I’m not a big fan of Facebook, but I do have a Facebook account. Sometimes I go weeks without looking at Facebook, sometimes I look at it every day for a while. I first signed up years ago when our nephew was traveling in Central and South America. He posted pictures and news of his travels on Facebook from time to time and it was a place to keep up with his travels. Later, I found it one way to connect with people whom I had known years ago, but with whom I had lost touch. A few years ago, I went through a period of checking on high school classmates as they planned the 50th anniversary reunion for our class. I’m not a reunion goer, and I did not attend, but I posted greetings to former classmates and also posted a couple of grade school papers that my mother had kept, including a class list from the second grade that was distributed so we would have the names of everyone in our class to write Valentine’s Day cards.

Through those contacts, I joined a Facebook group called “You Know You’re From Big Timber, Montana, if you remember . . .” It is a place for sharing memories and photographs from our home town. Most of the posts, however, aren’t of much interest to me. I was born and raised in Big Timber, but I left that town when I was 17 years old and haven’t lived there, except for a few summer months, since. Many of the “old time” photographs that appear in the Facebook group are from the years after I left the town.

There was a time when my family was prominent in that place. Our family company ran the operation at the airport, had the John Deere dealership, a feed warehouse, and sold gasoline, diesel, and a wide variety of farm and ranch supplies. Our store, where 4th avenue met the highway, was known as “The store with the plow on the roof.” On the roof of our showroom was a single bottom moldboard plow with a wooden beam, designed to be drawn by a horse. It wasn’t as old as the original 1837 John Deere plow that is featured in the national Museum of American History. I was taught that john Deere invented the steel plow, but that isn’t quite accurate. What John Deere did was to develop the concept. The 1837 polished steel plow was a significant step forward in the development of American agriculture because the implement was sharp enough to cut through the surface grass and turn the soil in a single pass. The implement made a huge contribution to the transformation of the prairies into productive grain production.

The plow that was on the roof of our store now resides in the Crazy Mountain Museum. Visitors there can learn about the history of agriculture in the region, but there is nothing in the display that tells the story of how that particular plow spent part of its life on the roof of a John Deere showroom.

I was thinking of the plow last summer because I read an article that the John Deere company discontinued production of the 3710 moldboard plow. After 175 years in the business of manufacturing plows, the machinery company no longer makes a plow. Tillage practices have changed in recent years and contemporary farming operations no longer need that kind of major tillage equipment.

Seeing how much changes with the passage of time, I have no doubt that after a few more years, people won’t know how plows worked. We forget quickly.

The biblical book of Isaiah begins with a description of peace in the second chapter: “they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they earn war any more.” It is a bold vision of a world at peace. The vision, however, has remained a vision since it was first written. Countries continue to go to war with other countries. The trade in weapons is part of the world economy. The peace that Isaiah envisioned did not come for Judah and Israel. During the span of history recorded in Isaiah, Jerusalem falls and the people are carried off into exile. The country suffers a resounding military defeat.

The verses from 2 Isaiah are part of the scripture that will be read in worship in our congregation as we are following the Narrative Lectionary this year. I wonder how many people in our mostly urban, sophisticated college town congregation know what a plowshare is. I’m willing to bet that most people think of the moldboard when they think of plowshare. The moldboard is the curved blade that turns the soil as the plow passes. The innovation of the John Deere plow was that John Deere put a removable and replaceable tempered steel edge on the bottom of the moldboard to cut through the soil. The cutting edge is the part that has the name plowshare. It was a distinction that was unknown in the time of Isaiah, when the term plowshare referred to all of the metal on a tillage tool.

That is pretty much trivia. I don’t think that preachers need to know the names of the parts of a plow bottom in order to get the concept of turning weapons of war into tillage tools. The transition from war to agriculture is the main point of the story, not the specifics of the construction of plows. I’ve been thinking about it because I will be sharing the time with children this week and I like to have a strong visual image to share with the children. I’ve decided that there is no need for me to run down an actual plowshare. I suspect that not very many of the members of the congregation would recognize one anyway. Instead, I’ll probably use a hand cultivator that we use in the garden that has a cutting edge and a tiny curved blade that turns the soil.

I’m thinking that the fact that John Deere has gone out of the plow business is probably a complication that is unnecessary in telling the story. It’s a good thing I have my journal to write down these stray thoughts that have little value in other settings.