Latest / Pine Street Pod / “Soil and Soul: On Earth, Food, and What We're Hungry For” Week Two - Good Enough

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“Soil and Soul: On Earth, Food, and What We're Hungry For” Week Two - Good Enough · Pine Street Pod

0:07
SPEAKER_01: Masanobu Fukuoka.
0:11
SPEAKER_01: Masanobu Fukuoka.
0:13
SPEAKER_01: Whew, got that right, I think.
0:16
SPEAKER_01: He spent the first part of his life learning all of the ways human beings could make nature work better.
0:24
SPEAKER_01: He was a Japanese agricultural scientist and he was trained to study plants.
0:31
SPEAKER_01: All he knew to do was diagnose problems and figure out what humans could do to make things grow better.
0:41
SPEAKER_01: Some of you gardeners in the room know what he's talking about.
0:45
SPEAKER_01: And he began to wonder if all that helping, trying to help nature grow, was really getting in the way of the greater goal.
0:56
SPEAKER_01: So he went home to his family's farm and he started taking things away from the soil in the field.
1:04
SPEAKER_01: He started with no plowing.
1:08
SPEAKER_01: And then he went to no chemical fertilizer.
1:12
SPEAKER_01: And then he went to no pesticides.
1:15
SPEAKER_01: And then he went to no weeding the way other farmers weeded.
1:21
SPEAKER_01: People came to call this farm philosophy do nothing farming.
1:28
SPEAKER_01: Now that is my style of farming.
1:31
SPEAKER_01: Do nothing farming.
1:33
SPEAKER_01: Fukuoka didn't mean to do nothing.
1:37
SPEAKER_01: He meant stop doing what the soil and the roots and the worms and the weather already know how to do.
1:46
SPEAKER_01: Pay attention before you interfere.
1:51
SPEAKER_01: Work with what is alive instead of constantly trying to improve it.
1:58
SPEAKER_01: One of the lessons he learned was from an old field that had been left alone for a whole lot of years, and in the middle of the weeds and the grasses of that old field, he found something really interesting.
2:12
SPEAKER_01: He found healthy rice seedlings growing all by themselves.
2:19
SPEAKER_01: Nobody had plowed them, nobody had fertilized anything, and to his amazement, in between the weeds and the grasses there was the rice.
2:32
SPEAKER_01: Kukuoka spent the rest of his life trying to understand what he had seen.
2:37
SPEAKER_01: And he said, crops grow themselves.
2:43
SPEAKER_01: Life was already at work before he arrived to improve it.
2:51
SPEAKER_01: Which is why the last line of the poem we just heard captures me.
2:57
SPEAKER_01: Everything is waiting for you.
2:59
SPEAKER_01: Everything, everything is waiting for you.
3:05
SPEAKER_01: Not because everything is waiting for you to fix it, because you have walked into a world that is already alive, already giving, already growing.
3:19
SPEAKER_01: And maybe what is true of mother nature is true of human nature.
3:27
SPEAKER_01: Maybe the same is true of you.
3:31
SPEAKER_01: Not some new and improved version of you, although I do like to calculate that myself.
3:40
SPEAKER_01: Oh, that was fourteen versions of Andrew ago.
3:47
SPEAKER_01: No, not some new and improved version of you, the you that is you today.
3:54
SPEAKER_01: You as you are, what you call flaws and hang-ups, and oh, if only this were different about me.
4:05
SPEAKER_01: Question is what it looks like to live that way.
4:10
SPEAKER_01: That the ancient farmers had a practice for this that started in that same place of accepting what is.
4:20
SPEAKER_01: Last week on Harvest Sunday, we started at the beginning, and I talked about Adam and Adama, earth creatures, dust and earth, soil and soul.
4:34
SPEAKER_01: And again, if you missed it, it's on the Pine Street podcast.
4:38
SPEAKER_01: And this week we move from identity to interior condition.
4:44
SPEAKER_01: And we start here.
4:46
SPEAKER_01: It's interesting that buried in agricultural laws of the Hebrew Bible is a command that probably is more urgent now than it's ever been.
4:58
SPEAKER_01: And when you harvest your field as these agricultural laws go, the idea was to not harvest all of the field.
