Happy New Year.  Mine began with a good laugh thanks to one of our quick-witted Broadway Christian Church members.   

Last Sunday my only responsibility was the Offering Meditation, a welcome respite from the tripleheader that accompanies years when Christmas Eve falls on a Sunday.  This year, that meant Jennie and me teaching the 9 am children’s Sunday school class when their teacher’s husband tested positive for COVID late Saturday night, a sermon, and other accoutrements at Broadway’s 10:30 am morning service, then a meditation, prayer, etc. for the 5:30 and 8:00 pm Christmas Eve candlelight communion services.  All wonderful, by the way. Broadway does Christmas Eve right.

I was duly instructed that my offertory on Sunday, being a fifth Sunday and the last Sunday of the year, needed to announce several opportunities to give:   

A)  Extend the weekly invitation for tithes and offerings. 

B)  Fifth Sundays at Broadway include a “Noisy Offering.”  Tin cans are passed by the deacons along with the offering trays and members drop a fistful of coins into them, creating a cacophony of clinking coins throughout the sanctuary.  The beneficiary?  Room at the Inn, a ministry that provides Columbia’s unhoused a safe, clean, warm place to stay.  Hot meals and a hot shower, too. A perfect response to Luke’s “no room at the inn” Christmas story.

C)  Broadway has a tradition on the last Sunday of the year they call the “Reverse Offering.”  The offering plates have assorted bills in them – ones, fives, tens, twenties.  Congregants are invited to take cash out of the plate and give it to someone or some organization that would benefit from it.  Help yourself and help some else.   

I announced all three of those giving opportunities and couldn’t resist adding a fourth. Noting that Sunday was a sixth day of Christmas, I announced that if anyone brought six geese a-laying, swans a-swimming, calling birds, French hens, turtle doves, or partridges, they should be given to Don Day after worship.   

Don graduated from Mizzou with a bachelor’s and master’s degrees in agriculture and for years served Central Missouri farmers through MU Extension Services.  Don’s initiatives are too numerous to list, but one of his colleagues wrote: “To many farmers and citizens in central Missouri, Don Day is University of Missouri Extension.” In his honor, the Columbia Chamber of Commerce established the Don Day Agribusiness & Bioscience Scholarship for students pursuing a career in agriculture.  A smart, community-minded, good and faithful steward of the good earth’s resources, Don. 

And funny!  Lord knows there are sour-faced Christians stewing in the pews on any given Sunday. ‘Nuff said.  So, every pastor needs church members who have a quick wit, with whom we can banter, tease, and make light of ourselves. Can I get an Amen? 

So it was that after worship, Don found me in the narthex and with the mischievous glint in his eye that signals frivolity to come, said, “David, I’m not sure what to do with all the manure those animals are going to produce.”  

Whereupon I laughed, but whereupon Don shared with me that among his many exploits with MU Extension was to research, propose, and communicate to area farmers the most efficient stewardship of … livestock manure.       

Don wasn’t done with me yet.  When I awoke on New Year’s Day, I saw an email delivered the previous evening from Don who had apparently continued to ponder poop.   

“David,” he wrote, “I did a little research this afternoon.  The following site from extension service in Utah calculates a higher volume of manure from all those animals than I could ever imagine.  Normally I would rather quote sources closer to home, but I think animals poop about the same amount everywhere except maybe Arkansas where they probably don’t feed the animals as much.”  

On the first day of Christmas, your true love gives to you – a partridge in a pear tree.

Great. Thanks. But who’s going to clean up after it? 

According to Dean Miner, Utah State University Extension professor, there’s no sense in letting it go to waste.

“When considering the value of the gifts received during the 12 days of Christmas, observers often overlook the fertilizer value of the manure produced by the continually accumulating animal gifts,” he said. 

They are the gifts that keep on giving.

And how much fertilizer do partridges, turtledoves, French hens, calling birds, geese, swans and cows provide over a 12-day period?

Total manure production is 16,173.7 pounds. That’s more than 8 tons. Of this amount, 20.5 percent comes from the fowl and the remaining 79.5 percent from the dairy cows, Miner said.

This is enough nitrogen to meet the average needs of 24 residential yards, assuming that each residence receives 4 pounds of nitrogen per 1,000 square feet with 4,500 square feet of lawns and home gardens. 

