Distance makes the heart grow fonder...

I grew up around farming -- not the large corporate farms of modern day but the small, family farm of 80 acres or so with two or four row equipment and a very hands on approach to the fruits of the earth.  There is great romance about it but I am not sure I looked at it very romantically then or now.  Nostalgia, yes but romance, I don't think so.  We lived close to the soil then.  Even if you lived in town and your father was a shopkeeper.

The land was not always a benevolent master.  The soil wore out.  The rain did not come or came when it should not have come or too little when we needed more or too much we needed a little.  The weeds were kept at bay with a corn knife and troops of kids walking the fields.  Every farm had a few hogs and cattle and lots of chickens -- these were not because this was your business but because it was your life.  These were not always kindly masters either.  The milk cows needed milking no matter what and they did not like the smell or hands of strangers.  Ahhh, it was a very close partnership -- the farmer and the land and the fruits of that land and his labors!

None of us know it like that anymore.  Farms are corporate entities.  When my mother's cousin died and that family farm sold, the buyers tore down buildings and bulldozed trees so that they could farm almost from the edge of the road to the other edge.  They did so with giant equipment in air conditioned cabs with computers figuring out the moisture content of the crop and its value at current market prices.  It was high tech and still is -- even more so!  There is no family farm like their once was.  Even the modern farmers are distant from the land and its crops.  They irrigate so that they do not have to depend upon God to send the rain.  They spread fertilizer and herbicides so that they can keep weeds and pests in check.  It is very big business.

My wife and I along with a million others watch All Creatures Great and Small and live out on screen the romance of a rural past.  We are all far removed from the farm.  We shop in automated food emporiums.  We enjoy foods in seasons where they would never have been available in the past.  We like it all fresh but we have no idea how that freshness got to the produce department or meat case or bakery.  We love the romance but we do not live it out.  Distant as we are from rural and farming life, the heart has only grown fonder for it all. 

So far from nature, we no longer admire it.  We worship it.  The green revolution is a theology.  God is nature and nature is God.  We dream of the circle of life.  We imagine the grand reunion with the tree as in Avatar.  We make policy based on these dreams as much as evidence.  We want the world to be like it was and still is in our dreams.  But this is poor ecology and even poorer theology.  In a place where cow farts can upset God's creative majesty and balance, we have a decidedly pedestrian idea of things holy and heavenly.  No, we are not rural or farm people anymore -- except in our unrealistic dreams.  This is the sad reality but we ought to at least own up to it.  God's work is not proclaimed by preachers like Greta Thunberg or Al Gore.  God is not interested in how we preserve a pristine world but how we use it.  Sure, we have some sins to confess but not in the least of them is making a God out of what God intended us to use for us and for His glory by how we use it for us.  Vanity of vanities -- it is all vanity.  At least so says this preacher.