Good Soil United Methodist Church

Every fall Dale plants wheat, and I have learned not to talk to him while he does it. Before a single seed goes in, he has walked the ground with a soil probe to see how deep the moisture goes. The drill is set to lay each seed about an inch and a half down, in rows straight enough to embarrass a ruler, at a rate he worked out at the kitchen table with a pencil and the seed bill. Seed costs money. If Dale can help it, not one kernel lands where it won’t grow.

I think of him whenever I read the parable of the sower.

“Behold, there went out a sower to sow.” — Mark 4:3

And then the man in Jesus’ story does everything Dale won’t. He flings seed onto the path, where it lies on packed dirt until the birds come for it. He throws it on rocky ground, where it comes up fast and dies the first hot afternoon. He throws it into the thorns. Some of it, eventually, lands on good ground. A hired hand who sowed like that west of town would not be a hired hand by Friday.

The farmers in that crowd would have caught it. I suspect a few of them laughed out loud.

We usually preach this parable as a test. Which soil are you? Hard like the path, shallow like the rocks, choked like the thorns? Jesus does explain it along those lines a few verses later, and it is an honest question to sit with. But I have watched people walk out of church afraid they are rocky ground, and I don’t believe that is where the story starts. It starts with a sower who doesn’t check the soil first.

Methodists have a name for this: prevenient grace, an old word for the grace that goes ahead of us. Before you ever said a prayer, before you knew enough to want to, God was already at work in you, throwing seed. Not because you had proved yourself good ground. Nobody had looked. That is not how this sower operates.

It is one reason Methodists baptize babies. I was baptized at about four months old, and I’m told I slept through the whole thing. I had done nothing. I could not have told you my own name. The water was not a reward for anything. It was seed thrown on ground that had shown no sign yet of being good, because God does not wait to find out what kind of ground you will turn out to be.

Here is the other thing about the path, the rocks and the thorns. They are not three kinds of people. They are most of us in a single week. I have been the path, so packed down with my own opinions that nothing could get in. I have been the rocky ground, all fire on Sunday and dried out by Wednesday. And I know the thorns well; they look a great deal like my calendar. Ground changes. Hard dirt gets broken up. Rocks get carried off one at a time. A field that grew nothing but goatheads for years can grow wheat.

So I try not to check the soil either. When someone slips into the back pew at 10:45, I have no idea what kind of ground they are, and most days neither do they. Every June, Vacation Bible School takes any child in Harrow Creek who walks through the door, and nobody asks which of them will grow up to be Methodists.

When Dale fills the drill at the edge of a field, a little seed always spills onto the turnrow. That is the hardest ground on the place, packed flat by every truck and tractor that has crossed it since spring. No farmer in his right mind would plant there. The birds get most of it, just as Jesus said they would. Not all of it. Come November there is a thin green stripe along the turnrow anyway.

Dale calls it waste, and by every standard a good farmer has, he is right. I have stopped arguing the point. I just slow down when I drive past it.

I had been in Harrow Creek about a week when somebody first told me how this church got its name. By the end of that month I had heard it four more times, from four different people, and every one of them told it the same way. Small towns do not always agree on much. They agree on this.

It starts with the drought. From 1950 to 1957 the rain mostly did not come to the rolling plains. It is still the drought of record in Texas, the one the state plans its water around. The wind lifted the topsoil off the fields and set it down again on windowsills, in the hymnals, in the folds of Sunday clothes. Families who had farmed here since before the First World War packed up and left. Attendance at this church fell by half.

The church held on. That is how the older members put it, and I have come to think it is exactly the right phrase. Nobody claims anything heroic. They finished this red-brick sanctuary in 1952, two years into the drought, which some will tell you was great faith and others will tell you was a contract already signed. I suspect it was both. And they started cooking supper on Wednesday nights, “because nobody should eat alone when the crop fails.” We are still cooking it.

Waiting, the way they did it, was not sitting still. They kept the doors open. They sang the hymns to a half-empty room. They set the tables on Wednesdays whether the pots were full or not. They prayed for rain every Sunday for seven years, which is its own kind of stubborn. That is what waiting looks like when it is a practice and not just a mood.

In 1957 the rain came back, nearly all at once, the way it does out here. The fields came back over the next few years, and some of the families did too.

Then in 1968 the Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren joined to become The United Methodist Church, and congregations all over the country were changing their signs anyway. This one took the chance to choose a new name. There was a meeting. And an old farmer named Wendell Pruitt, who had worked his land straight through the drought, stood up with his Bible and read one verse from Mark.

