Genesis 2:5-15
I grew up in a big city. The big city of Seattle, Washington. The population of the greater Seattle-Tacoma area is 3.5 million people. I've lived in other big cities. Spokane, Washington. Louisville, Kentucky. Bakersfield, California.
And I've lived in really small towns. Spearville, Kansas with about 600 people. (That's about how many people were in my high school class.) Hickman, Nebraska with around 1000 people. Leoti, Kansas with about 1400 people.
Because of my varied living situations and background, I think I have a unique perspective about people and their geography. What's the difference between living in a huge city like Seattle, and living in a tiny town like Spearville, Kansas? Here's one. When I moved to Spearville, one of my city friends at the time sent me a t-shirt. The front of the t-shirt read, "Small Town: A place you don't need to use your turn signal—we already know where you're going."
Let me back up here a bit. I want to answer my question about the difference between living in a large city vs. living in a tiny town. But I want to answer that question in this sermon, as the first of a series of sermons, titled, "The Life of Meaning." Not, the meaning of life. But the life of meaning. What is it about life that gives a person meaning? That gives you meaning? How do you know if your life has meaning?
I'm going to give you three ways to decide the answer to those questions. Today I'm going to tell you about how a clear understanding of dirt will determine the kind of meaning your life has. Next week, I will talk about dealing with God—who God is and who God is not—as a way of finding meaning in life. And two weeks from today I will talk about the reality of evil, and how evil in the world shapes the meaning you find in life.
So, I started out talking about cities and small towns. How many of you have been to Wichita or Kansas City. What's one of the first things you notice as you drive into downtown Wichita or Kansas City? It is so obvious, you probably don't even notice it. What is the obvious thing you don't notice? Give up (in case no one answers, or gets it)? The answer is, how much dirt is covered up by concrete, asphalt, brick and mortar.
Imagine what Wichita, Kansas City, or Seattle looked like before they were cities. Seattle was an evergreen forest covering seven hills. Now the trees are cut down and the hills are covered with concrete and asphalt. Imagine all that dirt, under cities all over the world, covered. Dirt is a living entity. But under concrete and asphalted cities it is cut off from the air, the sun, the rain.
According to the scripture story, we were made from the dirt, not from concrete and asphalt. Or, if you accept the evolutionary story of the beginning of humanity, you start with the primordial soup, the swampy mud from which the first organism crawled. Whichever, you start with dirt. With mud.
That's one of the main answers to my first question about the difference between Seattle and Spearville. In Spearville you are surrounded by a veritable ocean of dirt. When that dirt is plowed and planted—and even when it isn't—you can smell it. It's richness as a living thing is unmistakable and undeniable. In a small, rural town we are surrounded by dirt. By a living thing full of organisms both microscopic and macroscopic. In a small town you have to learn how to live with the dirt, how you are a part of it, and how it is bigger than you and controls everything about you—even to the point of embracing you when you die. Dirt is your beginning and ending.
So what does that mean? What does that have to do with your life of meaning? I'm going to get some help here from a woman by the name of Phyllis Tickle. That name strikes fear and dread in the hearts of our Sunday School class. We just got done reading a book by Phyllis Tickle in Sunday School titled, The Great Emergence. The book was, shall we say, "thick." Not thick in terms of a lot of pages. But thick in terms of really hard to understand. And it's all Gordon Stofer's fault. Jennifer Barten gave it a one out of five star review on Goodreads.
Anyway, Phyllis Tickle is an interesting character. She and her husband and seven kids used to live in Memphis. She said her kids understood life in terms of how "…everything was brick and concrete and asphalt in their lives." So she and her husband uprooted their family to the little town of Lucy, Tennessee, into a backcountry farm they named, "Lucy Goose Farm." She said, "…all our friends thought we were crazy."
After a few years on the farm, Phyllis Tickle reflected:
Out here, living this way…the first thing you learn is that we're not the measure of anything. We're never going to win out here. Do you know what I mean? Enlightenment and Western civilization in the last three hundred years has been built on the notion that man is the measure of all things. That's bull! Man's the measure of absolutely nothing. But you forget that, when you're in the city and everything is scaled to man. Everything is human size.
I think part of what Phyllis Tickle is saying is that in a city everything is mostly artificial. Artificial environments where you can keep the elements out and not have to be bothered by them. We do that somewhat in smaller, rural areas, but not so much as most of the world around us. In cities, life and all it contains is squared off, put on a grid, and connected not by options but by one-way streets. Even with all the tall buildings, people in the city are protected from seeing the sky. Thus, the only measure of life in that kind of contained and manufactured environment, is people. People are the be-all and end-all of everything that exists.
