God is found in the garbage that is _______(enter your name)

I read this in the bathtub today. Made me cry. It is from SoulSalsa by Sweet.

“.......God has this habit of choosing the little, abused, maligned things to do his greatest work. Like planet Earth. Nothing special, this planet called Earth. The more we know about where Earth fits in the Milky Way galaxy, the less special it seems. It’s a planet that goes around an ordinary star in an ordinary galaxy in an ordinary super cluster. Yet in this ordinary place God found an ordinary town, and some ordinary parents, to smuggle into the cosmos the very being of God.

That is the message of the Gospel. In the least likely of times and places, God does God’s greatest work. Wholeness is not the absence of disease but the creative combination of affliction and health, independence and dependency.

A boat-full of suffering and pain can be either a casket or a cradle.

The links between creativity and pain, creativity and suffering are symbolized in the story of Kopi Luwak coffee, the emost expensive, exquisite, exotic, flavorful coffee in the world. The story of what make Kopi worth $300 per pound is the gospel in a coffee bean.

The Luwak is a rare kind of civet cat native to Java and Sumatra. In Africa th ecivet cat (or more precisely it’s sex glands) is the source of musk, the chief ingredient in men’s perfume. In Indonesia the civet cat is the source of the world’s best coffee beans. A lot rides on the health of these fox-size creatures.

The Luwak has a very picky appetite. You might call it the Juan Valdez of the animal kingdom. It eats only the choicest, most perfectly matured coffee cherries, which it partially digests. The coffee beans then travel through the animal’s intestinal tract and are evacuated.

The hard bean is then collected, roasted, and brewed. Stay in an East Java plantation, and this is the coffee they might serve you for breakfast. For the rest of the world, there are only about five thousand pounds of it available per year to people outside Bahasa, Indonesia - at $300 per pound. The most expensive coffee in the world carries the name “Dung Coffee.”

Nature is filled with “dung coffees.” What is honey? What do truffles grow in?

The message of the gospel is this: God can take the worst and turn it into the best. In the most wasted places, God does the greatest work. God can turn and Sheol into a Shiloh.

Where was Jesus born? What goes in a stable? What were baby Jesus’ first smells on earth?

Where was Jesus crucified? What were Jesus’ last smells on earth?

The classic image of Ash Wednesday is burned garbage. Ashes are more than recycled palm fronds. They are a powerful reminder of that defoliated tree planted in the midst of Jerusalem’s garbage dump, a place called Galgotha, a symbol of cruelty and ugliness and death that at the same time became the “fount of every blessing.”

We coo about the dove, the symbol of the Holy Spirit. Artists paint doves sitting on the head of the Virgin Mary. But what is a dove? A dove is a pigeon, a trash bird. Pigeons become “doves” only on paper and out of the pens of poets.

The gospel of grace is a waste aesthetic: there are treasure chests buried in trash cans. Grace moves us from buried trash to buried treasure.”