Crackpot Jesus and the Bottle-Diggin' Pig

Sermon for the First Sunday in Ordinary Time, June 10, 2012

(copyright Mainecelt 2012, based on Mark 3:20-34 & 2 Cor. 4:7-5:1)

Bridie, like most pigs, is a great digger. Ever since we expanded her fencing, our one-year-old Devon sow has been exploring her new digs—literally. Where once there was green lawn, there's now a lovely patch of dark, upturned earth punctuated by the portly form of a very happy pig.

The first day or two she was mostly concerned with digging up the sod. But midway through the week, one of our farmhands found her chewing on something that was definitely not a proper pig chew-toy, something that went “screek!” and “clink” against her sharp piggy teeth. We managed to distract her with some two-day-old baked goods and took the object inside and rinsed it off. It turned out to be a sixty-odd-year-old broken glass bottle, the words “Casco bottling company” still clear on the scratched and dirt-filled glass.

We were surprised—and we weren't surprised. Like most old farms, our land is littered with the detritus of generations. Each time we turn up new soil, we find all manner of broken bits and artifacts. Mostly, we find old leather soles from children's shoes—the legacy of the eleven Edwards orphans who ran the farm in the fifties,hardscrabble to the extreme. The next two most common discoveries are broken crockery—mostly bean-pots—and the glass shards of old bleach bottles.

The Edwards children became orphans during a hurricane, when their parents drove out through the storm and the floods to get some food. With the water over the road, they couldn't see that the bridge wasn't just covered with water. The bridge wasn't even there. Eleven children, motherless and fatherless, the secure structures of their family suddenly broken apart, and in the midst of their grief, forced to work the land all on their own, to feed eleven hungry mouths... sometimes we just stop and look around our land, our thoughts heavy with the memory of all that suffering.

Jesus understood what it's like when the strong walls, earthen vessel of family, begin to crack. In fact, his family had strong views about this idea as well, as we see in our Gospel lesson. Jesus is out there with the crowd, doing his thing, and his mother and brothers show up to bring him home and pound some sense into his fool head. They're pretty sure, based on reports through the local grapevine,that he's gone right off the deep end. One translation says, “they heard he was beside himself.” And the scribes who'd come down from Jerusalem—a group with a tendency to leap to conclusions—claimed Jesus was possessed by the Prince of Demons.

Basically, the word on the street was that Jesus was an absolute crackpot, and his family was determined to haul him home, even if they had to resort to hog-tying and carrying:

Then his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside, they sent to him and called him. A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, "Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside,asking for you." And he replied, "Who are my mother and

my brothers?" And looking at those who sat around him, he said,"Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother."

They must have been some upset. There they were, trying to get their crackpot relative out of the public eye before he brought shame on the whole household, and what did he do when they called him out? Well, he turned right around and returned the favour, saying he wasn't much pleased to have them as kinfolk either.

See,the household was what they called the “primary social and economic unit” of the first-century Middle East. There was no escaping it. The household you were born into determined everything that happened to you for the rest of your life: your social position, your choices for work, the approved vocabulary of your speech, the cut of your clothes, the way you wore your hair, and—especially--the other sorts of people you could spend time with, who all had to be from the same sort of household as yours.

Now,on the surface, it's easy to take this story as the standard sharp-tongued retort of any rebellious young man. Nobody likes their mother—or their siblings—to embarrass them in public. We get that—and, if we don't, our young people are quick to remind us. But Jesus says something new, something different—something that proves to his birth family that he's a crackpot for sure. He redefines, completely, what a family can be.

For Jesus, a true family is not the household into which you're born, but a community of people united by the love of God, a community of shared purpose, dedicated to seeking and doing the will of God in the world. It is a gathering of cracked pots, people united by an awareness that the world is broken—and WE are broken—and God wants something different and more wonderful than anything the world's rules and powers have ever offered up.

It's a bit like the old story of the water-bearer:

Once upon a time, in a village in India, there was a man whose job was to bring water from the river to his Master's house. It had been his father's job, too, and his father before him—for he came from a servant class that was expected to spend their lives doing just this sort of heavy, repetitive labour. Now, this man, like his father and his father before him, was very poor. He had very little in the world besides the clothes on his back and the work-gear his father had left him: two clay water jars and a wooden yoke from which they hung, so he could carry them from the river to his master's house,over and over.

