Called to the Impossible
You should know that heckling is not common practice during regular services at the Princeton Seminary chapel.
When I preached last spring, I planted hecklers in the pews.
During the brief midday chapel services, it is also not common practice for the preacher to select multiple sermon texts. I chose four. They were read by students before I ascended the pulpit. To begin, a passage from Genesis 18 that culminated in Sarah’s bemused query, “After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?”
Next, verses from Exodus 3 that include God’s call to Moses: “So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.”
For the third passage, Jesus’s words from Matthew 5: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you … Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly parent is perfect.”
And finally, Paul from 1 Corinthians: “For I handed on to you … what I … had received: that Christ died … that he was buried … and that he was raised on the third day.”
The aforementioned hecklers hollered a one-word interjection after each reading, occasionally accompanied by a chuckle. “Impossible!” they cried.
Imagine the effect. We hear Sarah’s words, “After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?”
And immediately from a pew in the back, “Impossible!”
And then God’s call to Moses. “Impossible!”
And then Jesus’s commands. “Impossible!”
And then news of death and resurrection. “Impossible!”
What a privilege to collaborate with microbes and chicken manure. What a relief to recognize that the call to healing and life is a call to all creation. We do not work alone!
At the risk of naming the obvious, the whole point of my chapel message that day was this: God rarely calls God’s people to the possible. The witnesses of the Jewish and Christian theological traditions run in the other direction. The journey of faith is a journey with God into the impossible.
Perhaps this is good news in a world that too often feels completely impossible.
Farming or Ministry? Both?
At the age of 30, I set out with my spouse, Janel, on our own impossible journey. In 2007, we packed up our two young children and moved from Kansas to Princeton, New Jersey, so I could enroll at Princeton Theological Seminary in a master’s program. My life to that point had gone back and forth between farming and ministry. I grew up among Mennonites on a farm in south-central Kansas, then spent a half-dozen years serving as a youth pastor on Maryland’s eastern shore, and then moved back to Kansas to farm again.
The last stint of Kansas farming sealed the deal. I could not shake a sense of call to ministry. And so we made the leap of faith. I quit my job, and we moved east.
With the moving van pointed toward Princeton and the farm in the rear-view mirror, I recall thinking, “I have no idea what those years farming were for. They kind of seem like a waste.”
At that point in my life, it was simply beyond my own theological or vocational imagination that my love of the land and growing things, and my sense of call to serve in the world, could be one thing instead of two.
If you had been with me in that moving van and told me how things would go, I can imagine my one-word response. “Impossible!”
Two Decades Later
It is now nearly two decades since we made the move from that Great Plains farm to the campus of Princeton Seminary. We thought we were coming to Princeton for two years. We still haven’t left.
In 2008, a classmate learned of my farming background and shared his wild idea with me. “I think we should integrate fully accredited theological education with small-scale sustainable agriculture.”
I wasn’t sure about the idea. But it was a seed, and further conversation helped it take root. By 2010, I had my M.Div. degree and was starting doctoral work. Soon a mentor challenged me to work more intentionally on the project. In fall 2013, an administrator and faculty member took the idea to the seminary’s president, Craig Barnes.
In spring 2014, I was invited to meet with President Barnes. I walked into his office to discover a property survey unrolled across his desk. He looked at me, gestured at the survey, and said, “So it turns out, we already own a farm.” He was talking about a 21-acre off-campus tract that Princeton had bought a few years before his tenure began.
This changed the whole conversation. A steering committee was formed. Budgets were drafted. Plans were made.
In spring 2015, I taught a pilot course at the farm, and the seminary decided to go for it. I graduated from the Ph.D. program that semester and then came on as inaugural Director of the Farminary.
And now, the two things I could not imagine together 20 years ago (service to land and service to God), I now cannot imagine apart.
Impossible.
This story risks coming across as something of a fairy tale. That reading, however, falls short. It insufficiently interrogates my failure of imagination when I left the farm and moved to seminary. Why could I not imagine these things together? It also fails to acknowledge the complex history of the land we now call the Farminary—a history which includes, among other things, its location in a flood plain, decades of sod farming in the 20thcentury that stripped the land of topsoil, and the forced removal of Leni-Lenape Native Americans well before that.
We are wounded. The land is wounded. Though the Farminary dares to bring these things together in the hopes of healing and renewed vitality for both humans and land, it is no fairy tale.
Impossible? Perhaps. Fairy tale? No.