5:09
SPEAKER_01: You leave the edges and you leave what falls to the ground.
5:13
SPEAKER_01: You leave something behind for the hungry person that comes after you.
5:19
SPEAKER_01: And they called it gleaning.
5:22
SPEAKER_01: It was written into the law, like a healthy community did not squeeze everything it could from the field.
5:31
SPEAKER_01: A healthy community did not squeeze everything it could from the field.
5:37
SPEAKER_01: We've gotten really good at squeezing everything we can from ourselves, from our lives.
5:50
SPEAKER_01: And you know what it feels like.
5:52
SPEAKER_01: You know what it feels like on the weeks when your calendar has no white space.
6:00
SPEAKER_01: You feel it when you eat your lunch over your laptop.
6:04
SPEAKER_01: You feel it when that hobby that once gave you life has now become a soul-stifling side hustle.
6:15
SPEAKER_01: Or the friend that you keep meaning to call.
6:20
SPEAKER_01: Even a walk somehow has turned into how many steps was that again?
6:28
SPEAKER_01: We live in a place, Boulder County, Colorado, with extraordinary abundance.
6:34
SPEAKER_01: We are resource rich here.
6:39
SPEAKER_01: And somehow we find ourselves still working from a place of deficit, of giving in to the trap of scarcity that we just we don't have enough.
6:52
SPEAKER_01: Someone, a rich billionaire, was once asked, How much is enough?
6:59
SPEAKER_01: And he said, just a little bit more.
7:06
SPEAKER_01: Bukuoka understood the danger of this.
7:10
SPEAKER_01: He kept working, but he simply stopped demanding that the field produce every last thing he could get from it.
7:20
SPEAKER_01: A field with no margin eventually gives out, he found.
7:27
SPEAKER_01: The soil eventually gives out.
7:33
SPEAKER_01: And so does a life.
7:36
SPEAKER_01: But the biblical question goes deeper than that, and the question is: what happens when we forget that the land was never ours to begin with?
7:47
SPEAKER_01: We are worshiping this morning on Arapaho and Cheyenne land.
7:54
SPEAKER_01: Any theology that claims this ground as sacred inheritance while stepping over that fact has already departed from the text it claims to follow.
8:07
SPEAKER_01: Now, I don't quote Leviticus a whole lot around here.
8:11
SPEAKER_01: There's a reason we stand for the reading of the gospels.
8:14
SPEAKER_01: We are red letter Christians, after all.
8:18
SPEAKER_01: But Leviticus 25 is pretty direct.
8:22
SPEAKER_01: It says, The land is mine, God says.
8:26
SPEAKER_01: With me you are but aliens and tenants.
8:29
SPEAKER_01: We're all renting, right?
8:32
SPEAKER_01: And we hold that and we carry it into the gospel reading today, Mark 6.
8:37
SPEAKER_01: And Jesus and his disciples, they are in the wilderness.
8:40
SPEAKER_01: They're in this deserted place.
8:42
SPEAKER_01: They're in the marginal place.
8:44
SPEAKER_01: They're at the edge.
8:47
SPEAKER_01: And 5,000 people are out there with them.
8:51
SPEAKER_01: And the disciples say what most of us say when a problem just feels too big for us to get our arms around.
8:57
SPEAKER_01: And they said, Oh, send them away.
9:01
SPEAKER_01: We don't have enough here.
9:05
SPEAKER_01: This is classic scarcity logic.
9:11
SPEAKER_01: Confession, I have set in more ministry meetings in my pastoral life than I care to count, where that sentence ended the conversation before it started.
9:27
SPEAKER_01: We don't have enough.
9:30
SPEAKER_01: This story has been carrying that weight, we don't have enough, for about 2,000 years.
9:39
SPEAKER_01: And this story appears in all four Gospels.
9:42
SPEAKER_01: The only miracle besides the resurrection that appears in all four of the Gospels.
9:47
SPEAKER_01: And in Mark, it comes right after the death of John the Baptist.
9:52
SPEAKER_01: The disciples are exhausted and they're grieving, and Jesus says, Come away and rest.
9:58
SPEAKER_01: Take a breath.
10:00
SPEAKER_01: And the crowd just won't allow that.
10:04
SPEAKER_01: The wilderness setting echoes the Exodus.
