C is for Compost

Thank you for your challenging responses to Dr. Bertram's challenge. Last issue, recall, he invited readers to submit a sentence describing a Crossings theme, which sentence would consist of nine words beginning successively with the letters C-R-O-S-S-I-N-G-S. Some of your responses were a single such sentence, or a double sentence. One repondent listed 15 sentences. Another submitted a single sentence with a six sentence interpretation.

The joy in them all, as Dr. Bertram must have counted on, is how their inventive writers press into the service of the Gospel words that have probably never before done that duty. Since the acrostic discipline demands a word with the correct initial letter, the imaginative writers push into place a word with the required initial, often making a new way to speak the message about Christ. Did you ever expect "compost" to be part of a theological sentence? Reader Janet B Racen, of Sunrise Beach, Mo., offers this: "Compost, Renovate Old Sinful Self; Introduce New Godly Seedlings."

What does this mean?

In a day when we have become aware that natural resources, lavishly as the dear Creator has provided them, are nonetheless limited, the discipline of composting has quite an appeal. It gives something, good nutritious soil, for nothing. Actually better than that, doubly better, the new soil comes not out of nothing but out of a negative: the plant waste that clogs landfills and hyper-enriches the Wisconsin lake near which I live. Composting not only gives a silk purse, but simultaneously solves the sow's ear disposal problem.

This human cleverness is only copied from the original Composter himself. The park ranger my family followed through Olympic National Park last summer relished explaining how the rain-forest itself is a beautifully efficient, intricate and delicately poised composter. (If only, during her explanation, we had confessed due thanks to the only One who could create such marvel.)

If we are impressed when we observe the Creator's construction of organic recycling, how praiseful will we be, Reader Janet leads us to ponder, for His composting of our very lives, a process we not only observe but undergo! Turning us from sin to righteousness is an even greater accomplishment than making organic waste useful, for here is enemy made friend. This is the turning of a person from opposed-to-God to for-God, not merely rearranging organic chemicals to make the useless useful.

Those last two words might remind you of Onesimus, the subject of Paul's letter to Philemon. Here is an example of such divine composting. By this slave's conversion to Christianity, Paul writes to his owner, "Formerly he was useless to you, but now he is indeed useful both to you and to me," and, "no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother." That is some recycling! (I wonder how many corporations' human resources departments have considered using the Gospel to recycle the useless into useful? It is practical, since a beloved sister in the Lord will do her work better (working "as for the Lord"--Eph 6:5-8) than a slave would work for an earthly master.)

For another example of God's composting take not the subject of that letter but its sender, Paul. Remember his report to the Galatians of the buzz once spread concerning himself: "The one who formerly was persecuting us is now proclaiming the faith he once tried to destroy." Reader Janet's compost metaphor works especially fully in this case. For composting does not annihilate material and then make new material. No, it re-forms what is still there. So with Paul, who lost none of his zeal and none of his education in his conversion, none of his strength, none of his intellect and none of his passion. Yet he was turned from death to life, from a righteousness of his own based on law-keeping to the righteousness from God that comes to him through his faith in Christ. So Paul was still Paul, yet with a whole new life. Is this saying that grace merely improved Paul? No: he was converted, turned around. He did not advance further but had to start over, like a child. His own picture of conversion resembles composting rather than improvement, namely, to die and then rise again.

Which picture reminds us of a still greater wonder of composting than the cases of Paul and Onesimus. The wonder without which their wonders could never happen. The wonder is that the Lord God Almighty himself went through such a composting in person (namely, in the Son person). Not that he needed it, but that we did.

For who is Jesus Christ but God become human (too)? He becomes one of us, but more. Not merely one human among many, but the representative human, like Adam has been. One in whom, like Adam, the fate of the rest of us is determined. But Jesus starts out not like Adam did, in righteousness, but like we do who have already suffered from Adam's sin: mortal, vulnerable, born under the Law's authority to put sinners to death. True, because of Jesus' personal innocence he was not liable to the Law's execution. But he became so when he took on our sin: yours and mine. Then he personally undergoes metaphorical composting through his cross and resurrection. Beginning as a collective, old we, he emerges composted into a new collective we: immortal and glorious. But he was immortal and glorious to begin with, you object? True he was, we were not. But now, by undergoing composting himself as human from sin to righteousness, we his fellow humans can be--in him--what formerly he was as God and what humans otherwise never could have been, namely, immortal and glorious and in holy communion with his Father. In him we can be, and without him no one can be, for how else could they be?

His invitation now is, believe this into yourself, and be baptized into me. Be in me, and your own composting is off to a decisive start, as it was for Paul, then Philemon, then Onesimus. Or, in Reader Janet's words, "Compost, Renovate Old Sinful Self; Introduce New Godly Seedlings." Maybe she directed the second half not to us but to Christ himself, praying him for the Spirit, the Giver of life, who only can introduce new seedlings into the fresh soil we composted sinners have become in Christ through our faith in him and baptism into him.

What an amazing thing our Trinity does with us, and how amazing that he first did it to himself, for us.