What We Can Learn about The Christian Life from Compost

 Part 2: 

Great Things Come from Humble Ingredients

Compost is made from things most folks think have little value.  Fallen leaves, pulled weeds, and other yard waste is taken to the curb to be hauled away. Kitchen scraps and coffee grounds are put in the trash. But combined in a properly built pile, those humble ingredients produce something that provides great benefits to individual gardens and the general environment. 

That is a lot like the way God blesses humanity; He consistently uses people the world discounts to execute his loving, redemptive, plan. A walk through the scriptures shows that over and over again.

God started by choosing a small, vagrant, and highly dysfunctional family to form a people that would lay the groundwork for universal salvation. See generally Genesis 12-50 and Deuteronomy 7:6-8.   

Once God started down that path He repeatedly chose weak and disadvantaged folks to execute important parts of His plan. He chose little brother Jacob over Esau the first born.  He chose the the least liked of Jacob's sons to be the vehicle for preserving His people (and the broader society) from a devastating famine, and did so in spite of the fact that the son had been reduced to the status of a  prisoner.  He used Gideon, a weak and doubting peasant, to deliver his people from powerful oppressors.  He used Hannah, a barren and wrongfully scorned second wife, to birth Samuel, a great prophet who would deliver His people from from decadent spiritual and political leaders. He used David, the youngest and least respected member of his family, to provide much better leadership.

That pattern continued as God’s plan moved out into the broader world through Jesus, the universal messiah. Jesus was born to a a poor couple who were effectively homeless. God had earlier chosen an aging and previously barren couple to conceive and raise  the prophet who would announce the beginning of Jesus ministry,  a prophet who himself was scorned by social elites.

   Jesus himself was not a person that the world would naturally embrace. He “had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.” See generally Isaiah 52:13-53:12. And Jesus himself told us that it is those on the margins of society, the poor is spirit, the meek, the persecuted, that become salt and light to an otherwise putrid and dark world. Matthew 5:1-12.  

         God’s plan continued to unfold through people the world had little regard for.  His disciples were uneducated.  The religious leaders of their day did not hide their contempt for His followers.  Even regular folks were dismissive.

         But God used those humble folks powerfully. Indeed, the fact that  the church continues 2,000 years later and reaches around the world is powerful proof that “God chose[] the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom,” James 2:9, Saint Paul put it well:

God chose those who by human standards are fools to shame the wise; he chose those who by human standards are weak to shame the strong,  those who by human standards are common and contemptible -- indeed those who count for nothing -- to reduce to nothing all those that do count for something, so that no human being might feel boastful before God.” 1 Corinthians 1:19-20,25-29.

         So how do we respond to that undeniable dynamic? How we are to live, as individuals, and as parts of Christ’s body? Our original compost analogy helps with that.

Just as a wise gardener does not share the world’s dismissive attitude towards the humble things that make great compost, we shouldn’t buy into society’s dismissive attitude towards those on its margins. We should not "conform...to the standards of this world," but should follow God’s more perceptive, more merciful--and ultimately far more fruitful--approach. See Sirach 11:1-6, Isaiah 55,  Isaiah 58:6-14, Matthew 25:31-46, James 2:1-8.