A Gospel for the Land
While my family did not grow up farming, growing up in Kansas there is a curiosity of the land settled into us from birth. I technically lived in the city, Wichita, but driving the surrounding areas we would pass cotton fields, alfalfa fields, corn fields, and occasionally sunflower fields. My grandparents even had a full garden in their backyard growing vegetables to use at Sunday Dinner.
In the background of my childhood tending to the land, caring for it, and working with the land took shape in my heart. Slowly, over the last 30 years, I have watched a lot of that land turn from farms to cookie cutter houses and shopping centers. One of the things I have admired most out here in Easton is how protected the land is… how public the land is but in a way that invites wholeness and restoration not commercialization.
I’ve lived on the West Coast, in the northern part of the Rockies, in the heart of the midwest, and now on the East Coast. Each area had beautiful land and appreciation. Though, if I am being honest, on a facetime with a colleague back home, he showed me his family home and farmland. The vastness of Kansas’ land and its openness is always going to have a special place in my heart. Though it is mainly flat there is a beauty in its wideness. You know how small you are standing under all the twinkling stars and watching the storm roll in for miles accepting what is to come, you grow up learning how to be more present and attentive to the land you walk on.
While working on my undergraduate degree in religion and psychology, I also decided to take environmental courses. In one of those courses we were invited out to The Land Institute for the Prairie Festival. A time where scientists, artists, musicians, sustainability professionals, chefs, eaters, and curious minds alike gathered to engage with current events, new research, global conflicts, socioeconomic trends, artistic movements, and the significance of the prairie landscapes. One of the speakers posed a question that has unsettled my stomach since hearing it in 2019… what wouldn’t we do for land?
We forget what the land actually is. We talk about “dirt” as if it’s just a passive floor beneath our shoes or a blank slate for our buildings. But the ground we walk on is a living, breathing community. Ecologists remind us that in a single teaspoon of healthy soil, there are millions—sometimes billions—of living creatures, fungi, and microorganisms working in a delicate, ancient balance to sustain life on this planet. The soil doesn’t just support us; it sings its own quiet, microbial hymn to the Creator.
Yet, there isn’t much more our world’s hands could do to fracture that hymn. The ground beneath us isn’t just an ecosystem; it’s a participant in our history, even in our faith. As we heard in Genesis when Cain strikes Abel, the earth drinks the blood, and the soil cries out. We live on a land that has been bloodied, stolen, traded, bought, sold, and torn up. For power, for money, and for dominance, our world has treated the Earth as a territory to be conquered rather than a home to be tended.
We rely on high-input, extractive annual systems that tear up the soil year after year, leaving it vulnerable to erosion, drought, and exhaustion. Paul writes in Romans that all creation groans under the weight of sin and death. The climate stress, the vanishing topsoil, and the overdeveloped landscapes aren’t just technical failures; they are the physical manifestations of a spiritual rootlessness. We have traded covenant for commodity.
It is easy to look at the wounded earth and feel a paralyzing despair. But the Psalmist reminds us of a startling truth: “If I make my bed in the depths, you are there.” God is not a detached observer hovering above a ruined planet. The Divine presence embraces the wounded earth. We have a God who knows what it is like to be human. A God who shares in the grief of a creation that groans. That means even in our ecological depths we are surrounded by a holy accountability that refuses to write off the physical world.
And because God meets us even in those dark places, we are invited to look to the very earth for our renewal. Jesus points us to Jonah, to a descent into the belly of the earth, into the darkness, burial, and the hidden womb of the planet before new life breaks forth. In God’s Kingdom, resurrection is never a disembodied escape hatch from a ruined world; it always involves a descent into the dirt. The promise of the Gospel is the redemption and renewal of all things—heaven and earth joined together, whole and healed.
To step into that promise, we have to undergo a fundamental shift in how we perceive the ground beneath our feet. For generations, modern culture has trained us to view land primarily as a commodity—something to be bought, sold, subdivided, or paved over for convenience. We treat it as real estate rather than relations. But The Season of Creation focus on Land invites us to realign our vision with the heart of God. We must learn to see the earth not as a resource to be managed, but as a sacred trust to be honored.
Think about what it means to say that the land is sacred because it holds Christ. In the Incarnation, God did not bypass the physical world; God took on our world, wrapping divinity in dust and clay. The Word became flesh—adamah, Adam’s root word means from the ground. When Christ walked the Judean hills, his feet pressed into the same soil created through him. When his body was laid in a tomb carved out of rock, the earth cradled the Maker of the universe. The ground is sanctified because it is the very medium through which God draws near to us. When we harm the watershed, exhaust the topsoil, or turn creation into a battlefield for power and money, we are defacing something that carries the fingerprints of the divine.
If the ground is holy because it cradles the Creator, then how we treat our local spaces matters. Out here in Easton, I see flashes of what this sacred respect looks like—public spaces and preserved lands that invite wholeness, protection, and restoration rather than relentless commercialization. It reminds me of the deep wisdom behind the perennial crops we studied at The Land Institute. Annual crops require us to rip up the soil year after year, leaving it naked and vulnerable to the wind and the rains, constantly starting over from scratch. But perennial plants put down roots that stretch feet, sometimes yards, deep into the earth. They stay put through the bitter winter freeze and the scorching summer drought. Their deep roots hold the soil together, build organic matter, and create an underground network of resilience that can weather almost anything.
Our life of faith needs that kind of perennial rooting. We cannot live on shallow, extractive spiritualities that only seek quick fixes or personal comfort when the storms of life or the crises of our world hit. We are called to sink our roots deep into the story of God’s redeeming love for all creation. That means shifting our daily rhythms—how we consume, how we advocate, how we walk lightly on our local ecosystems, and how we teach the next generation to cherish the earth.
It is not easy work to care for creation in this world. When despair creeps in—when we look at the suburban sprawl replacing childhood memories, or the overwhelming headlines of climate distress—we remember that our hope is not fragile. It is anchored in the God who meets us even in the depths. The soil cries out, yes, but God hears it, and God is already at work breathing resurrection life into the dust.
So let us change our perspective. May we treat the ground beneath us with the reverence it deserves, knowing it is holy, wounded, and deeply loved by God. And like the deep-rooted prairie grasses that hold the Kansas plains against the storm, may we put down roots of active hope, tending the earth as a sacred home until Christ brings God’s kingdom fully—on earth as it is in heaven.
Amen.