Love for the land is apparent in this Sunday’s readings. Moses believes the land on which he stands “is holy ground.” He believes he and his people will be led “into a good and spacious land,” a land that is fertile, fruitful. In the Gospel, Jesus tells a parable about land. It has an orchard and a particular tree which is not fertile, not fruitful. However, there is a gardener, a farmer in the story who vows to change that. “I shall cultivate the ground around it and fertilize it; it may bear fruit in the future.”
Love for the land is of vital importance. It is unfortunately the case however that land is not always loved and is exploited instead. This is often the case with those who are rich, specifically those in the corporate food system. They exploit the land they own believing it is money making ground. As such, they prevent the land, and us, from being fertile, fruitful. Violence is done to the land, to animals, to plants, and to people. Violence has consistently been done to people who want to be on the land, farmers, and who are forced to be on the land, slaves. Leah Penniman is a farmer who loves the land and who is also the descendant of slaves. Leah is the author of Farming While Black and the founder of Soul Fire Farm. On her farm she gives voice to the experience of African Americans who have had their energy extracted, against their will, to be bound to the land, as slaves. She also gives voice to the experience of African Americans who love the land, “while the land was certainly the scene of the crime, the land wasn’t the crime.” At Soul Fire Farm, “(W)e talk about what happened with slavery and sharecropping and the lynching that happened on the lands and the role of the black farmers in the civil rights movement. Just this whole beautiful, tangled history we’ve had with soil, and give opportunity to use our ancestral healing methods to address that trauma.” She notes that across the U.S.’ still operative slave system, land is owned by people who are white and worked by people who are brown and black and still exploited. At Soul Fire Farm she shares her love for the land and her fertile and fruitful skills for farming the land with aspiring growers. She draws upon her African heritage and African American activists whose love for the land has been instrumental in nurturing fruitful people and fruitful farming practices.
“We are very committed to leaving the Earth and the land better than how we found it. So that’s the first thing we do. The second relates to training, equipping and resourcing the next generation of black and brown farmers. So we have a number of training programs ranging from a day to a whole season to support this returning generation of folks to their ancestral rights to belong to the land. And then the final thing is organizing to change the structures that hold up and bolster this racist food system. So we work regionally and nationally on land reparations, on policy shifts and other initiatives to make sure that everybody, regardless of their backgrounds, can have access to lands, can be a farmer with dignity, and also be able to consume culturally-appropriate and healthy foods.” (Leah Penniman)
Prayer: Spirit, guide us to be fruitful, with land and ourselves
Question: What is my relationship to land?
March 24, 2019 Luke 13:1-9 Third Sunday of Lent