Rot and Redemption

Reflections on the year gone by

Synod 2023 has just ended. It’s been a year since Synod 2022, the meeting in which it was discerned that unchastity, by definition, includes homosexuality—even within the confines of committed, monogamous marriage.

I haven’t been surprised by the triumph of conservatism within the CRC. I was raised in the rural conservativism of the blue-Psalter years. For many years I believed this conservativism to be correct, and as a younger man I spoke in support of it. But eventually, humbled by my inescapable homosexuality, I had to rethink, reframe, recant, and reform.

The emotional exchanges on the floor of Synod 2022 were indeed unforgettable, but it’s Synod’s aftermath that has given me the most fodder for contemplation. The exchanges, the movements, the groups, the websites. The blog posts and YouTube recaps. The Banner, the Reformed Journal. The Facebook posts and the irresistible bantering and bickering in their appended comments.  Above the myriad articles and reflections, one singular word has wiggled and wormed around in my brain for the better part of the past twelve months.

Rot.

In a YouTube video in which he celebrated the “massive” accomplishments of Synod 2022, a CRC pastor and synod delegate from Classis Minnkota decried last year the “tremendous amount of rot” within the CRC’s “agencies…institutions…and in Calvin University and Seminary.”  While the pastor urged his viewers to exercise patience with the liberal members of the denomination, he also went on to admit that “it’d be awesome if they just got up and walked out the door.”

I’m no theologian; I don’t know whether ‘rot’ is a term with particular significance to ministerial or pastoral work. I can inform my understanding of ‘rot’ only from my qualifications as a trained horticulturist and my experience as an amateur kombucha brewer. Rot happens when all or part of an organism loses its ability to live, and when the substance of that organism is fed upon by the bacteria and fungi whose role in nature is to harvest and metabolize the original organism’s nutrients. The bacteria and fungi incorporate these nutrients to fuel their processes, to feed their bodies, and to further their own reproduction. Rot, in general, feeds on dead and diseased tissue. In some cases (think gangrene in animals and the soft-rot that liquefied the potatoes in Grandma’s root cellar), rot can also become infectious, causing necrosis and actively killing the tissue on which the rot will subsequently feed.

But the decomposition of organisms and their metabolism by ‘lesser’ species is not always a bad thing. The sourdough bread we brewed during the pandemic was leavened by the yeast that rotted the wheat. The byproducts of grain fermentation include acids (which give sourdough its distinctive flavor) and carbon dioxide, whose bubbles leaven the bread. Wine, too, is a fermented—and therefore mildly rotten—product.  Could it be significant that both eucharistic foodstuffs have been preserved and made palatable by their own decay? Should we not note that both the bread and the wine, representing Christ’s body and blood, have not been reduced but rather redeemed by their ‘rot’? Jesus himself compared the kingdom of God to yeast that works itself, at the hands of a woman, through sixty pounds of flour.¹

Last October, I attended a seminar and demonstration on food fermentation. Before I knew it, I was home again, standing before a countertop stacked high with jars and colanders and sugar and salt. Our kitchen soon reeked of kimchi and kombucha and sauerkraut. I had heard of the wonders of good gut health. Our bodies contain more microbial cells than human ones; our guts are ecosystems unto themselves. The microbes in your intestines decompose the food you eat—rotting it, in a way, and making its nutrients available to you. The ‘rot’ that inhabits us is essential to our survival. Yes, we people are made in the image of God. But more crudely described, humans are walking compost piles, albeit imbued with consciousness and often blessed with an appreciation for the Divine.

(We’re not alone in our dependence on microbes. The plant kingdom, too, as I read in Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, could barely exist were it not for the mycorrhizal fungi that make nutrients available for roots’ uptake.)

If we base our worldviews on an understanding of ourselves as limited individual animals, then we’ll categorize the upward currents of life and birth and generation and integration as good, and the downward forces of degeneration and decomposition and dying—including rot—as bad. But if we believe that the Word was God and was with God, and if we believe that God is Love, then we know that the ultimate principle, the deepest Truth, that ungraspable Logos are a God who is Love, and the Love that God is. The earthly cycles of integration and disintegration, of life and of death, are part of a cycle that is a manifestation of the Word and have been intended by God, without whom “nothing was made that has been made.”²

I’m grateful for all parts of the cycle, for life and death and rebirth, and for the rot and decay and regeneration that come in between. I’m grateful for this difficult year. I’m grateful to have had to re-evaluate my relationship with God and with Christianity. I’m grateful for the company and support of those who have read and written and listened and spoken. I’m grateful for faith in the knowledge that this is all part of the process, that no part of Christ’s body will be amputated and thrown away, but rather that we’re all one body. I’m grateful to know that this experience, however dizzying, is part of the endless turning of a regenerative cycle, all part of The Plan.

I’m grateful for my wilted TULIPs, which by the bushel I’ve hauled to the compost pile of theological decomposition. I’m grateful for the slimy peels of a guilt-based fear of a wrathful God, and grateful for their slow disintegration, from which the deep humus of remaining faith will nourish a new season’s spiritual sprouts.

I’m grateful for communion; for the rot that transforms unpalatable grain into leavened bread, and for the rot that transforms a glut of perishable grapes into sweet and shelf-stable wine. I’m grateful for the knowledge that loss and death and schism—while putrid in the short term—are a natural part of a divine cycle, and necessary for vibrant rebirth. I’m grateful for all of this. But most of all I’m grateful for redemption, and for the rot that is essential in bringing redemption about.

1. Matthew 13:33, Luke 13:20-21

2. John 1:3