“And other fell on good ground, and did yield fruit that sprang up and increased…” — Mark 4:8

Then he said what the drought had taught them: the ground was good all along. It just needed rain and patience. The vote was unanimous, which Teresa Fuentes in our office assures me has not happened at a church meeting since. Her grandparents were in the room.

I have turned Wendell’s sentence over more than almost anything I learned at Duke. He did not say the drought was a punishment, or a test they had passed, or a blessing in disguise. He did not try to explain it at all. He said it had taught them something about the ground. Seven years of blowing dirt had looked like a verdict on this land, and it was not one. The land was not bad. It was waiting, the same as they were.

I sit with people in their own dry years: a long illness, a grief that will not lift, a prayer that has gone unanswered longer than they can stand. I have learned not to promise them rain by Tuesday. I don’t know when it will rain. Neither did Wendell. What I can tell them is what this church found out the slow way. A dry spell, even a long one, is not the last word on the ground.

They could have named the church for the rain. It would have made sense; the rain is what ended it. They named it for the ground instead.

This year Dale is leaving the north quarter fallow. He cut the wheat off it in June, and he will not plant it again until next fall. That is a hundred and sixty acres doing, as far as anyone driving past can tell, nothing at all.

People notice. Harrow Creek knows whose field is whose, and a quarter section sitting idle gets talked about. Twice now someone has caught me at the co-op to ask, very kindly, whether Dale is feeling all right.

He is fine. What he is doing is old dryland sense. The rain we get out here is rarely the rain we need, so a farmer will sometimes let a field sit a season. He keeps the weeds off it, leaves the stubble standing to catch what snow comes and to hold the dirt down when the wind blows, and lets the ground bank every drop that falls. Dale says the north quarter is saving up. By next fall it should have moisture down deep where the roots can find it, and it will likely make the best wheat he grows that year.

Dale did not come up with this on his own.

“But in the seventh year shall be a sabbath of rest unto the land, a sabbath for the LORD: thou shalt neither sow thy field, nor prune thy vineyard.” — Leviticus 25:4

Leviticus 25 is not a farming tip. It is a command, and it must have sounded like a frightening one. Skip a whole year of planting? And eat what? Somebody asked exactly that. It is right there in verse 20: “What shall we eat the seventh year?” I am glad they said it out loud, because it is the first thing I would have asked. God answers with a promise. The sixth year will be blessed enough to bring forth fruit for three. The land rests, and the people are carried.

I wish I took that promise as well as the north quarter does. I don’t. Pastors are famously bad at rest, and I am no exception. There is a day off on my calendar every week, and most weeks I treat it as a suggestion.

We have a blue heeler named Wesley, for John and not the town, and he has never once rested on purpose. He herds the barn cats. He herds Caleb out to the truck every morning, ready or not. He seems to take the north quarter as a personal insult. When he finally sleeps, it is because he has fallen over where he stood. Some evenings I look at him and recognize the type.

Here is what the fallow field keeps teaching me. Resting is not the same as being neglected. Dale still goes out there. He keeps the weeds down and checks the ground after a rain. The field is looked after; it just is not asked to produce anything. That is the best picture of Sabbath I know: a stretch of time when you are still cared for, and nobody needs anything from you. The work does not get finished first. It never does. You rest anyway, because God rested, and then told us to.

My own best version of it turns out to be a Sunday afternoon with the Rangers on the radio and a scorecard on my knee. I keep score in pencil, every pitch. It is the most restful thing I know, because nothing that happens in the eighth inning is my responsibility. I have noticed that in the weeks I do that, the sermon the next Sunday is better. I did not expect that. Dale was not surprised.

From our back porch you can see the north quarter. This time of year the stubble has gone pale and the ground looks empty, and I have caught myself feeling sorry for it. I shouldn’t. It is the only field on the place doing exactly what it was told.

The best theology in our bulletin isn’t in the order of worship. It’s down at the bottom with the announcements: Wednesday Night Supper, six o’clock in the fellowship hall. Five dollars a plate, kids eat free, nobody is turned away.

Three clauses, and whoever first wrote them knew exactly what they were doing. I’d like to take them one at a time.

