Harvest Service: November 9. 2008
Jesus’ parable portrays a landowner who receives a great harvest. The landowner appears quite happy, but all too quickly his intentions go astray. He is lead by his greed away from God and into his own desires for security, ease, and wealth. Our landowner is right to rejoice in happiness, but wrong to turn away from God. We too, are right in celebrating the harvests, but we must be wary in our celebration and examine ourselves as to what this blessing means to us in our lives with God.
Celebrating the harvest may be odd when cast in the light of recent events, though. With election results to either celebrate or bemoan, a financial crisis that continues to inflict us with fear, and two wars that continue to sap our resources. It seems out of place to take a day to remember and celebrate the agricultural blessings that the good Earth has yielded through our sweat and labor. Celebrating the harvest today is not meant to suggest that focusing on the harvest will solve any of the other items in our constellation of worries and fears. Even worse, examining our heritage and future as the inheritors of Adam’s curse to forever sweat and toil with the ground may add to our list of worries.
The bounty of the harvest, though, the fruit of our labor here on Earth, is a reminder of the great blessings of God our creator and redeemer. As well, the harvest is a time for humankind to remember our original charge from our creator to be stewards of the Earth. That charge is echoed in our being drawn into the body of Christ and called to continue the ministry of reconciliation and healing of Creation.
God’s expresses his blessing to our agricultural world in the words he speaks to Noah. God promises that the Earth shall always bear fruit in its season for us. Agriculture is an inseparable element of the Hebrew culture we witness to Genesis. So far away have we stepped from the agricultural roots of civilization that our translation looses much of what is there in the Hebrew. The last verse of this Genesis passage is interwoven with agricultural imagery. Seedtime and harvest, zera vQatzir in Hebrew, refer to the fall planting of wheat and the springtime harvest of grain. Summer and Winter, qayitz v choref, do not refer to a season so much as to the fruit harvest of the summer time and the olive harvest of last fall. Where we have almost artificial words for seasons, the very words in Hebrew refer to the agricultural events that happen throughout the year. It would be like us saying “Apple Harvest time” instead of Fall, or “Flower Picking time” instead of Spring and Summer.
God’s words are a poetic promise to an agrarian people that the bountiful seasons of the Earth will never cease. Yes, man is sinful, God reminds Noah in the previous verse. But the blessing of the Earth itself, with its seasons of harvest that roll on like Day and Night, this blessing is eternal.
In the midst of our harvest rejoicing we can fall into a trap of forgetting the blessing’s source. We should not forget to see how human sinfulness trods across God’s blessing of a bountiful Earth. We often hear it said that the harvest is the fruit of our hard work, our labor, our hands. If we listen poorly, we’ll take a very selfish meaning from Psalm 128 where it says that, “we will be blessed with the fruit of our labors”. An equation gets set up in our minds, that our hard work leads to our blessings. As much as we are enamored by our productivity and we dedicate countless resources to improving our agricultural production, we leave out an essential element of the equation that yields blessing.
Luke portrays Jesus remonstrating a man from the crowd for being so tied up in the possessions of this Earth, tied up in Greed, that this man is unable to see the more important connection he should be cultivating between himself and God. The parable that follows, traditionally titled the parable of the rich fool, draws an agricultural analogy. The recipient of a bountiful harvest and is more interested in storing it for himself than considering what God is doing through this harvest. We may not immediately see ourselves as sinfully good at storing up treasures for ourselves, what considering our abysmal savings rate or the skyrocketing price of food being pushed in part by our energy needs. Jesus’ harsh words speak strongest to us in our work to take more and more of the blessings of the good Earth for ourselves right now, forgetting our role as stewards of this blessing. We are recently becoming aware that our system of tilling the fields with deep plows is causing massive erosion that may rob our midwest fields of their ability to sustain the incredible harvests that lead in part to our country’s strong growth. And while we used to pray for rain, our industrial agricultural system now has us irrigating at such levels that many rivers barely reach the sea, leaving wastelands where there used to be coastal wetlands. The cost of our desire to improve our harvest, so that we can have even more of God blessed fruitful land right now, is starting to become clear. We are forgetting our stewardship charge.
The same motivations lie in this drive that leads Jesus’ rich fool. Fear for one’s safety (next year may not be as good!), a desire for ease (more harvest means cheaper food), and selfish perspectives (God gave this land to us!). Fear and selfishness. Human sin, even here, amidst the joyful harvest time. And it is this sinful selfishness, this self-reliance run amok, that Jesus warns us about through the rich fool. In our pursuit of self-reliance through ever more proficient methods of taking from the Earth, we turn away from God. We decide that we do not need God, we need only more efficient plows, stronger chemical fertilizers, and more water diverted.
The blessed Earth will still produce, but not as our will demands. It is not our blessing that we reap with our hands, but God’s blessing. Our work is not for our glory, our work is for God’s glory. It is this transformation that Jesus calls us to, that we are to be humble as we rejoice in the harvest. Humility not deny us the joy of celebrating the harvest. Instead, humility helps us to celebrate the source of the blessing, our loving creator, God. In the overall equation, where before we left out the essential ingredient of God’s overflowing love, we now find that our contributions, our sweat, toil, and ingenuity, are overshadowed by the overwhelming grace of God who in his creation and blessings has left to us a beautiful land that produces so richly.
Finding more environmentally friendly ways to reap the blessed harvests is part of our place as God’s children, as part of our calling to be good stewards, even good shepherds. We remember that we are called into the body of Christ, to continue his ministry of reconciliation and healing in this world. Paul refers to Christ, the greatest blessing to creation, with an agricultural metaphor: the first fruits. When we learn to humbly to lift up the blessings of the harvest, we better learn to lift up the first fruits, the body of Christ called into the world to renew and restore all things to God. When we celebrate the harvest with humble hearts, we again take our place offering thanks to God for his innumerable blessings, chief among them being Jesus Christ.
Readings:
Genesis 8:13-22
Psalm 128
1 Corinthians 15:19-28
Luke 12:13-21
November 13, 2008 at 10:07 pm
Your sermon is so eloquently written and delivered, I wish I had a more eloquent way of expressing my gratitude for it. This sermon can be understood or pondered on so many levels. First is the obvious – how are we being stewards of our creation? How do we go about repairing – repenting if you will, turing away from our old ways towards better ones that are in line with caring for God’s Creation. And even more specifically – looking at our food industry and what is has become. This is an area of great personal interest to me, which I will be looking into more. I’ve known this about myself, but your sermon was a great reminder and nudge to go back to that and develop some focus. The sermon is also a great relief – God’s promise that He will provide – the fruits will be born in their season. And I tend to believe that we, as people, cannot repair the physical damage we have inflicted on the environment, but in the same way that Christ reconciles us to God, he can reconcile creation. All we have to do is accept it – repent – again turn away – from the old ways and back towards the ways of God and the spirit will take care of the rest. Perhaps that’s a simple way of thinking. Of course one can also interprest this on a personal level. We struggle and struggle to be productive, make things happen. This is the American way – fierce individualism and indepence – pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality. We forget though, that we don’t do it alone. It pains me when I hear people who take credit for their own success – call themselves “self made,” forgetting their advantages and God’s blessings that contributed to their success. Again, God’s message is a relief as well – that I am not the source of my success alone. Thanks Matthew – I’m so glad you gave this message to the parish!
November 14, 2008 at 12:08 am
Dear Matthew,
What a harvest of beautiful inspiring words and feelings! Thank you for inspiring to focus on what really matters and overcome fear.
Blessings,
Elvira