Farming in the World

Matthew 20:1-16, The Definition of Love by Andrea Gibson and

Excerpts from the Gospel of Phillip

Good morning again and thank you for showing up for yourself, for others, for our greater love, for the world we know is both here and not yet. Thank you for the privilege of your time. As always, I offer this prayer from Psalm 19. And as you're so moved, I invite you to take some deeper breaths with me that we all might hear whatever we need to hear today. God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, our rock and our redeemer. Amen. 

On the evening of March 11th, 1930, the crowd swelled to 10,000. At the evening prayer held on the Sabarmati sands at Ahmedabad.  At the end he delivered a memorable speech where he said, "Let there be not a semblance of breach of peace. Even after all of us have been arrested, we have resolved to utilize our resources in the pursuit of an exclusively nonviolent struggle, he told the crowd. Let no one commit a wrong in anger. This is my hope and prayer. And I wish these m words of mine reached every nook and corner of the land. And Gandhi went on, "Let all who are cooperating with the government in one way or another, be it by paying taxes, keeping titles, or sending children to official schools, withdraw their cooperation in all or as many watts as possible. You may take it as my will. It was the message that I desired to impart to you before starting on the march. If I am arrested before that time, I shall eagerly await the news that 10 batches are ready as soon as my batch is arrested. I have faith in the righteousness of our cause and the purity of our weapons. And where the means are clean, their God is undoubtedly present with blessings. And where these three combined, their defeat is an impossibility. A satcha grai, whether free or incarcerated, is ever victorious. God bless you all and keep off all obstacles from the path in the struggle that begins tomorrow. 

These are just some of the words from the speech that Mahatma Gandhi gave before the beginning of the Salt March, also known as the Dandi March and the Dandi satyagraha, a 24-day walk spanning 240 miles that sought to nonviolently challenged Britain's Salt Act of 1882. The act, for those of you who remember the history, prohibited Indians from collecting or selling salt, a core staple to their diet. They were told that they had to buy salt only from the British, who held a monopoly over the manufacturer and sale, and then also charged them an additional tax. Having long had enough of colonialism and imperial rule, Gandhi saw this as an an occasion to target something specific, to highlight the bigger injustice and to inaugurate a newly trained group of peaceful warriors. So at 8:38 a.m. on April 6th, 1930, he broke the salt laws and catalyzed a movement and a way of changing the world that is called sachiha. The word is Sanskrit and satya is truth implying love along with firmness. A graha thought of as a spiritual force born of truth and love. For Gandhi, satya was way more than what some later called passive resistance. Rather, he offered a specific method for how to powerfully push back against the cruelty of the empire and build something new. 

Ahimsa in Sanskrit is nonviolence but it's deeper as it's really about all living beings having the spark of the divine. So to hurt another being is to hurt God in a way. Gandhi said it is perhaps clear from the foregoing that without ahimsa it is not possible to seek and find truth. Ahimsa and truth are so intertwined that it is practically impossible to disentangle and separate them. They are like two sides of a coin. A smooth unstamped metallic disc. Nevertheless, ahisma is the means. Truth is the end. Means to be means must always be within our reach. And so it is our supreme duty. 

Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. studied Gandhi and formed some of his thinking from this concept. He wrote, "I was particularly moved by his salt march to the sea and his numerous fasts. The whole concept of satyagraha, which is truth equals love. Agra is a force." He said, "Satyagraha therefore means a truth force or a love force." And it was profoundly significant to me. He went on, "As I delved deeper into the philosophy of Gandhi, my skepticism concerning the power of love gradually diminished and I came to see for the first time its potency in the area of social reform." He said, "It was this Gandhian emphasis on love and non-violence where I discovered the method for social reform that I had been seeking, the truth force, the love force that fueled the overturning of the pain painful clause of a deathdealing colonial system. 

In the text that we heard from the gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells a story where workers are given the same wage even though some of them didn't work as long. It is a vision so radical that those who came first are angry. And the question offered in response is, "Are you envious because I am generous?" I love this question because it gets right to our human egos. Some of us humans just have a really hard time with love fueled generosity, with wild abundance, extravagant love, or shall we say, with the paradigm of spiritual farming. Don't you love that? That we heard from the gospel of Philip. A life filled with what we need does require a particular combination of things. This text suggests faith, hope, love, and knowledge. As you heard, farming in the world requires the cooperation of these elements. 

You might remember that for many of the writings not included in the Bible, they were given the label of gnosis, knowing a certain way, a certain way of knowing and seeing the world or as the ancients thought about it, seeing through the eye of the heart. So knowledge here does not just mean information. It's more like the insights and wisdom we gain from experience if we choose to integrate them. So from this we get a most precise and perfect spiritual recipe. Along with knowledge we get love and hope and faith which is trusting in a goodness that is not visible and living anchored in that. 

Jean-Yves Leloup, scholar on many early Christian writings says of the gospel of Philip that one might detect something of a return of the repressed in these texts shows something like a collective unconscious of that group and now they are coming up again and you might have heard them being labeled as apocryphal because that word simply means hidden or secret in ancient Greek. Fragments of this gospel are quoted in earlier writings even before the 3rd century. So best guesses as to the as to the date range from 250 common era to around 150 common era. The main reason it was likely not included and Karen will go into this more in our session after is that it alludes to what seems to be a physical relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus. So that's the main reason the church fathers wouldn't have wanted it in the Bible. I didn't use that fragment because I figured it would just totally get you to often distracted about that because there's so many other gems in it. 

Faith is our earth that in which we take root. Hope is the water through which we are nourished. Love is the wind through which we grow. Knowledge is the light through which we ripen. 

I think satyagraha truth force love force is an example of what this can look like in a time like the one through which we are living. What actions do we take that are rooted in faith quenched by hope that are about not cooperating with the cruelty of the empire? How can we turn our individual and collective love force up higher louder volume? How can we bring it out in public more? How can we inspire more to see the beauty and to not stop pointing out what is still there even when it seems like there is so much hard and ugly? What if that is a perfectly good definition of love? 

There is something that is only possible with a wildly radical abundant love that we are a part of. I do believe that whatever name we have for God, it has no hands but ours. We can choose to be instruments of this divine work. So let us be disciplined in our spiritual farming, my friends. Knowing faith is our earth. Let us take root. Hope is our water. Let us be nourished. Love is our wind. Let us grow. Knowledge is our light. Let us ripen. 

May it be so. Amen.