Sermon by Dana Cassell

Scripture: Psalm 86

On the greenway in the park where I walk the dog every day, someone has spray-painted the flower planters:

Money for war,

But can’t feed the poor.

I see that graffiti nearly every day, but this week, as I was reflecting on Psalm 85, it seemed particularly appropriate, a reminder of what God’s shalom does and does not look like, on the ground.

My own garden is failing. I traveled last month right around the time that the drought set in, and even though a friend watered my peppers and tomatoes and zucchinis faithfully, it wasn’t enough to keep them happy. I came home and spent a couple of weeks trying to revive things. My tomatoes GREW, and I was so excited. I went up to the garden one day and decided that I would come back the next to harvest the tomatoes; give them one more good day of sunshine to ripen and redden up.

That evening, my garden friend texted me: I’m so sorry, she said, but something has eaten your tomatoes!

I was in the car with my dad, and when I read that text, I YELLED and pumped my fist in the air. My dad, who was driving, hit the brakes and said WHAT?! WHAT?! It’s just my tomatoes, I said. It’s okay.

I was so, so, so sad. The resident groundhog who lives under the shed at the community garden and is VERY, VERY LARGE, had stolen those almost-ripe tomatoes right out from under my nose. 

I am in the process of pulling everything out and re-planting my entire garden plot, here in the heat of mid-summer. Not ideal. But I’m determined.

Growing food is hard, and getting harder. I am so privileged not to have to depend on my own gardening skills to feed myself. The local farmers whose lovingly-grown produce fills my weekly farm-share fills my fridge with more veggies than I can consume, but that, too, is a privilege. It’s expensive, and I have to drive a couple of miles to pick it up every week.

Even industrial food, neighborhood grocery stores and markets, are not accessible to everyone. You all know this. More than 44 million people in the United States are hungry, including one in every 5 kids. It is one of the most absurd realities of our Super Absurd country, that we are so obscenely rich and cannot keep everyone fed.

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No one knows for sure when the psalmist wrote Psalm 85, but scholars’ best guess is that it is a hymn borne of the experience of some Israelites returning to their homeland after the Babylonian exile. While the people were forced to live away from their homes, they set their hopes on eventual return. It would be, the people hoped and believed and Isaiah the prophet wrote, so good. In Isaiah 49, we hear the chorus of the displaced people, the hope for return:

Thus says the Lord:

In a time of favor I have answered you;

    on a day of salvation I have helped you;

I have kept you and given you

    as a covenant to the people,[a]

to establish the land,

    to apportion the desolate heritages,

9 

saying to the prisoners, “Come out,”

    to those who are in darkness, “Show yourselves.”

They shall feed along the ways;

    on all the bare heights[b] shall be their pasture;

10 

they shall not hunger or thirst,

    neither scorching wind nor sun shall strike them down,

for he who has pity on them will lead them

    and by springs of water will guide them.

11 

And I will turn all my mountains into a road,

    and my highways shall be raised up.

For decades, the exiled Israelites had been holding onto the hope of return to their home. They sang and wrote and told beautiful stories of what it would look like. They would all be safe. Their enemies would be vanquished. God’s glory would be with them in the land. No one would be hungry or thirsty ever again.

Generations held onto this hope. And then, when some of the Israelites were finally able to return, the rude reality of what life was actually like after that massive trauma and loss hit them like a ton of bricks. The prophet Haggai, who wrote during this period, put words to the discouragement:

God’s “glory” was absent (Haggai 2:7, 9; New Revised Standard Version “splendor”); the land was not productive (Haggai 1:10); and there was no peace (Haggai 2:9; New Revised Standard Version “prosperity”). 

The Israelites knew what God’s vision for them was: shalom. We often translate that Hebrew word as “peace,” but its actual meaning is much richer and fuller. It is something like “complete well-being.” Biblical scholar J. Clinton McCann says “Shalom exists when all people are attended to and provided for in such a way that they will be able not only to survive, but also to thrive.”

Shalom is fullness, richness, collective well-being. It is the set of circumstances in which abundant life is accessible to everyone. One way of understanding Psalm 85 is that it is the hope that the Israelites, newly returned from exile and discouraged to find that trouble had followed them, still held out. It is a picture of what the Israelites knew to be God’s will for the world, no matter what things looked like on the ground at the moment.

The artist John August Swanson painted his interpretation of this vision, and I love it so very much.

The image is sort of…agricultural. All the humans seem happy and healthy and whole, of course, but so do the…chickens! And the dogs and horses and trees and fields. This vision of shalom is not just about humans; it is about entire ecosystems.

Which brings us back to food. In Psalm 85, the psalmist hits every note that the prophet Haggai bemoaned. God’s glory dwells in the land again, love and faithfulness meet and PEACE – shalom – and righteousness kiss each other. It’s this beautiful image of steadfast love, salvation, righteousness, faithfulness, in kind of soaring language. 

And then, in verse 12, the psalmist breaks out of the poetics and simply says: The Lord will give what is good, and our land will yield its increase.

In other words, there will be enough food for everyone. No one will be hungry. There’s a line attributed to Dorothy Day that you have probably heard: “Peace begins when the hungry are fed.” It’s like, maybe, all the other, higher-level aspects of shalom – justice and righteousness and everlasting peace – might get built upon a foundation of everyone simply having enough to eat.

And I don’t know about you, but right now, when our world kind of feels like it is on fire and the fires are only growing and spreading instead of being contained, having that simple foundation feels like a really helpful and material place to start to build peace. I cannot solve international conflicts. I have very little influence over American electoral politics. But you know what I CAN do? Grow a garden and share its fruit.

And even though my tiny little garden plot is sort of failing at the moment, it is part of something bigger: My tiny community garden plot is managed by a non-profit called LEAP – Local Environmental Agriculture Project. It’s a relatively new organization in Roanoke, but in just the last few years, they have taken over managing three local community gardens, all in city neighborhoods that are also close to qualifying as food deserts. They run the farm share program that I participate in, creating important opportunities for sales and connection for local farmers. 

And just last year, thanks to some federal covid funding, they built a brand new LEAP Hub, a mile from my house in a high-crime, food desert neighborhood. The HUB houses a commercial kitchen where entrepreneurs can kickstart their new food businesses and where the LEAP kitchen manager uses extra produce that farmers can’t sell to create soups, hummus and other products that are sold in the brand new LEAP store, housed there in the same building, at very reasonable prices. It is, to my mind, a beautiful example of what happens when public funds are used to feed people instead of wage war upon them.

In fact, there are statistics about all of this: addressing food deserts is correlated with decreased crime rates. Cleaning and greening neighborhood spaces also impacts crime rates significantly – one study in Philadelphia found that cleaning up abandoned lots and planting trees and other plants reduced gun violence by 29 PERCENT. Even if my tomatoes got eaten by the groundhog, that beautiful space still makes a difference.

And it is, I think, an example of how peace begins when the hungry are fed, how shalom – the fullness of collective, communal well-being – can be built on the foundations of the land yielding its increase and the humans tending and sharing it well. 

Psalm 85’s vision of what God wants for the world is soaring, beautiful, aspirational. But it is also very grounded, literally, in humans tending to the earth and sharing its bounty with everyone. Maybe peace does indeed begin when the hungry are fed. Maybe we can be peacemakers simply by tending tiny gardens, together, and sharing what they produce.