You arrive at these numbers by adding up the animals that are accumulated at the end of 12 days after your true love is finished giving. 

For example, on the second day of Christmas your true love gives to you two turtledoves and yet another partridge in a pear tree. That means you have accumulated two partridges and two turtledoves in just two days. You keep going down the list and you see how quickly it all adds up.

Miner calls this “accumulated critter days.” Here is how it adds up. 

Accumulated critter days: 78 partridges, 132 turtledoves, 165 French hens, 180 calling birds, 168 geese-a-laying, 147 swans-a-swimming and 120 cows (not counting the maids-a-milking).

As pointed out, the maids-a-milking do not count because they do not fall under the winged or four-legged variety of gifts. Miner said they are considered “non-producing gifts.” The same holds true for the drumming drummers, leaping lords and piping pipers.

If you multiply the partridge’s 78 accumulated critter days by their average weight of 4 pounds, you arrive at 312 pounds of accumulated weight days. 

When you multiply 312 by .225, which is the fresh manure production factor, you arrive at 70.2 pounds of fresh manure that your partridges have produced for you over those 12 days of Christmas.

“Of course, the fresh manure production factor assumes that poultry eat 5 percent of body weight per day, of which 90 percent passes through as waste at 20 percent dry matter,” Miner said.

Turtledoves, assuming an average weight of one-half pound, produce 14.85 pounds of manure. French hens, averaging 5 pounds, produce 185.65 pounds of fertilizer. Calling birds, at 1-pound average weight, produce up to 40.5 pounds of manure. The geese, with an average weight of 30 pounds, yield 1,134 pounds of manure. The swans, at 60 pounds, produce up to 1,984.5 pounds of fresh manure. The cows, with an average weight of 1,350 pounds, bring in a whopping 13,284 pounds of pure sunshine.

Miner said typical poultry manure is 4.3 percent nitrogen, 1.6 percent phosphorus and 1.6 percent potassium. Fresh cow manure averages 2.2 percent nitrogen, 1.3 percent phosphorus and 0.8 percent potassium. This provides a total fertilizer yield of 439.63 pounds of nitrogen; 227.5 pounds of phosphorus and 161.1 pounds of potassium.

Not bad for just 12 days of Christmas. But what about after that?

“Don’t ask,” Miner said.

Not one to let Don have the last word, I offer the following biblically based response: 

The babe born in the manger grew up to serve as an Extension agent for the kingdom of heaven.  Traversing rural locales and speaking to people of the land, Jesus spoke in parables that used agricultural metaphors familiar to his down-to-earth listeners.   

In one of his parables, he told of a fig tree vineyard owner (Luke 13:6-9) who says to one of his hired farmworkers, ‘For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down!”  

Some say the vineyard owner is God. Really? “Repent you fruitless fig tree or I’m gonna cut you down!” Does that sound like the God we know in Jesus Christ?  God the barren fig tree chainsaw murderer. No! The God we know in Jesus Christ is the gardener who sees lives that are like a barren fig tree: dry, parched, lifeless. Seeing them, God says, “That isn’t life as I intended for it to be! I intend blossoms, flowers, leaves, fruit. “I have come that you might have life and it abundant.”  That’s what I want for you!    

And so what does God the gardener do?  Insists the fig tree be left alone until God can do what?  “Dig around it and put manure on it.”  God doesn’t want to cut.  God wants to cultivate!  We have a God who’s willing to get down and dirty, elbow deep in manure, working deep, rich grace into our roots, our hearts, our minds… so that we’ll bear fruit. This verse is Luke’s John 3:16: “God so loved the world that God sent his only begotten son to get down on his hands and knees and spread manure around dry fig tree lives so they might not perish, but bear fruit.”

This is a roundabout way of saying what I started off with: Happy New Year.  We’re in the caring, cultivating hands of a Master Gardener with a heart of gold, healing hands, and a wonderful sense of humor who, faced with our persistent foibles and broken resolutions to do better, keeps coming back to us, determined to bring forth the best. 

That’s no laughing matter. It’s the Gospel of our Gardener God who, over time, cultivates folks like Don Day who are good for the earth, others, and the church; a God who in this new year can and will bring forth good fruit from our lives, too.  Count on it.