Tell Me About Your Garden Series for Lent
Psalm 51:1-17; Genesis 4a-25
Ash Wednesday
March 5, 2025
Thank you to the 15 gardeners, ranging in age from 51 to 102, for opening your homes and gardens to me and sharing your stories in the summer and fall of 2024 and as a group in early spring 2025 for my doctoral project for Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary.
Listen to the devotion through this link:
“For Ash Wednesday
All those days you felt like dust,
like dirt,
as if all you had to do was turn your face
toward the wind
and be scattered
to the four corners
or swept away by the smallest breath
as insubstantial—
did you not know what the Holy One
can do with dust?”—Jan Richardson[1]
I recently became a composter with the gift of two specialized bins from fellow gardeners. I am amazed that my husband and I were able to fill the 50-gallon bin in just a few months, mainly with fruit and vegetable peelings, tea bags, coffee grounds, and leaves. Every day, when I go out to feed the birds, I bring our food waste to the bin, dump it in, and give it a turn. It makes me happy to do this, but I also lament all the years that we have simply thrown our compostable waste into the trash because it seemed like too much trouble or too complicated to compost.
I am grateful to the gardeners in our flock who encouraged me and taught me how. When I see the big pile of now frozen fruit and vegetable waste, I hear the gardener who gave me the 50-gallon bin saying, “Be patient.” I can’t wait for the magical transformation to wonderful black soil to enrich my garden next summer.
One of our gardeners, Kaitlyn, says she is learning through composting how to let go and how letting go leaves space for something new. “Sometimes, the plant is spent, and it’s time,” she says, “I tell the plant, ‘You are going to go to a new place. You are going to become soil, again.’”
On Ash Wednesday, our foreheads are marked with palm ash and olive oil and we remember when God told the first human beings, after eating the forbidden fruit, “you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Today and throughout this season, we remember our fragility and vulnerability, and our need for and connection to our Creator God, the Holy Spirit that sustains, transforms, and heals us, and the Son, our Redeemer, Lord, and friend.
The word we translate “dust” is adamah in Hebrew. This word is found more than 200 times in the Bible and means both land and soil.[1] The first human being, adam, was made from adamah. But adamah doesn’t mean “dirt,” like something gets dirty and needs to be cleaned. Soil is both living and life-giving! A mere handful of it “has more living organisms than there are people on the planet.”[2] Soil is a gift from God.God’s love for the soil, say agriculturalist Fred Bahnson and theologian Norman Wirzba, is evident from the beginning, when God does not “create the world from a lofty and disinterested height or through means of violent force.”[3] The Lord, instead, “enlists and … engages the soil so that the earth puts forth all kinds of vegetation and fruit and ‘bring(s) forth living creatures of every kind….’”[4] In the second chapter of Genesis, the “centrality of the soil is (even) more pronounced.”[5] This is when the Lord God “fashions the first human being by taking the dust of the ground into his hands, holding it so close that it can share in the divine breath, and inspiring it with the freshness of life.”[6] Only when the ground is filled with God’s breath is human life, and the life of trees, animals and birds, possible at all.[7]
But not everyone loves the soil or gardening. The gardeners in my flock told me about family and friends who don’t want to get their hands “dirty.” One said that none of his friends labor in their own lawns. They prefer to pay people to tend their lawns for them.
Sometimes, I wonder what Jesus would do, if he lived in our neighborhood. Would the one mistaken for a gardener in John chapter 20 tend his own lawn? Numerous biblical passages reveal his intimate interactions with soil as part of his ministry of teaching and healing. In the 9th chapter of John, Jesus uses soil to restore sight to a man born blind, spitting on the ground, making mud with his hands, and covering the man’s eyes with it. Then he tells him to go and wash in the pool of Siloam. He does so and comes home seeing.
In the 8th chapter of John, when a woman accused of adultery is brought to Jesus for judgment, and the scribes and Pharisees demand that she be stoned, he bends down and writes with his finger on the ground. When they continue to press him, he straightens up and says, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Once again, he bends down and scribbles with his finger on the ground. Most scholarship focuses on speculation over why she was brought alone and not with her male partner, the wisdom of the way Jesus handles the situation, and what Jesus might have been writing. Scholars do not usually discuss the fact that he was directing his attention to the soil, and thereby turning their attention to it, and our attention to it, as if the ground holds answers to the problem of sin.
