They thought that Tree and her husband were ignoring the most noxious of the weeds, and the wind blew those seeds on their land. Unfair! No one thought their experiment was interesting, especially at first. “They’re just being lazy,” people said.
Tree and her husband applied for and received subsidies from the government, not for the crops because they had stopped growing them, but for conservation. With very little human help — remember, they left things alone — things changed. The soil health and the water flow improved greatly, especially when they got beavers. Rare bugs and plants came back. Twenty years in, Knepp is a top breeding spot for nightingales, turtle doves, falcons, and purple emperor butterflies, all of which are going extinct in Great Britain. It turns out that the cows and pigs and ponies shape the land naturally, and when they’re living like animals did hundreds of years ago, they create an ecosystem that allows for and encourages variety of all kinds of animals, birds, mammals, fish. It’s part of one beautiful interrelated system. The show was mesmerizing and hopeful.
And so, this past week, when I was reading the passage from Romans about the body and the members of the body about how we’re called to live together in community, about how we’re all called to participate, about how our gifts are different, about how we all belong — I couldn’t help but think about Knepp.
You see where I’m going? I read the body passage and I immediately thought about the ecosystem that Knepp experiment uncovered. An ecosystem that when balanced creates diversity, wildlife of all kinds, to quote our Isaiah passage “a wilderness like Eden, ….a “desert like the garden of the Lord,” where God’s justice is “a light to the peoples,” where God’s salvation goes out and God’s arms “rule the peoples.” The “Knepp experiment” is the kind of place where every creature does their part, and the beautiful effects of this kind of living, one not marked by difficulty and painful labor, but one where each living creature brings its own mark, its own place, it’s own effect and together. It’s the kind of beautiful that made me sit up and take notice.
The cattle keep the weeds down because they need to graze, and in their poo small bugs lay their eggs, the food for the songbirds that thrive at Knepp. The pigs root around for their food, spreading seeds making the ground soft for the native plants. Slowly, the natives choked out the invasives, the ones that the neighboring farmers hated so much. The work of the beavers deepened the pond, making a thriving ecosystem for pond creatures, fish and amphibians, little dragonfly larvae, and all the rest followed
The whole story felt like a miracle.
But then I started thinking about the church, the ekklesia. The word that Jesus uses in our gospel passage is the Greek word for gathering that later came to mean church. The early ekklesia was open, expansive, and hospitable. It just was. Everyone was welcome, the widows, the orphans, the rich, the poor, children, women, Jews, Greeks, Vikings, Anglo Saxons, Africans, even Dutch people, everyone. And everyone had their place, their work, their mark, their role, their mission, their calling, and together this all changed the world, not in the lightning bolt kind of way, but in the deeper, organic, life-giving kind of way of the Knepp experiment.
Because just like the Knepp experiment, the early ekklesia was full of goodness which spread into the world. If there was a sickness spreading, everyone knew where to go for help, the Christians. If there was a widow or an orphan who had no resources, the Christians would help. If someone was hungry, go find those Christians, they’ll give you food. You didn’t have a cloak? The Christians who had two cloaks would give you one of theirs. We even hear a verse in Acts where it says that “all of them were one in heart and mind. No one claimed any of their possessions as their own, but they shared with everyone as they had need.” This kind of living was like that soil at Knepp, that became even more healthy even as more animals left their mark. And because of their work, the work that each of those beasts did, they could share the resources with even more creatures. They made more room, more space, more habitat.
There was even room for Peter in the early church. We get proof of this in today’s gospel. We see Jesus asking his disciples what they know about him, and it was Peter who got it right.
But you remember the Peter stories, right? He wasn’t the sharpest knife. He was the one who fumbled out of the boat to try to walk on the water, the one who denied Jesus three times, the one that Jesus called diabolical four verses later in the very next part of our chapter. But Peter doesn’t have to get it right every time though. Nor do we.
No one has to get it right every time. We just have to trust the process, just like they did at Knepp. And all Peter has to do is the work that God has called him to do, to be the very best Peter that he could be. And for this he was called the rock — partly because he’s often dumber than a bag of hammers, but also because he’s the rock which is the foundation of everything.
And it’s both, all at the same time because that’s another one of the mysteries of God. God doesn’t love us because we’re the best, even though I still have that secret suspicion that I’m God’s favorite — you are too, by the way. But really God doesn’t love us because we’re the best. God just loves. And it even gets better than this. God does the work in us that needs to get done. Jesus said it today about Peter in our gospel. Flesh and blood don’t do it, but God reveals it. It’s not the same, but in that miraculous, magical way, the rewilding of Knepp happened with very little human effort. God steps in and teaches us, frees us, loves us, holds us, walks with us, and somehow, beautifully, we change.
Our soil changes. The water patterns change. There's a new species of birds that sing to start the day and the little field mice are really happy. The cattle spread the good native plants. And more and more people and critters find us hospitable. Goodness multiplies. The mycelium network, the strange fungus under earth the earth shares its resources, and in the natural world of things, even more beauty emerges, surprising us with its variety and the way that even the endangered species find a home there.
God’s power is rarely seen in a lightning bolt. It’s the still small voice, our weaknesses, the sunrise, the ecosystems that creates more space, the webs of connection between us, the soil that is built up as we continue to become the people that God is calling to be, in our community, in this city, in our nation. We offer our gifts as part of God’s gathering, the ekklesia, to everyone who needs them, gifts that we offer, not out of our strength or will power, but freely to be used by the God of the universe. God is the one who shows us how by coming down from heaven, by loving and indeed enjoying Peter and not only Peter’s shenanigans, but ours too. God is the one who makes us one body, one ecosystem, through the Eucharist, through fellowship, through vulnerabilities, through God’s work happening through us and in us so that we become the people, the community, the ekklesia that we’re called to be. It’s a beautiful place, natural, organic, with diversity and beauty and bugs and amphibians and ponds and even beavers.
Be who God meant you to be, and you will set the world on fire (St. Catherine of Sienna).