10:07
SPEAKER_01: There's manna in the desert, there's God feeding people with what they hadn't grown.
10:11
SPEAKER_01: When Jesus takes the bread, he takes it, he blesses it, he breaks it, and he gives it.
10:19
SPEAKER_01: Four actions.
10:21
SPEAKER_01: The exact language of what the gospels call the Last Supper.
10:27
SPEAKER_01: And the early church knew this.
10:30
SPEAKER_01: They saw this as a sign of a new kingdom dawning.
10:34
SPEAKER_01: It was a new era.
10:35
SPEAKER_01: It was a new day.
10:37
SPEAKER_01: And so the question is from Jesus: what do you have?
10:43
SPEAKER_01: Go and see.
10:46
SPEAKER_01: It's a question that gets behind their defenses, maybe.
10:50
SPEAKER_01: It's a disarming invitation to actually look at what you have and not what you don't have.
10:58
SPEAKER_01: In business, it's a way of saying, I would rather amplify my strengths than to make better my marginal weaknesses.
11:08
SPEAKER_01: What happens when we focus on our strengths rather than always trying to improve our weaknesses?
11:16
SPEAKER_01: Well, the disciples come back with the question of what we have and not what we don't have, and they say, we have five loaves and two fish.
11:25
SPEAKER_01: And Jesus takes what they have, he gives thanks, and begins, and 5,000 people eat, and 12 baskets of leftovers are there.
11:36
SPEAKER_01: Maybe fish sandwiches or something like that.
11:41
SPEAKER_01: This past spring, when we talk about what we're hungry for, it's not just bread, is it?
11:47
SPEAKER_01: It's for the bread of life.
11:50
SPEAKER_01: It's not just for the body, but it's for the spirit too.
11:56
SPEAKER_01: And this past spring, researchers reported something we haven't heard in a long time, and I'm pretty skeptical of this: that church attendance had gone up for the first time in 25 years.
12:10
SPEAKER_01: I told someone this morning, plenty of good seats still available here.
12:18
SPEAKER_01: It caught my attention because I know something about a church that has come through a hard season and begins to reimagine what they could be.
12:29
SPEAKER_01: But the bigger story is that in a single generation, some 40 million Americans have left the institutional church.
12:37
SPEAKER_01: It's one of the largest shifts in American religious life.
12:41
SPEAKER_01: And I don't think all those people stopped being spiritually hungry.
12:47
SPEAKER_01: I don't think they stopped having spiritual longings suddenly.
12:51
SPEAKER_01: Because, as we know around here, they still climb mountains and feel small in the best possible way.
13:01
SPEAKER_01: They stand under a night sky and run out of words for the transcendence and awe that they see and that they feel.
13:09
SPEAKER_01: They light candles for people they miss.
13:12
SPEAKER_01: They meditate, they pray, sometimes without calling it a prayer.
13:16
SPEAKER_01: Some want nothing to do with Christianity anymore, but they still can't quite shake Jesus.
13:26
SPEAKER_01: The hunger's still there.
13:29
SPEAKER_01: And a lot of people just stopped believing church was a place where they could still be fed, where their spiritual longings could be met and satisfied, where there was a sense of friendship and community.
13:44
SPEAKER_01: And what if our calling in our little corner of the vineyard of God's field?
13:51
SPEAKER_01: What if our calling is not simply to get more people into church from 10 a.m.
13:56
SPEAKER_01: to 11 a.m.
13:57
SPEAKER_01: on Sunday?
13:58
SPEAKER_01: Now that would be great.
14:01
SPEAKER_01: But what if it were not the only goal?
14:04
SPEAKER_01: What if we became the kind of church that people who have given up on church would love to be part of?
14:11
SPEAKER_01: Call me naive, but I still believe in that.
14:15
SPEAKER_01: A place where you don't have to pretend to believe things that you don't, where questions aren't treated like threats, where your life doesn't have to be cleaned up and look good before you walk through the door.
14:35
SPEAKER_01: Where we can feed people, where we can make friends, where we can tell the truth, where we can sit with mystery, where we can work for justice and try to follow God and way of Jesus together.
14:49
SPEAKER_01: Where maybe, just maybe, we can be Christians without being jerks about it.
