Seeds

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 22, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

On this Earth Day, we talk about the life of seeds as they interact with the life of humans, about how diversity is crucial to protection against disease, and how well-meaning people sometimes create unintended consequences when solving short-term problems.

Call to Worship
– Denise Levertov

But we have only begun to love the earth.
We have only begun to imagine the fullness of life.

How could we tire of hope?
– so much is in bud.

How can desire fail?
– we have only begun to imagine justice and mercy,

only begun to envision how it might be
to live as siblings with beast and flower, not as oppressors.

Surely our river cannot already be hastening
into the sea of nonbeing?

Surely it cannot drag, in the silt,
all that is innocent?

Not yet, not yet
– there is too much broken that must be mended,

too much hurt we have done to each other
that cannot yet be forgiven

We have only begun to know
the power that is in us

if we would join our solitudes
in the communion of struggle

So much is unfolding that must complete its gesture
– so much is in bud.

Reading

EARTH TEACH ME
– from the Ute indians of North America

Earth teach me stillness
as the grasses are stilled with light.

Earth teach me suffering
as old stones suffer with memory.

Earth teach me caring
as parents who secure their young.

Earth teach me courage
as the tree which stands all alone.

Earth teach me limitation
as the ant which crawls on the ground.

Earth teach me freedom
as the eagle which soars in the sky

Earth teach me resignation
as the leaves which die in the fall.

Earth teach me regeneration
as the seed which rises in the spring.

Earth teach me to forget myself
as melted snow forgets its life.

Earth teach me to remember kindness
as dry fields weep with rain.

Sermon

Hoof and horn, hoof and horn,
all that dies shall be reborn
Corn and grain, corn and grain,
all that falls shall rise again.

The story of Johnny Appleseed is a good example of how history gets simplified and painted over with the assumptions and prejudices of whatever generation is telling the story. The Disney Johnny Appleseed shows a boy in Pennsylvania in the early 1800’s taking care of his family’s apple trees, picking big round red apples and singing “Oh, The Lord’s been good to me, and so I’ll thank the Lord for giving me the things I need, the sun and the rain and the apple tree, the Lord’s been good to me!” Bluebirds twitter around his head, and he has a guardian angel who looks like an old white settler and talks like he’s going to say “Consarn it!” any minute. He shows Johnny a cooking pot to wear as a hat, gives him his bag of seeds and his good book, and sends him west with the other white folks who were being offered 100 acres for free if they could establish a permanent homestead. A permanent homestead was established if you planted 50 apple trees and 20 peach trees in three years. There were land-development companies who had “bought” the land (after the First Nations people were “removed”) and wanted it to be settled by European Americans.

He was born John Chapman, in the late 1700s. Moving west, his story begins on the western frontier, which was anything west of Pennsylvania. His beliefs were Swedenborgian, which was Christianity informed by the writings of the Swedish scientist and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. They taught that a person should live gently, in love, filled with the love of God. One of the beliefs pertinent to our story this morning is that they didn’t believe in grafting trees, because they believed it hurt the trees.

An apple tree grown from seed produces what are called “spitters,” because that’s what you had to do after you took a bite of one. “Sour enough to set a squirrel’s teeth on edge and make a jay scream.” – Thoreau

Disney and I imagined that Johnny Appleseed was eccentric enough to roam the west barefoot planting trees that would produce lovely sweet apples that people could eat off the tree, but that betrays a cultural blind spot. Since he didn’t believe in grafting, all his trees were planted from seed. What were the spitter apples good for, then? The great American drink, safer than the water out there, cheaper and more fun than coffee or tea – hard cider. Apparently, frontier life was lived in a bit of a haze, with every person, man, woman and child drinking it at an average per person of about 10 oz of hard cider a day.

He would stay just west of the wagons full of settlers coming to claim their 100 acres, and plant the orchards they would need. He would clear some land and plant 50 apple trees and 20 peach trees. Then he sold the orchards to the settlers, and moved on.

This land provided the basis for the building of family wealth through generations of people from England, Scotland, Ireland, Scandinavia and Europe. What was the situation for the non- white folks? Sherman promised formerly enslaved men 40 acres and a mule. Some people got that land and some didn’t. In a few years Reconstruction was over and Jim Crow laws began. Many Black folks lost their land. Banks would only lend to white folks, so farming was possible, but difficult. Wage labor was thought of in Washington DC as the proper place for Black Americans, rather than land ownership. Land is the basis for much of the family wealth of many Americans, but not nearly as much for people of color.

American farmers here lost their land as the Texas Rangers, local law enforcement, and civilian vigilantes killed thousands of Americans of Mexican descent, or pushed them across the border. Some ended up workers on land they used to own.

What happened to the spitter apple trees John Chapman planted? When Prohibition was voted in, the FBI demanded all the cider trees be destroyed, and they chopped down a good many of them themselves.

Who owns the land? Who grows the food? How is the food grown? Those are important questions globally. The people who own the land, especially land with water, have the power. Who owns the farms now?

After WWI, people started moving to the cities to work in factories. Hoover began programs to feed the destitute Europeans. America began to see itself as the food producer for the world. Ag grew more and more industrialized. Now many big-ag farms are owned by corporations rather than families. Our seeds are modified to increase their yield. The scientists who do this have all the good will in the world to make it a better place. They want farmers all over the globe to use these high yield seeds, but the companies who own the seeds want to recoup their investment, so they patent their seeds and forbid the farmers all over the world to save seeds the way they would have done for thousands of years, in order to plant again from the crops they harvested. Partly this is because the modifications don’t hold over a couple of generations, and the plants revert to the way they were before they were modified. The world bank will loan farmers money to buy seed, but only from certain approved companies. Monsanto owns the patents on 25% of all seeds in the world. This alarms some people. The scientists are under pressure to modify the seeds in helpful ways, like making them immune to Roundup, also produced by Monsanto, so the spraying will kill the weeds but not the crops. If there is an organic farm next to an industrial farm, it is incumbent on the organic farmer to make a barrier or buffer so that the sprayed insecticides and weed killers don’t get on their crops. If they do, the crops cannot be sold as organic.

Sometimes, though, the pollen from the “roundup ready” crops mixes with weeds, and then they become resistant to roundup too. They have engineered corn that has a bacteria called Bt in the kernels themselves. This is bacteria naturally found in soil which is bad for insects. Bt corn makes insects sick. The problem is, it makes all the insects sick, and there are concerns that the Monarch butterflies have been impacted by these modified crops. They were trying to develop seeds which would become sterile in two generations, making it impossible for people to use the seeds more than once, but then concerns were raised about the pollen from these plants mixing with other crops, making everything sterile eventually, and that would be bad.

If I were to make up a religion, it would be built around seeds. They hold infinite life inside themselves. If you plant an apple seed, who is to say how many apples will result over the next 100 years? A thousand? With what awe we should regard a seed. The seeds are buried in the ground, they split open, which I am sure is alarming to them. Then a new shoot begins the struggle toward the sun. Does this not mirror the journey taken by the soul? The shoot finds the sun, builds an infrastructure by which to deliver nutrients to itself, and then grows. It blooms, which may also be alarming. I’ll talk more about that on June 3 at flower communion. After the bloom, when the beauty is quiet, the seeds develop. This is the truly productive time for the seed/soul. Then the seeds scatter and the cycle begins again.

… as above so below. As without, so within.

Hoof and horn, hoof and horn,
all that dies shall be reborn
Corn and grain, corn and grain,
all that falls shall rise again.

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