One by one, the crowd leaves. No one picks up a stone. Jesus straightens up, turns to the woman and asks, “Where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She replies, “No one, sir.” And he says, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.”
Soil was of great interest to the biblical farmer, as well, who was “heir to a long agricultural tradition which originated in the Near East before the Neolithic period (ca. 7000 BCE) with the domestication of plants and animals.”[5] Farmers in ancient Israel faced unfavorable growing conditions; they often lacked fertile soil and sufficient water. Irrigation wasn’t always the answer as it caused salts to accumulate in the soil. “The farmers reacted to the decreased soil quality by increasingly cultivating barley instead of wheat” [6] because barley had a higher salt tolerance. Remember how Ruth and Naomi returned to Israel right at the beginning of the barley harvest?
The farmer could restore soil fertility through the practice of crop rotation and “green manuring, the cultivation of legume plants to increase nitrogen” in the soil and fallowing, letting the land rest in the Sabbatical year, as instructed in Ex. 23:10-11, “For six years you shall sow your land and gather in its yield;but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, so that the poor of your people may eat; and what they leave the wild animals may eat. You shall do the same with your vineyard, and with your olive orchard.” The other biblical practice, embraced by avid gardeners, is composting, “one of the oldest biotechnologies” of humankind.[7] They used dung, compost, and ash for fertilizing.[8]
Another plant we hear about on Ash Wednesday, in addition to the palm, is hyssop. In Psalm 51:7, the writer entreats the Lord to cleanse him from his sin. “Purge me with hyssop,” he says, “and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.”
Syrian hyssop is a wild herb that grows “abundantly…among the dwarf shrubbery, usually on stony ground. The Arabs call it zaatar and use it in tea and in cooked and baked food. … Because of its association with cleaning, the hyssop plant was thought to possess powers of spiritual purification.”[1] It is a “handsome plant and… is rare in the Sinai, where Moses ordered the people to take bunches of it[2] in Ex. 12:21-22, and dip it in the blood (of the Passover lambs), and touch the lintel and the two doorposts” with it. It’s mentioned in 1 Kings 4:33 as a plant that wise Solomon, who knew his trees, talked about, from the cedar of Lebanon to hyssop that grows “out of the wall.” And finally, we find hyssop in John 19:28-30, when Jesus, “knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the scripture), ‘I thirst.’ A bowl of vinegar stood there; so they put a sponge full of the vinegar on hyssop and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the vinegar, he said, ‘It is finished’: and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.’”
In this season of Lent, a time of drawing nearer to God, seeking forgiveness and reconciliation, and loving and serving others, I pray you will begin a spiritual practice, such as composting, which will strengthen your relationship with God and neighbor, and bring healing, fertility, and beauty to the earth. Remember, soil is a gift from God. We were all made from soil—animals, plants, and human beings. And one day, to soil we will all return, and new life will begin, again.
Let us pray.
God our Gardener, please forgive us for the ways we have fallen short of the calling to be tillers and keepers of the earth and lovers of God and one another. Stir us to seek you, with all our hearts throughout this season of Lent. Strengthen our relationships with you and our neighbors and help us to do our part to bring healing, fertility, and beauty to the earth. Thank you for the gift of soil and the promise of new and abundant life in the Son. Amen.
[1] Jan Richardson, Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons (Orlando: Wanton Gospeller Press, 2015), 89.
[2 Michael Zohary, Plants of the Bible (Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 1982), 22.
[3] Pamela Dolan, Contemplative Gardening (NY: Morehouse Publishing, 2022), 83.
[4] Fred Bahnson and Norman Wirzba, Making Peace with the Land: God’s Call to Reconcile with Creation (IL: InterVarsity Press, 2012), 15.
[5] Bahnson and Wirzba, Making Peace with the Land, 15.
[9] Oded Borowski, “Agriculture,” in Anchor Bible Dictionary, Vol. 1 (A-C), edited by David Noel Freedman, (NY: Doubleday, 1992), 96.
[10] W. Bidlingermaier and L.F. Diaz, Annals of Composting (USA: Ingram Content Group, 2021),14.
[11] Bidlingermaier and Diaz, 8.
[12] Borowski, 96.
[8] Bidlingermaier and Diaz, 8.
[10] Zohary, 96.
Sharing God's Love and Grace 