14:57
SPEAKER_01: How many times have I said that?
15:00
SPEAKER_01: A place where you don't have to pretend now maybe we've been staring at empty seats and calling it scarcity.
15:15
SPEAKER_01: But the hunger, the spiritual hunger is everywhere.
15:21
SPEAKER_01: And that sounds like abundance to me.
15:25
SPEAKER_01: What could be possible if we make that shift from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset from uh we don't have enough and we can't, to everything is waiting for us.
15:45
SPEAKER_00: Everything everything that is waiting for us.
15:51
SPEAKER_01: That's what happened in Boulder four days ago.
15:54
SPEAKER_01: Boulder County is facing a serious budget deficit.
16:00
SPEAKER_01: Thirty to forty million dollars over the next three years.
16:04
SPEAKER_01: No big deal.
16:06
SPEAKER_01: 90 positions eliminated, and this week county commissioners voted unanimously to put$11 million toward helping the 1,000 residents of San Lazaro Mobile Home Park to buy the ground beneath their home.
16:24
SPEAKER_01: An anonymous buyer had offered$42.5 million, and the residents had until December 8.
16:34
SPEAKER_01: And on the morning of the vote this past week, they had raised only a tiny fraction of what they needed.
16:41
SPEAKER_01: They were doing everything they could.
16:43
SPEAKER_01: Kids are selling lemonade at Porch Fest.
16:47
SPEAKER_01: Residents are packing the county building with signs in English and Spanish and Bosnian.
16:54
SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Gracias, Havala.
16:57
SPEAKER_01: One resident said the vote restored her faith and humanity.
17:02
SPEAKER_01: A county cutting millions from its own budget looked at its neighbors and said, You need the ground beneath your feet.
17:14
SPEAKER_01: That's gleaning.
17:16
SPEAKER_01: That's not sucking everything we can out of the field that God gave us, out of the bank accounts that we are managing and stewarding, and saying there's enough for everybody.
17:30
SPEAKER_01: It's also an answer to Jesus' question: what do you have?
17:33
SPEAKER_01: Go and see.
17:34
SPEAKER_01: Start there with what you have.
17:38
SPEAKER_01: Enough also means knowing when to stop.
17:41
SPEAKER_01: A field that gets to rest can grow again, and so can we.
17:46
SPEAKER_01: Or as Anne Lamont says, everything will work again if you just unplug it for a minute.
17:55
SPEAKER_01: Including you.
17:59
SPEAKER_02: What is enough?
18:02
SPEAKER_02: Not just a little bit more.
18:05
SPEAKER_01: Enough is a meal that you share with friends and neighbors and strangers.
18:13
SPEAKER_01: Enough is the field left fallow.
18:16
SPEAKER_01: Enough is the day allowed to end.
18:20
SPEAKER_01: Enough is the rest that belongs to the rhythm of life.
18:29
SPEAKER_01: You might not need me to tell you this, but no matter how you feel, how fragmented you are today, maybe how broken or broken apart you might feel in your psyche or your soul, you are whole.
18:50
SPEAKER_02: And as someone has told me, the broken body of Christ is still the body of Christ.
19:03
SPEAKER_01: You carry gifts and wounds, you carry questions and hopes, and that is plenty for the spirit to work with.
19:13
SPEAKER_01: You are worthy, you are capable, you are beautiful already.
19:20
SPEAKER_01: Every morning I pray a little prayer that takes me about 30 seconds.
19:28
SPEAKER_01: And it says, God be in my head and in my understanding.
19:33
SPEAKER_01: God be in my mouth and in my speaking.
19:36
SPEAKER_01: God be in my ears and in my listening.
19:40
SPEAKER_01: God be in my eyes and in my seeing.
19:44
SPEAKER_01: God be in my heart and in my thinking.
19:48
SPEAKER_01: Stay with me all this day long.
19:53
SPEAKER_02: I told my therapist that I wondered if that prayer was long enough.
20:00
SPEAKER_02: Thirty seconds?
20:03
SPEAKER_02: Not enough.
20:06
SPEAKER_01: And she asked me who my audience was when I asked that question.
20:11
SPEAKER_01: Who are you talking to?