One of the clay pots was perfect in every way for its purpose. The other pot had once been just like the first one, but on the day the water-bearer's father died—when his old heart had stopped in the middle of his journey—the pot had fallen against a stone and developed a crack. Now, though the water-bearer had tried to patch it, the fact was: that pot leaked.

It leaked so badly, in fact, that no matter how the water-bearer hurried from the river to his master's house each day, he never successfully arrived with that pot more than half-full of the precious water on which the whole household relied. He couldn't run too much faster,or he might spill the water from both jars. So every day he worked as hard as he could, making trip after trip, always with the fear that his master might decide he was unfit and hire another water-bearer for the job. Every night he lay down, bone-tired, and worried. He was miserable.

Finally,one day, he mustered up his courage and went to his master. "Master,” he said, “I am so very sorry. I work hard, hard as I can. Yet, because one of my pots is cracked, I've only been able to deliver a portion of the water to your household, and you don't get all you deserve from my poor efforts."

The Master smiled at the water bearer, and invited him to go for a walk down to the river. “I know you work hard.” said the Master. “And because you try to make every step count, I know you watch the ground beneath your feet as you carry water to my house each day. Now, as we walk back from the river, I want you to lift your head. See what a beautiful place this is? People say my estate is like an oasis. Look around. Notice the lush greenery, the fragrant flowers."

Indeed, as they climbed the path from the river to the Master's house the water-bearer took notice of the sunlight touching the beautiful flowers along the side of the path, and he noticed how the winds were softened by the leaves of young fruit trees. But when they reached their destination, his sadness returned. "Master, thank you for the honour of your presence and for sharing the beauty of your estate,” he said, "But I still must apologize for my failure."

The Master said, "Dear water-bearer, you haven't understood what I was trying to show you. Did you notice that the flowers and trees only grew on one side of the path? That's because of your cracked pot. I planted flower seeds and saplings on that side of the path,and everyday as you walked from the river the water that leaks from your pot has watered them. I could have hired a new water-bearer, but I preferred to grow flowers and trees. With those flowers, I have perfumed and decorated many rooms, and these last few seasons the fruit of those trees has graced many tables."

We are all gathered into this community of faith as earthen vessels,each with our own rough edges, our chips and our cracks. As Paul says, in his letter to the Christians at Corinth,

... We have this treasure in clay jars ...We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus' sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you. Yes, everything is for your sake, so that grace, as it extends to more and more people, may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God. So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day.

“Yes,”he says, “we're all cracked pots.” We carry, in our fragile human bodies, both the death and the life of Jesus, and it shines through every crack and broken edge. For our lives, in faith, are formed from clay and fire, into something beautiful and broken that God can use for Glory.

So,this is how we show ourselves as brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ. We root around. We find the shards and jagged edges, the chipped and broken vessels, and we wonder whether they have any use in this world. And then we open ourselves in prayer, inviting God to use all this brokenness, inviting God's healing spirit to bless it and use it to make something beautiful.

We are all cracked pots, and we follow a crackpot Savior who challenged the structures of his day, busted the bonds of death and cracked open the gates of heaven. We are his family, each one of us broken, each one of us holy. Praise be to God!

(Thanks to Rev. Peter Heinrichs, from whom I learned the story of the water-bearer--and thanks to our WWOOF volunteers, who keep our livestock safe from sharp objects!)

Agricultural Alchemy

Forget lead-into-gold. We have succeeded in an alchemy far more precious: sunlight into earth, earth into bacon, and bacon magically transformed into...fresh shrimp!

Okay, so maybe we had a bit of help with the first part. The Great Golden Orb's radiant energy was captured and held in earth, solar energy coursing through each element of the ecosystem. Next, we brought piglets into the mix: greedy little earth-gobblers, leftover-lovers, four-footed fertilizers. They rooted for us, and we rooted for them.

Then, one day, the pigs came home in little white packages. That was another kind of magic, to which we shall merely make allusion. You could say it was an act of slice...er, slight...of hand. Six roisterous, boisterous hogs had been divvied up, cooled down and gift-wrapped.

Next, six little piggies went to market. Our farmshare customers bought most of the meat, ordering animals by quarters, halves and wholes. (Two other pigs were otherwise processed into traditionally-cured products we'll have to wait months to taste. We trust it will be worth the wait!) We ended up with about one pig's worth of meat for our own freezer, plus lard to be saved for cookery and soap.

