A Sermon for San Francisco
What I see: a city of miners and farmers
One of my favorite things that I’ve seen/heard this year was a sermon from pastor Dave Lomas called “A Vision for a City” (recording).
He spoke about a lot of ideas such as the difficulty of building community in a city of transience, our search for a belonging in an age of “rootlessness”, and the creation of character through the decisions we make. In particular, what I most remember is his analogy of miners and farmers to contrast two ways of approaching life.
San Francisco was built from a mining frenzy in the 1840s, when hundreds of thousands of gold miners set up tents in the city to extract minerals from the earth, leaving the land depleted. Today many of us are “miners” in the city as well— here for just a couple of years to strike gold in our relationships and our work. When we feel like we’ve gotten enough value, we will leave the city and move to the suburbs.
“The failure of an urban promise: That promise concerned human persons who could lead detached, unrooted lives of endless choice and no commitment. It was glamorized around the virtues of mobility and anonymity that seemed so full of promise for freedom and self-actualization. But it has failed...It is now clear that a sense of place is a human hunger that urban promise has not met...It is rootlessness and not meaninglessness that characterizes the current crisis.”
- The Land, Walter Brueggemann
It is then unsurprising that we feel lost, when none of us plan on staying here for long. So the question is then— how can we “put down roots” when we know that our time in the city is limited?
One answer is to adopt a “farmer” mentality. Farmers are people who care deeply about the land and soil, making sure that it can sustain life for seasons to come. To be a farmer means to plant, water, grow, and build and to think about what you can give. (The parallels to farming in Silicon Valley are easy to draw here: starting something new, supporting talent, providing funding— but that to me feels one-dimensional.)
“To feel at home in a place, you need to have some prospect of staying there.”
- Jayber Crow, Wendell Berry
And so Pastor Dave ends his sermon with “Be a farmer, not a miner.”
And personally, my biggest takeaway is that I must now read all of Wendell Berry.
