The Land Needs Salvation: Pentecost 8B Psalm 85

      Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;

righteousness and peace will kiss each other.

      Faithfulness will spring up from the ground,

and righteousness will look down from the sky.

      The Lord will give what is good,

and our land will yield its increase.

 The first three verses of Psalm 85 tell God, “You have forgiven and restored us in the past.” But the next four say, “We need salvation again.”

We need it, but so does our farms. Surprisingly both people and land are bound together in the hunger for salvation. God alone can make salvation and peace happen—by speaking it. But when it happens, it happens not just for people, but for the land that the people depend upon for life.

What are the conditions for human thriving? They are political, but also, necessarily, agricultural and ecological. So, when the prophets speak of “religious” salvation, they must mention the productivity of the soil: Amos’ vision of the time of salvation includes the plowman overtaking the one sowing the seed (Amos 9:13). Hosea sees salvation as God forging a new covenant with wild animals, birds of the air, creeping things of the ground and at the same time abolish war. God will answer prayers for salvation because he will answer the cries of the heavens and the earth, and they will then speak to the grain, the wine, and the oil (Hosea 2:18, 21-22). Isaiah sees salvation as involving an end of war and slaughter, that will make room for adequate rainfall, fertile fields, and productive livestock, but also a clean mountain streams and a renewal of the sun and moon (Isaiah 30:23-26).

When it happens all the good powers of God converge. These are all the most famous and central concepts of Hebrew theological vocabulary: Hesed, or God’s loving faithfulness to his covenant with the people; meets up with emeth, or God’s dependable faithfulness; zedeq, or righteousness and shalom, or peace, will kiss each other. In fact, faithfulness will spring up from the ground, and righteousness will look down from the sky above.

Yes, in that great, last day of the final, complete salvation, all will be healed. And God alone can bring that about.  But Leviticus reminds us of the meanwhile. Meanwhile the healing of the land depends on our obedience to the God of peace and love.

 If you follow my statutes and keep my commandments and observe them faithfully, I will give you your rains in their season, and the land shall yield its produce, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit (Leviticus 26:3-4).

 Psalm 85 is a worship song for the meanwhile: for anxious times. We need to be saved. But while we plead we also praise. God has saved us, but we need it again and again.

Salvation must always be a global thing. We who believe want God to redeem us from illness, broken hearts, money worries, and the awful feeling that we are drifting away from all that we truly value. But for us to be saved, the land itself must be saved. Not a day goes by that we aren’t pressed in by the news that the tipping point has perhaps already been passed. The melting of the glaciers and permafrost, the incineration of the rain forests, the record heat waves killing people, and uprooting others and creating mass migrations that spawn fear-driven politics.

Salvation of us and salvation of the land are two halves of the whole. As we wait, anxiously, for that final day of salvation, we must permit the Lord  to make us woke—to make us passionate about justice-filled peace. Then we will be woke enough to shelter immigrants from barren lands, and allow them to bless us with their good work. Then the land will show forth its faithfulness. Then will come bountiful rain from above and we will enjoy a bountiful crop of righteousness.

Then the land will yield its increase.