(This sermon is to be presented at a table with a large bowl of dirt at the center, which the preacher is speaking to for the most part.)

O Dirt!

O displaced particles of earth - not even dignified as earth, that azure orb that fills the blackness of creation's void.

No, you are dirt.
Dirt for sale.
Free dirt.
Essence of dirtiness.
The bane of tide and scrupulosity.

My childhood friend. Progenitor of mud and castle fantasies. Why is our friendship now so distant, intermittent, burdened with indifferent hostility?

And yet, now that we meet again, I run my fingers through you like a lover combing his beloved's hair, like big baboons, grooming and renewing bonds.

Yet we have abused you.
Your ligaments with earth are severed, torn away and shredded.
You are deserted by your creaturely inhabitants, the squirmy worms, the bugs, the little things that speak of nature to the young.
You are an empty, bombed out house, a heap of ashes waiting for…new life? Or death? A burial? A burning transformation in a potter's fire?

Oh, but how ancient you are!
Is this a stone adornment of an ancient maiden?
Is this a pebble from the glaciers that once slept upon your shoulders?
Is this perhaps a bit of petrified peachstone from someone's ancient garden?
Is this a bit of pottery that once was warmed upon a hearth, with people laughing round the fire?

Were you there when ancient conifers laid down their bodies on the earth, heaping up the buried energy that now illuminates our life?
Are you the buried sun to light our way?
Were you there when old leviathan did battle with tyrannosaurus rex,
cut open wounds across the land where tiny mammals clung to shaky birth?
Were you there when gladiators and conquistadors splashed blood upon your face in vanities of arrogance and exploitation?
Were you there to drink the blood of slaves and victims of a brutal domination?
Yes, you were there.

And yet how easily we blot out all awareness of your memory!

Though the footsteps of our ancestors are often frozen in your fist, yet we know not our common past.

What brought you here?
The great ice-cap…did it create you out of grinding megatons of icy blue oppression? Did a stream of mountain froth and calm meandering deposit you for burial along the boundary of the waters and the rocks?

How many times have you been cut and crossed and quartered?
How often have the spades of men,
the rakes of women,
the sharpened hooves of animals
pierced your suffering side and broken up your body?
How often have they turned you over, laid you down, plowed deep harrows on your back, force fed you fertilizer,
torn their life from deep within your death?
How often have surveyors laid their tapes and chains upon you,
perched upon you transits,
measured out the property where mine and thine protect a hostile world from greed and fear?

Now we face each other here.
You bounded in a bowl, your fired fellows holding you secure.
Not some mighty glacier brought you here, but human hands.
No other god than I will settle on your destiny,
will put you underneath a building,
plant a tree within you,
bury my own lost loves within your womb.

And if you do not yield, I have machines to break you down, and carry you around my world.
For you are dirt.
You count for nothing.
You are death. The cloak of death. I will not hear your voice.

But when I touch you, see strange markings on your face…did I say face?

When I see curious lines, almost like words upon your body…did I say body?…

Though we have pounded, powdered, pulverized, and fertilized you into stone,
yet still you are the face of earth.
Our face. My face.
Our body, my body.
Imagine that. Imagine you.

Though drenched with blood you give us wheat.
Though seeped in floods of sewage you respond with grapes.
Piss poor from roadsides, gasoline, and concrete,
yet you give us burnished pottery, the fingertips of beauty.
A house of worms, decay, and centipedes, you offer up forsythia and awesome oaks.
You do endure.
You find a voice that penetrates the din of all our anxious industry.
You whisper, now I hear you,
yes, we are your children.
You are our past, you are our parent.

What then are we to do… you and I, face to face, finger to finger, foot to foot?
Shall we continue with our cold alienation?
Shall we return to being strangers?
Shall we settle for the prisoning walls and paper lines that cut us off from one another?
You and me? Me and her? Us and them?

Shall we settle for the poisoning wells of our pollution pressed upon your patience?
Or shall we find the common water hiding deep within us?

Shall we coffin off our lives, or shall we claim again our deep original bonds?
Earth…earthling?
Dirt…dirtiness?
Worthless fundament…suicidal, genocidal godlings?
Pulverized together now, can we regain our unity?

Can you flower? Can I garden?
Can you sponge the rain? Can I keep it clean?
Can you suffer children's play? Can I pass your borrowed life to them?
Can we claim the unity of earth, the unity of earthlings?

It is springtime. It is again the time - the hiccup of grace in the world's drunkenness.
The narrow window between death and life where creation finds its timeless origin.
Let me plunge again my hand into your side, and claim my life in yours.

Let us be the crossroads of creation.
Let us both sing resurrection.
Now let dirt become the earth.

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