20:15
SPEAKER_01: Even in a prayer practice, we can get in a place of like, is that enough?
20:21
SPEAKER_01: Am I doing it right?
20:25
SPEAKER_01: You are enough.
20:26
SPEAKER_01: The loaves were five, the fish were two, and five thousand people went home full.
20:33
SPEAKER_01: Maybe soil and soul have this much in common.
20:36
SPEAKER_01: When we stop living from what we lack, we begin to see what is already here.
20:42
SPEAKER_01: And here at Pine Street, we've got a name for that.
20:46
SPEAKER_01: A name for what some of us would like to grow, for some of what we hope to grow together, and it's called Vision 2031.
20:56
SPEAKER_01: We're imagining this place as a community hub for the common good where faith and art and service and belonging come together in downtown Boulder.
21:05
SPEAKER_01: A church where people who have given up on church might actually want to walk through the door, whether on a Thursday night or a Friday night or a Saturday morning or, yeah, maybe a Sunday morning.
21:16
SPEAKER_01: And some of this is already happening.
21:18
SPEAKER_01: In Faces of the Front Range, we had a beautiful opening art reception on Friday night with Anton.
21:25
SPEAKER_01: His portraits invite us to see our neighbors differently, to see farmers who are working fields around us.
21:33
SPEAKER_01: And later this month, trans elder and composer and performer Allie and Steve Mullen will be here for Trans Solidarity, Difference Embrace.
21:44
SPEAKER_01: It's our 2026 Common Good Forum.
21:48
SPEAKER_01: It's going to include a live podcast on Thursday night, and then on Saturday night, a performance at the Boulder Public Library telling the story of Allie in conversation with her younger self, who is Steve.
22:01
SPEAKER_01: It's a stunning production, and I hope that you will make plans to be here for that.
22:08
SPEAKER_01: And then there is Anna Dingler.
22:11
SPEAKER_01: Back in March, when I preached about Vision 2031, I wondered with the Ezekiel question of can these bones live?
22:22
SPEAKER_01: And Anna came up to me afterward and said, that was really inspiring.
22:27
SPEAKER_01: And I want to come alongside you and help bring that vision to life.
22:35
SPEAKER_01: I announced last Sunday that she is now our director of community engagement and belonging here at Pine Street.
22:43
SPEAKER_01: And I love that story because that's how a vision becomes real.
22:47
SPEAKER_01: Somebody sees what could be and brings what they have and says, I'm in.
22:54
SPEAKER_01: Anna has said it, many of you have said it, and there is room for more of you to say it too.
23:02
SPEAKER_01: This beloved community is already growing and we get to grow it together.
23:08
SPEAKER_01: I often say when I'm taunted by empty pews, Jesus started with 12 and he ended with 11.
23:18
SPEAKER_01: So we're doing pretty good.
23:28
SPEAKER_01: All over the world this morning, bread is being broken in cathedrals and living rooms and city churches and village chapels, and people are coming to the table with the same hunger, hearing the same promise, and the promise is there is enough.
23:45
SPEAKER_01: Everything, everything is waiting for you.
23:49
SPEAKER_01: Jesus knew it, and he wants us to know it too.
23:53
SPEAKER_01: And it's like this come to this table with what you have.
23:57
SPEAKER_01: Five loaves, two fish.
24:00
SPEAKER_01: Come to this feast of grace and bring all the faith you have.
24:05
SPEAKER_01: Your questions, your hope, your doubts, your tired and weary heart, your one small thing that you can offer, bring it.
24:14
SPEAKER_01: Feel what it is like to say, I'm in.
24:19
SPEAKER_01: Because good enough is enough to begin.
24:26
SPEAKER_01: Let something grow wild where you stop trying to control it.
24:30
SPEAKER_01: Trust what is already alive.
24:32
SPEAKER_01: And when that old voice tells you there isn't enough time, and there isn't enough money, and there isn't enough courage, and there isn't enough of you, remember the story five loaves, two fish, everybody ate.
24:47
SPEAKER_01: You are good enough.
24:48
SPEAKER_01: We have enough.
24:50
SPEAKER_01: There is enough, and everything, everything is waiting for you.
24:56
SPEAKER_01: Everything is waiting for us.
24:59
SPEAKER_00: Amen.