Well, that freezer was stuffed mighty full, so yesterday I took a few extra white packages with me when I went to the Winter Farmers' Market. There, in the cooler, underneath all our beautiful farm-fresh eggs, sat a pound or two of nitrate-free bacon, some ground pork and some chops: the original countryside currency.

Standing at a table across from me, the Live Lobster Lady lilted a lament. "Meat!" She cried, "My family's so hungry for meat!" I listened with ill-disguised delight. Too much seafood on their table? How fortuitous! In our house, it just so happens that we're tired of pork and eggs! I took out a pack of bacon and sallied forth across the aisle. That's when the alchemy happened. One hand to another, a shared smile and a few magic words, and the bacon disappeared, to be replaced by two packets of fresh-caught hand-picked shrimp meat.

The shrimp meat was transported home with much fanfare. A little lime juice, some garlic and peanut butter and olive oil, a bit of egg and some rice noodles, and more magic happened: Pad Thai! (I would have taken a picture, but we "disappeared" it too fast.)




I'm enjoying our experiments with agricultural alchemy. Maybe next week, I'll go looking for that other transformative substance: the fabled Philosopher's Scone.

Barnyard Haiku II

This week at church, I presided over the first session of our "Soul Spa." (I loved the name so much I had to steal it. Thanks, Songbird!) It's a four-week program designed to encourage storytelling, fellowship, and creative exploration on spiritual themes among the women of the church. Each week has a hands-on no-skills-needed creative project, and our first one was a "ten-minute haiku" exercise in which we played with different names for God.

By the end of the session, we were all indulging in a fair amount of Holy Foolishness, and if anyone said anything that happened to be five or seven syllables long, someone would shout, "That works! That could be haiku!" The event exceeded my imaginings!

So, Dear Readers, I invite you to indulge in some further explorations. I've done a few of my own... can you comment with your own haiku related to God, Barnyards, Gardening, or any combination thereof? Profundities and Irreverence are both entirely welcome!

Here are mine:










The bees have come home.
Hurry, open, you flowers!
We make a welcome feast.




















Open the new field.
Watch the cows leap, turn, and munch.
Such well-fed dancers!

















Piglets at wood's edge
Snoozing under broadleaf trees:
No sunburned ears here.

















Sweet, tender seedlings
Garden bed's green, lacy edge--
Get away, damn chickens!

Stuck.

STUCK

Down beneath the chicken pen,
Under many an egg and hen,
There's a shadowy sort of a glen
Just the right size for a piglet.

Under the floorboards, dusty and dark,
Free from the farmdog's pesky bark,
Down in the dirt, the piglets park,
Indulgently digging their diglet.

Nothing but noses poking out
As piglets under the barnboards scout
or doze with a now-and-then twitch of the snout
While chickens pass by, unperturbing.

But oh, how they grow, those dear little hams--
Just as their uncles and cousins and grams--
'Til half-way-out some porker jams
With a noise that's quite disturbing.

What's to be done? The shingles shake.
The terror-struck pig's sides heave and quake.
We fear for the hens. Will barnboards break,
In this battle between hog and hovel?

We look at the posts. We peer at the beams.
The pig in question screams and screams.
The farmer tires of tragic themes.
She leaves, then returns with a shovel.

Some jobs are little. Some jobs are big,
Some holes are harder than others to dig,
Especially round a stuck, thrashing pig.
But the critter was freed, fat and fine.

---

Now we're digging no longer for pigs, but for gold,
As onto our farm we strive hard to hold.
May our efforts bear fruit. May our strivings be bold,
And may all of our work turn out swine.


(Image and text copyright Mainecelt 2009)

Pig Deal.

Grunt.

.....grunt...grunt.

...sqeeeee! Grunt squee squeeeeee!

For the record, in case anyone out there is wondering,
these are NOT the sounds to which a farmer enjoys waking.

Roosters aren't so great either, but I'll take a nice, normal, healthily-crowing early morning rooster any day over...

Seven Escaped Pigs.

To start with, here's how the weather looked by the time I came in for a short break in the late morning:
That's better than the image on the weather radar this morning at around 6:30, when we were suiting up to go chase pigs. The 6:30 image had a lot more yellow, orange, and red in it. What you also can't see from this image was that our farm was right...in...the...middle of the storm (think of those ellipses as thousands of rain drops).