Five dollars is a real price. It isn’t free, and that’s on purpose. Most people in Harrow Creek would rather pay their own way, and a price lets them. The man who has been on a tractor since daylight can put down his five dollars and eat his chicken spaghetti as a customer, not a project. The retired teacher whose house has gotten too quiet on Wednesdays can tell herself she came for the sheet cake. A price is a kind of courtesy. It says you are a guest here, not a case.

Kids eat free because a family with four children should not have to do arithmetic in the doorway. I have watched young parents come in from work, still in scrubs from the county hospital or with red dirt on their jeans, and seen their shoulders drop when they remember the math stops at two plates. I have a sixteen-year-old tuba player at home. I know what one growing boy can do to a pan of King Ranch casserole, and I would rather not price out three of him. A child at our long table is not a line item. She is the reason the table is long.

And then there is the last clause, the one that makes it church. Nobody is turned away. Not the stranger who saw the cars in the lot and took a chance. Not the family who came for a month, stopped coming, and has now come back. Not the young man between jobs who sits by himself the first Wednesday and doesn’t by the third. I am not going to tell you who leans on that clause. Often I don’t know myself, and that is the point. It was written so nobody would have to say it out loud.

I have come to believe the first clause is there so the last one can stay quiet. If supper were free, the folks who can pay would feel like charity cases, and some would stop coming. If it were five dollars and nothing more, we would be a restaurant with folding chairs. Put the two together and nobody at the table can tell who paid and who didn’t. That isn’t an accident. That is grace with good manners.

The prophet Isaiah got there first. At the start of chapter 55 he calls out like a man selling melons off a tailgate, and then says something no seller ever has:

Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.

Buy, without money. Any farmer in Harrow Creek would have a few words about milk without price. But that is how God likes to talk: in the language of the market, turned inside out. You come to buy. You find out it has already been paid for.

We say the same thing on the first Sunday of every month, only in a different room. When we gather at the Lord’s Table, nobody asks to see a membership card. You don’t have to be a Methodist, or from Harrow Creek, or sure of very much. The invitation belongs to Christ, not to me, and he has never asked me to check anyone at the door. The table is open to everyone. You hold out your hands, which is the only way anybody has ever received bread.

It is no coincidence that the church that opens that table on Sunday sets up folding tables on Wednesday and keeps the same rule at both. Each table teaches the other. Supper teaches me about Communion: that a crowded table is a better one, and that the children are not an interruption of the meal but part of it. Communion keeps supper honest. It reminds me that none of us earned our place at either table, including the ones who paid.

At a quarter to seven the hall starts to empty. The youth head off with Marcus, the Cherub Choir goes to find Miss Bea, and the grown-ups come with me and their Bibles. Somebody is always still at the end of the long table, finishing a second piece of pie. Whoever they are, they’re welcome to it. The bulletin says so.

You can see the elevator from the highway long before you can see the town. Before the stoplight, before the Dairy Queen, before anything else, there it stands: the only thing for miles that got tall on purpose.

Folks here give directions by it. They come home by it. People who grew up in Harrow Creek and moved off tell me they don’t feel they’re home until it comes up over the horizon. Ask a stranger to draw this town and they will draw the elevator first and fill in the rest.

Matthew 13:31–32 has been different for me ever since I came to live in sight of it. Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field:

Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.

Botanists will tell you the mustard seed isn’t really the smallest seed there is. Jesus was talking to farmers, not botanists, and every farmer listening knew exactly what he meant.

Most of us hear it as a story about getting big. Small seed, big tree; small church, someday big church. I have sat through enough district meetings to know how much we love that reading. And I confess that when I see the elevator from the highway, I think of it as the big thing. It is the biggest thing we have.

Dale set me straight one June. I rode along when he hauled wheat to town, and while we sat in the line of trucks waiting our turn at the scale, he told me there are something like a million kernels in a single bushel. Then he pointed up at the elevator and let me do the arithmetic. I gave up somewhere in the billions.

Sitting in that truck, I learned there is nothing big inside the elevator. Not one thing. It is tall and heavy and you can see it from the highway, but everything it holds is something you could lose in the crease of your palm. Wheat from the farms west of town, milo from the farms east of it, every kernel grown from a seed somebody put in the ground, prayed over, and waited on. The elevator isn’t a big thing at all. It is a great many small things that ended up in the same place.

I think that is closer to what Jesus was after. He didn’t say the kingdom is like a tree. He said it is like a seed. All through Matthew 13 he keeps reaching for things you could hold between two fingers: a seed, a bit of leaven, a single pearl. The kingdom arrives at the size of something you could drop in the dirt and never find again. That is the scale God likes to work at. The big thing comes later, and it isn’t ours to build.

