Seeing Sabbath with an Agrarian Mindset
By Rev. Samuel F. Chamelin
Sabbath is a tricky concept on a dairy farm. The categories of “work” and “rest simply will not obey the demands of cows who need to be milked and fed every single day. Our solution was a simple one – on Sundays, we did only what was required: milking and feeding, with an allowance for emergency animal care. The hardest part, though, was making hay. My father refused to make silage on a Sunday, even if conditions were favorable. That was the line we were unwilling to cross to demonstrate faithfulness to a call deeper than dairy farming, something more central to our character.
But let’s be real for a second – the push and pull of that decision was about economics as much as it was about faith. Our family didn’t have the luxury of easy answers of Sabbath observance as farm life screamed its demands while faith whispered its invitations. Faithfulness would require a deeper question – who are we at our core, and what does goodness look like? Israel also felt the push and pull of two competing ideologies – the productivity of Egypt behind, or the freedom that lie ahead. Both answers had spiritual and economic ramifications that God lays before Israel in a stark and agricultural way. “The land you are entering to take over is not like the land of Egypt, from which you have come, where you planted your seed and irrigated it by foot as in a vegetable garden. But the land you are crossing the Jordan to take possession of is a land of mountains and valleys that drinks rain from heaven” (Deut. 11:10). Egypt, like all empires, was oriented towards production – gardens, irrigation, manipulation of the environment for economic purposes. In this paradigm, the land and the people are pushed to the edges, beyond their natural selves, to build a society.
Israel would have remembered well the hardships of such a commitment, but the allure of “prosperity” would always haunt them. God is calling them to a place much more unpredictable. Israel’s land is to be respected for the fragile and beautiful environment it is, “…a land the Lord your God cares for” (Deut. 11:12). The people will not be called to create an empire, but to participate in an ecosystem. Faithfulness to God’s commandments will be critical to life not just for Israel but for all living things. “So if you faithfully obey the commands I am giving you today—to love the Lord your God and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul—then I will send rain on your land in its season, both autumn and spring rains…” (Deut. 11:13-14). It is not hard to imagine unfaithfulness having agricultural and ecological consequences, crippled as we are by climate change. We see the devastating effects that a poor anthropological framework can have.
Our demand for consumption have created an environment where the rain does not fall, or where it falls so harshly to be destructive. Faithfulness – respect for life - creates abundance for the land, for the people, for the economy. What Deuteronomy understood narratively, Wendell Berry understood pointedly. In his brief essay entitled “The Agrarian Standard,” Wendell Berry contrasts two different ways of farming that are really two different ways of seeing the world: “agrarian” and “industrial.” His claim is that these two perspectives, are “two nearly opposite ways of understanding ourselves, our fellow creatures, and our world.”
Industrial thinking, he says, sees everything as a machine whose end is production. “The way of industrialism is the way of the machine. To the industrial mind, a machine…is an explanation of the world and of life.” It is a mindset of production, that things have value only as they serve consumption. As long as we produce, we have value. We can easily see how capitalism reinforces these notions, but religion can take on industrialist trappings as well. To the extent we are virtuous and do virtuous works, we have value. We see this all over our faith communities, do we not? Bigger, more efficient, cranking out a religious product that serves the masses. It’s no wonder, then, that we give so much of our lives to our work-related pursuits. We have absorbed the conviction that our worth is in our work.
In contrast, “agrarian,” Berry says, “starts with givens – air, water, geography, flora and fauna…Agrarian farmers know that their very identity depends on their willingness to receive gratefully, use responsibly, and hand down intact an inheritance, both natural and cultural, from the past.” An agrarian mindset places value not on production, but on life. What matters is life, and that life is to be nurtured, cultivated, and handed down. In an agrarian mindset, life is the standard.
So the question my parents faced on a Sunday was pretty simple – what is my deepest self? Am I simply a means of production, or am I a child of God given life, and life more abundant? Sabbath will show us how we answer that question. If we are machines built for production, then Sabbath is an antiquated, mythological yearning. Reality demands that we give our life to the means of production. But if we are loved by God, if we are defined by our life and not by our production, if we value the life in us and the life in our ecosystems, then we reject the narrative of machines, and abandon the plow to tend to our life. We step outside of our economic demands to reconnect with our most essential selves and with the Creator. When we make that decision, we find that healthy, life-giving production comes both from our hands and from the hand of God, who looks upon us and cares for us as a beloved creation.
The Rev. Samuel F. Chamelin is the pastor of St. Mary’s United Church of Christ in Silver Run, MD, as well as the founder of The Keep & Till in Carroll County, MD, an expression of faith working at the intersection of spiritual formation, sustainable agriculture, and ecological conservation. www.thekeepandtill.org Facebook.com/thekeepandtill Twitter and Insta: @terraanimata