The incessant rain has seriously hampered our pig management this year. Enclosures that, in a normal summer, would serve the pigs for a few weeks are turned into muddy morasses in a matter of days. We try to keep them on fresh, clean ground with a lot of places to root, plenty of shade, and an array of twigs and green-growies to chew on and scratch against. Not only are they trampling the greenery too quickly, but the rapid onset of storms has been spooking them enough to bust through the four-strand electric fence.

So imagine a sudden downpour at dawn on a small Northland farm. Imagine the distant rumble of thunder, then the sudden hard patter of arriving rain. Then imagine...Grunt...grunt grunt....squeeee! Yep, that's how our morning began.

Here's a sampling of the clothing we went through during our pre-breakfast "running of the swine." (I should mention, by the way, that we have a total of eight pigs. While the rain poured and seven pigs gleefully jounced around, up the braes and down the glens, Pig Number Eight trundled back and forth inside the fenceline of the old enclosure, fruitlessly calling to all its escaped comrades. I was torn between praising its law-abiding nature and mocking it for its stupidity. In other words, I was not at my compassionate best as a farmer.)

Here are some of the pigs, exhausted after several circuits of the yard, the gardens, the cattle pasture, and the woods. Note that five pigs are sleeping peacefully INSIDE their new fence. Note that one pig is sleeping peacefully OUTSIDE the fence. Oh, well. You can only do so much on a farm after half the workforce departs for an off-farm job. I thought five pigs inside the fence was pretty good, with just myself and a mostly-untrained Border Collie on the job!

Here are two other pigs, NOT sleeping peacefully. They are, instead, pulling the tarp off of the firewood pile, unstacking the wood, rooting in the herb beds, and generally making themselves as much of a nuisance as possible. To put it as mildly as I can, these particular creatures are, umm, "not especially appreciated" right now. (The only reason I'm blogging is that I've given up.)

The renegades seem to be staying fairly close to their fenced-in friends, so my goal now is to just keep an eye on them from the house--with occasional stick-brandishing screaming raids if they get too close to the gardens again--until The Piper comes home. Seven days a week, she picks up a bucket or two of plate-scrapings from a local "breakfast served all day" restaurant. The pigs ought to come running for these syrup-soaked pancake bits, eggs, hash browns, orange slices and triangles of whole-wheat toast. (She'll dump it in the middle of the new enclosure and we'll work together to lift the fence and usher the renegades in.) Heck, I'D come running for that, too. In fact, after chasing pigs all over Creation for the last six or seven hours in the pouring rain, I would eat just about anything sluiced in a trough in front of me, as long as I don't have to cook it myself.

Moovin' Into June

Welcome, June, sweet month of green-growing!

June is a month of movements: folk flex muscles and venture outdoors, seeds open and stretch, leaves unfurl, vines extend, snowbirds return from Parts South and the highways of Maine burgeon with migratory herds of RVs.

The first movement of our own June symphony involved some challenging orchestration. The instruments at hand were spools of electric fence-wire, unwieldy armfuls of step-ins (portable fenceposts), hoses and water-tubs, several hungry animals and a clamjamfry of forage areas.

To begin with, we made an overture...a perambulation of all areas with enough mollifying mouthfuls to appease our hungry cattle. They've eaten their way through everything in their permanent pasture, and--as we wait for the recently-seeded auxiliary pastures to become established--we view all grass-growing areas as bovine buffets. No need to pull the gas mower out of the barn yet this year-- all our mowing has been done not with a sputter and a roar, but with a munch and a moo.

I'm sure we'll need that mower towards the end of the week. Earlier this Spring, in a fit of temporary insanity, I offered our farm as the host site for a church picnic. Wouldn't it be fun to share our sweet baby animals, tidy little gardens, and the farm's fine, green expense--er, expanse--with the rest of the congregation? The offer was made--and accepted--in April, that cruelest of months when all gardens exist merely as figments of the imagination rather than rank, bug-bitten, weed-choked realities. April, when the pasture is just starting to emerge from the snow, and one imagines it perpetually lush and grassy...well, I'm sure you can figure out how this played out! Here we are at the start of June, struggling to rotate our livestock around the yard while we rush to beautify the (manure-strewn) landscape and try to make the house look like a quaint little cottage instead of a construction site.


Yesterday we moved the cows (out of the side yard into the orchard)










so that today we could move the piglets (out of the barn into the side yard)










so that tomorrow we can move the chicks (out of their box upstairs into the barn)
so that we can start a new batch of chicks in the incubator.