But in rural areas, I have found there is an entirely different world, where, as Tickle says, "Man's the measure of absolutely nothing." Let's take the sky and the land as an example. After living in cities through my mid-twenties, I moved to Spearville, Kansas for a year. I took a year off from my three year program at seminary, to get a year of practical experience in the church. To find out what being a pastor was really like, apart from the rigors of arguing theology.
One of the things I remember feeling was how oppressive the openness was. Isn't that weird? There was so much sky! A 360 degree panoramic view of the sky with nothing in the way. And a 360 degree panoramic view of dirt, for as far as my eyes could see. Dirt and sky.
I wrote a poem about it, at the time:
i am currently in Kansas
waiting for a tornado to carry me to Oz
living in solitude
out on the high plains
under the expanse
of so much sky,
within the emptiness
of so much land,
i am becoming
simply me
I'm glad I kept this poem, particularly for the last line. I started out with the attitude of a lot of my friends who worried about me living so deeply rural. Those who have dared to come out and find me under this expanse and emptiness interpreted it as I had: "There's nothing to see here!" I saw all the land and all the sky as nothing. It took a long time to switch that meaning from, "There's nothing to see here," to, "There's too much to see here." Too much sky. Too much dirt.
I slowly began to see the wisdom and truth in Tickle's statement, "Man's the measure of absolutely nothing." Out here under "so much sky" and "so much land" I discovered how small I really am in the largeness of that sky and dirt. Some people come to that revelation when they look up at all the stars at night. I came to that revelation as I spun in a slow circle one day and took in the enormity of so much in respect to my size as a human.
That revelation, for me, became what I believe must be the starting point for us all: I am not the measure of anything. I am simply a small part of a much bigger world than I ever imagined. I am surrounded by a world that is alive and dynamic and growing. I am a small piece of a huge world that was created way before humanity came to be. In fact, again if you believe in the creation story, humanity was the last thing to be created. Everything was done when we moved in. Thus we had nothing to do with this big world we have found ourselves in.
The unspoken myth or lie that we come to believe if we live in the cities is that, "This was all created by us. We are the makers. The designers. The builders of our own world." Everything is designed around human beings. Tickle was right—in cities we are the measure of all things.
Once I moved to Spearville, and the other various small, rural towns I've lived in, I found out that was a lie. There's a much bigger world that we are a part of, and that world and it's largeness becomes invisible in cities. Or at least we try to make it so.
The truth I discovered, just by changing my geography (or as Kathleen Norris calls it in her book, Dakota, "spiritual geography") was that I can't find myself, I can't discover the life of meaning, living a small life, living a cramped life in an artificial environment like cities. I can only find my place in the largeness of life under so much sky and the emptiness of so much dirt.
There's another aspect of rural that I discovered, that Phyllis Tickle identified so well once they moved from Memphis to Lucy, Tennessee. She wrote:
Here, everything is alive. And because it's so alive…and because it really is going to win—it's going to bury us…Some day, they're going to find us under mounds of kudzu. But the truth of it is that, while all of that's happening, there's also such enormous permanence here, such a consistency of cycles, and a magnificence of all of the growth that's happening here, that you are caught in majesty that doesn't require anything of you except just a sense of, "Yeah, it's here. And God bless me for the time I'm part of it. How wonderful to be a part of it."
I think that's what I meant when I wrote that line at the end of my poem, "…I am becoming simply me." There isn't a whole lot that you feel is growing in the city. All the concrete, asphalt and bricks keep that from happening. Where there are no growing things, there are no growing humans. Once in Spearville, it wasn't just the enormity of the sky and the dirt, but also the enormity of growing things. Everything is alive. It caused me to discover I was alive also, and part of a much larger world out here that is alive, and grows and becomes.
Out here, living with so much dirt, the measure of all things is life itself. Growing, teeming, vibrant life. Again, that is what I began to discover is what brings life meaning—realizing, as the creation story tells, we are all dirt, that is our beginning point, and we find ourselves best in the midst of so much dirt and so much sky. Because it's not just the dirt. It's the growth. The life. That the measure of all things, the measure of meaning is life itself. That is where we all must begin if we are to find the life in meaning.
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