Landfills, recycling centers, and sewage treatment plants. They are not what you would call “scenic spots.”

But sometimes our spiritual health requires some serious trash-talk.

I grew up near a sewage treatment plant, not far from the city landfill in Bowie, Maryland. These sites were surrounded by woods, where my friends and I liked to play. When we would head out on a summer day, my mother would ask where we were going. We’d say, “The sewage plant.”

Yes, I had a charming childhood.

My point is that I know what these places look like. I know what they smell like. And now, in this season of summer travels to picturesque places, I don’t have any desire to visit them, see them, or smell them. But, at the same time, I know that they are incredibly important destinations for each and every one of us.

Fact is, we need to get rid of our garbage. This is true of both our physical trash and our spiritual refuse. On the spiritual side, Psalm 130 promises to help with the disposal of our iniquities — our sin, evil, vice, wickedness, and injustice. And a book called Garbage Land gives us insight into the elimination of our physical filth.

This is a fascinating work by a science writer named Elizabeth Royte. It bears the subtitle On the Secret Trail of Trash. The book is one woman’s journey along the long and winding road of waste management, with visits to the final destinations of our old computers, soda bottles, leftover food scraps and bodily waste.

This is not a pretty picture. In fact, it stinks.

Tagging along with anthropology students who are performing a dig in a landfill, Royte finds that 40-year-old hot dogs look just like the ones you buy at the grocery store. Seventy-year-old newspapers can still be read. Even Cling Wrap still clings. Decomposition is not as fast or complete as we imagine it to be.

Each of us, here in America, generates more than four pounds of trash per day, which is why our landfills are bursting at the seams. My family and I are doing our best to recycle, but we still throw away too many Styrofoam cups, plastic toys, and packing materials — materials that will sit around even longer than 40-year-old hot dogs. Even when we make an effort to recycle items like old computers, there is no guarantee that they will be taken apart carefully and reused in an environmentally friendly way. Chances are, they will be shipped off to a Chinese village, where people will tear them apart with chisels and hammers, in search of small amounts of copper and gold.

Fortunately, there is some humor to be found in all this. I’ve heard about several courses now being offered for people who have a hard time getting rid of their garbage and junk.

Class 1. Refrigerator Forensics: Identifying and Removing the Dead.

Class 2. If It's Empty, You Can Throw It Away.

Class 3. If the Milk Expired Three Weeks Ago, Keeping It In the Refrigerator Won't Bring It Back.

Class 4. Recycling Skills 101: Boxes that the Electronics Came In.

Class 5. Recycling Skills 201: Styrofoam that Came in the Boxes that the Electronics Came In.

And a final class called Giving Back to the Community: How to Donate 15-Year-Old Levis to Goodwill.

But even if we get better at tossing stuff, Elizabeth Royte has found that our landfills have a hard time holding on to our trash. The largest landfill in the world, Fresh Kills on Staten Island, received 13,000 tons of trash a day until it was closed in 2001. Yes, that’s right: 13,000 tons of trash, each and every day, for decades on end. Today, it is surrounded by a retaining wall, but that wall allows the release of one million gallons of toxic stew per day. This poisonous mixture of cyanide, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, and mercury flows straight into New York Harbor.

I’m glad that my family is going to the coast of Maine this summer, not the Staten Island shoreline.

But the fact remains: We need to get rid of our garbage. This is going to be true whether we consume a lot or a little; whether we recycle our bottles or toss them in the trash. Each and every one of us produces waste, and for some of us the garbage is going to be more spiritual than physical.

We are sinners, after all — releasing a steady stream of toxic stew. We don’t release cyanide or cadmium or chromium, but we spew out gossip and insults, half-truths and lies, selfish manipulations and hurtful actions. Mix in anger and lust and greed, and you’ve got a serious sin management problem.

How can we safely dispose of all this personal, spiritual garbage?

Today’s scripture lesson, Psalm 130, is an attempt to answer the question of where our sin goes. It begins with the passionate plea, “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice!” (Psalm 130:1). We know what the psalm-writer is feeling, because we ourselves have come close to drowning in the depths of our sinfulness, overwhelmed by the destruction and discord and disintegration that comes from our actions.

We’ve become lost in lust. Overcome by ambition. Misdirected by material things. Drowned by destructive desires. And sometimes our sin has not been selfish at all, but instead it has been self-less. Yes, that’s right: self-less. We have lost direction in life by giving too much of ourselves to others, and failing to become the complete person God wants us to be. In all of these cases, we feel as though we are sinking over our heads in a landfill of personal trash, and so we cry out for help, “Lord, hear my voice!”

There’s nothing we can do to save ourselves. We know it, and God knows it. “If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities,” we admit, “Lord, who could stand?” (v. 3). We realize that we cannot maintain a solid stance in the shifting pile of refuse we have created. When we try to climb out, we simply lose our balance and fall deeper into the pile. The debris of our sinful actions creates a kind of quicksand that sucks us ever deeper in.

If you have ever hurt a loved one — deeply hurt a loved one — you know that you cannot repair the damage by single-handed individual effort. I know this; you know this; we all know this. Forgiveness is never a do-it-yourself project. Sure, you have a part to play as you confess your fault, admit your error, amend your ways, and grieve the hurt you have caused. But there can be no reconciliation until you are given the gift of forgiveness. Your garbage has to be hauled away by others, as they liberate you from your personal landfill.

This is precisely why Psalm 130 concludes with the assurance that God wants to save us: “O Israel, hope in the Lord! For with the Lord there is steadfast love, and with him is great power to redeem. It is he who will redeem Israel from all its iniquities” (vv. 7-8). The psalm reminds us that God loves us, and that he has taken decisive action to haul away our trash.

The key term to remember here is “redeem.” God has great power to redeem, and he is the one who will redeem us from all our sin. This word goes back to the ancient world, and it has a fascinating history. It comes from the time when armies would routinely conquer neighboring countries and take people as prisoners. The family members left behind would recover from the invasion, and then pull together money to use as a ransom to buy the freedom of their loved ones. The redeemer, in these cases, would be the particular person who travels abroad to buy back what was confiscated, to rescue the people who had been taken into captivity.

There was nothing necessarily religious about this redeemer. He was simply doing a job. But from this work we get an image for God — the one who is, for us, the ultimate redeemer.

And just how far will God go to rescue us from captivity to sin? All the way to the cross. In Jesus Christ, God has allowed himself to be dragged to the landfill called Golgotha, and to be put to death for our sins. This is all part of God’s saving plan, because Jesus came “to give his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). We “were bought with a price,” according to the apostle Paul (1 Corinthians 6:20). Jesus is our redeemer, the one who pays our ransom, buys us back, and liberates us from the horror and death of life in our own personal garbage heap.

We’re no longer stuck in a spiritual landfill, recycling center, or sewage treatment plant. We are free, because Jesus has redeemed us with the payment of his own life. We have been plucked out of the trash pile, cleaned off, and released to live a life of love and service.

And where does our garbage go? What is the final destination of our gossip and insults, half-truths and lies, lusts and longings, selfish manipulations and self-less wanderings?

All this trash goes straight to the cross. And that’s where it stays, forever. No toxic stew. No environmental danger. No waste management problems.

We are redeemed and released, in a sacred system of total sin removal.

There’s nothing trashy about it. Amen.


Sources:
Motavalli, Jim. “Trash Talk: In Garbage Land, Elizabeth Royte talks dirty.” Grist magazine. July 28, 2005. www.grist.org.