Good Soil is a small church. On a typical Sunday there are about eighty-five of us. Most of what we do would never show from the highway: about thirty backpacks of weekend food that go home quietly from the elementary school on Fridays, a Meals on Wheels route on Tuesdays, an empty lot where the old parsonage stood that we mean to turn into a garden. Every year we also pay our full apportionments to the wider church, which sounds like a budget line until you remember what it pays for, a long way from here. That is a truckload at the elevator too, poured in with everyone else’s, and nobody can tell whose grain was whose.

And then there are the birds. Jesus doesn’t end the parable with how tall the tree got. He ends it with who moved in. Anybody who has stood near a grain elevator knows the birds got that message a long time ago: pigeons on every ledge, sparrows working the spilled grain around the pit. Dale says the elevator would be glad to be rid of them. Jesus seems less particular.

If the mustard seed is about getting big, it is about a particular kind of big, the kind with room in it. The tree in the parable is great because something tired can land there. Nobody asks the birds whose field it is.

I still look for the elevator every time I come home. I know what it’s made of now.

My grandmother kept a prayer list on her refrigerator. It started as one sheet of notebook paper held up by a magnet shaped like a Holstein, and by the time I was in high school it had spread to four sheets and most of the freezer door. You had to lift a corner of it to find the handle.

Names went down the left side in pencil. Nobody ever came off. If someone got well, she kept praying for them, on the grounds that they would probably get sick again. If someone died, she left the name where it was and prayed for whoever missed them. Every morning before breakfast she stood at the counter with her coffee and went down it, name by name. Her coffee was usually cold by the time she reached the bottom.

She didn’t look like someone having a religious experience. She looked like someone checking fence.

John Wesley gave the first Methodists three general rules. The first two get most of the attention: do no harm, and do good. The third, in his eighteenth-century English, was “attending upon all the ordinances of God”: public worship, the Word read and preached, the Lord’s Supper, family and private prayer, searching the Scriptures, and fasting. Not so long ago a Methodist bishop put it more plainly, and that is the phrase we use around here: stay in love with God.

I love that phrase. I also think it is easy to misread. We hear “in love” and think of a feeling, the kind that comes over you at seventeen in the bleachers on a Friday night. Feelings come and go. If staying in love with God depends on feeling it, most of us are in trouble by midweek.

But look again at Wesley’s list. Every item on it is something you do with your body, on a particular day, whether you feel like it or not. Wesley called them means of grace, which is a churchy way of saying they are the places God has promised to show up. He wasn’t telling Methodists to feel more. He was telling them where to stand.

The short letter of Jude, tucked in just before Revelation, puts it in seven words at verse 21:

Keep yourselves in the love of God.

Notice what Jude doesn’t say. He doesn’t say to keep loving God harder. He says to keep yourselves in God’s love, as if it were a place. It is like the shade of the one tree in a pasture in August. You didn’t make the shade, and you can’t make more of it by wanting to. You just don’t wander out of it.

I grew up on a dairy outside Muleshoe, which is the best school for this I know. Cows have to be milked morning and evening, every day of the year: Christmas, your birthday, the morning after a funeral. A dairy cow has no interest in how you feel. My father loved that place with his whole heart, and I promise you he did not feel it at half past four on a January morning with the wind out of the north. He went out to the barn anyway. Some mornings, by the time the sun came up, the feeling had come out to meet him.

I doubt my grandmother felt something every time she went down that list. Some mornings, I suspect, she felt mostly the coffee. But she kept at it for more than fifty years, and it did something to her face I can only describe by saying she looked like a woman who had never wandered far from the shade.

We keep a few refrigerator doors at Good Soil. The Covenant Discipleship groups are one: four to six people who meet every week and ask each other plainly how they are keeping all three rules. Teresa’s prayer chain is another. Sunday morning is the biggest. None of them waits on anybody feeling inspired.

When my grandmother died, my mother took the list down, every sheet, and folded it into the family Bible. My name is on the first page, near the top, in pencil gone soft and gray.

I keep my own list now. It is on our refrigerator, held up by a magnet from the co-op gin. Dale is on it, and Caleb, and Hannah in Fort Worth, and a good many of you. Some mornings I feel something when I go down it. Most mornings I feel the coffee. I go down it anyway, name by name, and nobody has come off yet.