Three Convictions
Along the way, three convictions have emerged that undergird and guide our work at the Farminary. The first conviction is that the skills, proficiencies, and sensibilities of a good farmer, gardener, or ecologist broadly overlap with the skills, proficiencies, and sensibilities of a good leader in a congregation, school, nonprofit, or neighborhood. The good gardener knows how to pay attention to seasons, tend life, recognize limits, ask for help, and do a budget. The excellent ecologist understands water, the interdependence of creatures, and the interconnectedness of life and death. So does the proficient leader in a congregation, school, or nonprofit.
The skillset, in a word, is pastoral—the word’s very roots point simultaneously to the pasture and the parish. The land at the Farminary uniquely nurtures these skills. It teaches us to respect the seasons. It unveils water’s sacredness. It helps us recognize limits. It reveals the interconnectedness of life and death.
A second conviction is that the land makes three-dimensional or brings to life subject matter that has been taught at the seminary from the beginning. Seminarians have been learning for centuries that God is the creator of the heavens and the earth. Much can be learned about this teaching in a library or traditional classroom, but if the exact same content is conveyed at the farm, and if the farm’s many creatures are invited into the conversation, insights will be gained that are not possible elsewhere. The same could be said of incarnation, baptism, communion, and more.
A final conviction is that if we listen carefully to the land (surely a core proficiency of the good farmer), it confronts us with many of our most vexing contemporary challenges. It confronts us with ecological devastation and climate change. It confronts us with the legacies of extractive agriculture, chattel slavery, and migrant farmwork. It confronts us with the histories and memories of the Leni Lenape.
Cooking the Compost
While I am under no illusion that we have the answers to all of the questions that the land raises, I am convinced of one thing. In a world seemingly stuck in its death-dealing ways—hellbent on the habits of extraction, exploitation, and exhaustion—we are called to the impossible. We are called to life.
And yes, I believe that call comes from the Creator of the heavens and the earth.
Of all the teaching spaces at the farm, for me none compare to the compost piles. Every fall, the seminary facilities team delivers leaves from the main campus to the farm. Then, once a week throughout the year, a seminary student drives the old Dodge farm truck to campus dining, student residences, and a local coffee shop to collect food scraps, spent coffee grounds, and other organic material.
The scraps get mixed with the leaves to form compost piles—a half-dozen of them through the course of a year. Each begins roughly the size of the Dodge truck, and then over the course of several months and with the aid of trillions and trillions of microbes, it cooks down to about half its original size. When the compost is finished, it becomes rich fertilizer for our gardens and fields.
It is perhaps our most tangible response to the call to healing and life.
When students gather at the compost pile, I tell them, “If you can learn to preach half as well as this compost pile, you’ll be just fine.”
Think about it. The compost pile takes into itself all that is passing away—the banana peel, the rotting potato, the apple core, the spent coffee grounds, and last year’s leaves. But it does not do this so that death gets the last word. Rather, it does this for the sake of new life in another season.
The compost pile proclaims tangibly and multi-sensorially that though death is real, the forces of life remain. Though the land at the farm knows the wounds of extraction and exploitation, extraction and exploitation will not get the last word. Though we know exhaustion and loss, the possibility of rest and new life remain.
That sounds a lot like the Gospel to me—not merely as an idea for consideration, but as a touchable, smellable, life-through-death reality that ever invites our participation, awe, and joy.
And there is more. The compost pile also challenges our typical ways of perceiving the world. What do we see when we look at a pile of leaves or a bucket of rotting food scraps? Our world’s economic, social, and political forces condition us to regard food scraps and autumn leaves very much like I looked back on my time farming when I first moved to seminary—as waste.
The compost pile strongly suggests otherwise. That which the world labels as refuse and waste may, in fact, be the key to healing and new life. That which the world labels trash may in reality be treasure.
What a gift to learn from wilting lettuce and dormant trees. What a privilege to collaborate with microbes and chicken manure. What a relief to recognize that the call to healing and life is a call to all creation. We do not work alone! We will never heal alone. Isolation and atomization will only deepen the wounds.
What if it’s true? What if the Creator is on the side of healing and life? What if the Creator is calling us to learn from and collaborate with all creation for the sake of healing and life? What if death does not get the last word?
Impossible?
Perhaps.
But then again … impossibility is where we’ve been called from the beginning.
Nathan Stucky, Director of the Farminary Project at Princeton Theological Seminary, is the author of Wrestling with Rest: Inviting Youth to Discover the Gift of Sabbath (Eerdmans, 2019). Ordained in the Mennonite Church (USA), he has a B.A. degree in music from Bethel College (North Newton, KS), and a M.Div. and Ph.D. (Practical Theology, Christian Education and Formation) from Princeton Seminary. His scholarship explores questions of land, ecology, theology, agriculture, justice, joy, and Sabbath as they relate to theological education.