ADD TO THIS WEEK'S TO-DO LIST:
Finish all interior house trim. (Mmm-hmm. Right.)
Move the tablesaw out of the dining room. Replace with actual table.
Tile the bathroom floor so we can finally hook up the bathroom sink.
Clean out the pig stall, power-wash & spray down with bleach.
Clean out the chickens' stall & add used shavings to compost pile.
Weed raised beds; plant succession crops, beans, tomato seedlings.
Make signage for farm hazards & mark safe areas for picnic guests.
Haul all debris, tree-prunings, & construction waste to burn pile.
Have everything looking nice by Friday morning.
Work at Farmers' Market Friday afternoon.
Work off-farm job all day Saturday.
Mow whatever remains of lawn (Saturday night?)

Yep, June: month of growth and movement. Right now, I'd better get mySELF moving, because I'm growing a nice big crop of STRESS!

Gilt Trip

The Gilt Trip: A Rural Adventure

There are folks who make cars and promote them with ads
Where they show that the car is so large,
it can fit in a soccer team, two king-size beds,
and the contents of one garbage barge.

How roomy the car is! The seats come unhinged!
The configurations are endless!
You can fit all your friends...even after a binge!
(You can live in it if you are friendless!)

But in all of those ads, there's one situation
The ad-makers never do feature.
It's the one where a farmer makes use of the car
to transport any sort of farm creature.

They wouldn't want word getting out about this,
but--give me a minute, I'm beggin'--
I'll tell you how great it was, bringing all eight
of our pigs home in our station wagon!

Okay, so the inside was, um...aromatic.
When piglets are nervous, they show it.
But if you need to fetch home a piglet or two,
then a wagon's a good place to stow it!

We borrowed the kennel (we're sorry, dear dog!)
and we brought along two smaller carriers.
They each took two piglets. The kennel
held four. They peeked out from wire-door barriers.

Eight pigs in a car with the windows rolled down.
We paid, rev'd her up, and drove out.
Our cargo was grunting and squealing, but we
drove with glee down the old homeward route.

The car, we admit, needed airing a bit.
But the pigs arrived home safe and sound.
When you don't have a truck, well, a wagon must do
when it's time to haul farm stuff around.

So, ad-men, ad-women, as you sit and plan
for your promos and clever ad copy,
Remember us wagoneers, down on the farm,
with our pigs packed inside our jalopies!

--copyright Mainecelt 2009

P.S. If you're wondering about the title, a gilt is a young female pig.

Rusticity Report: December 2008

Indoor weather report as of 6:30 AM: 31 degrees. (Let me repeat: that's INDOORS.)
Status of running water in house pipes: none.
Status of window view at all windows: opaque & crystalline.
Status of fire in woodstove: out, but with live coals remaining.
Status of farm dog: eager to pee, reluctant to do so outdoors.
Farmhouse toilet seat report: chance of frostbite in awkward areas.
Farmhouse breakfast: jasmine rice pudding, made with leftover rice, leftover baked squash & apples, eggs from our hens, milk from Winter Hill Farm, and a dash of ginger.

Now, for the outdoor report: 2 degrees above zero
Status of field hydrants: handle stiff but functional, water at full force.
Status of view: crystal-clear and sparkling, if eyelashes don't freeze.
Cows: contentedly chewing on two cartloads of "haylage" (hay sauerkraut). New trough de-icer plugged in to new outdoor outlet on woodshop/cottage, seems to be working.
Chickens: devouring locally-sourced grains sprinkled with grit & dried seaweed. Water frozen; dispenser brought in to thaw on newly-lit woodstove.
Pigs: relocated to local butcher for tomorrow's "date with destiny."

Now, at nine o'clock in the morning, I am thinking about the house lumber that will be delivered later today--our last major delivery except for the flooring. I am thinking about the puppy, now napping in her kennel, who warmed my hands by shoving her thick-coated wiggly body impatiently under the desk, lifting my hands away from the keyboard to pet and stroke and twine cosily in her black and white fur. I am thinking about the four-hour shift I must work at a shop in another town to help pay for the lumber, the puppy's food, and everything else that sustains this farm. I am thinking about the business plan due in my class tomorrow, the lumber that needs priming and sanding, the plumber who *might* show up later this week and help us get into the cottage by Christmas... and now, having taken the time to write all this, I am thinking I might be late for work!