November 22, 2009
Psalm 126
In just a couple days, a pilgrimage of sorts will happen all across this great nation of ours, as people will load up their cars and make their way across town or across the state or up to the airport to fly to some distant place where they’ll stick their knees under a table surrounded by oddball relatives, tables piled high with food we pretty much eat only once a year. Depending on how widely scattered your family is (or if you even have family with whom to share the big day), the table will be a bigger or smaller deal, but to the nation’s farm economy, why, Thanksgiving is a very big deal. According to HealthDiaries, a website that knows stuff:
- Of the 272 million turkeys raised in the United States this year, some 45 million of them are set to be eaten on Thursday, Minnesota being one of the top turkey-growing states in the Union, and this the bird Benjamin Franklin wanted named as our national bird (the Bald Eagle notwithstanding, if you can imagine…).
- This year nearly 300,000 Tofurkeys will be sold over the holiday season—the vegetarian option, along with almost 700 million pounds of cranberries (most of them grown in the soil of our good neighbor to the East, the great state of Wisconsin, the nation’s #1 producer of cranberries (from which my momma makes my very favorite food in the whole wide world: cranberry relish).
- A billion pounds of pumpkins were at least scheduled to be produced in the U.S. this year, most of them in Illinois, until weather conditions this Fall threatened the crop and thereby the pie, though, I’ve been told, not to worry—I think we’re going to be OK, especially Wednesday night here at Emmaus...
It is our big day, coming right up, worthy of a pilgrimage…
I often read the Governor’s Proclamation at Thanksgiving time (either to you, the congregation, or at least to myself). I’m talking about the words of Governor William Bradford of the Plymouth Colony, allegedly written in 1623—goes like this:
Inasmuch as the great Father has given us this year an abundant harvest of Indian corn, wheat, peas, squashes and garden vegetables, and has made the forest to abound with game and the sea with fish and clams, and inasmuch as he has protected us and spared us from pestilence, and granted us freedom to worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience, now I, your magistrate do proclaim that all ye Pilgrims, with your wives and ye little ones, do gather at ye meeting house, on ye hill, between the hours of nine and twelve in the daytime (that would be both services and Sunday School, for those of you scoring at home) on Thursday, November ye 29th, in the year of our Lord one thousand six hundred and twenty-three, and the third year since ye Pilgrims landed on ye Plymouth Rock, there to listen to ye Pastor and render Thanksgiving to ye Almighty God for all his blessings.
There’s that word again: “pilgrim”— refers to a wayfarer, somebody who travels in a foreign land, or somebody who travels to a holy place to visit as an expression of their religious or spiritual devotion. That would be how the word was used during the time of the Bible, going way back to the Old Testament, as God’s people, the Hebrews, would load up the car and make their three annual journeys (called “pilgrimages”) to the Holy City of Jerusalem. Didn’t matter where they lived, they would just drop everything, make that long hike, with extended family and friends and neighbors, caravan-style. In the Spring it was to remember God’s saving ways with them at the Feast of Passover; in early Summer it was to renew their promise to live as people of the covenant at what was called the Feast of Pentecost; and then in the Fall they would celebrate the myriad ways God had blessed them in the Feast of Tabernacles. That was the cycle, the ritual pilgrimages and feasts that gave their spiritual lives order and continuity.
Jerusalem was the highest city geographically in all of Palestine, which meant their journey was one that took them up, up, up—tougher getting there than it was getting home. And as they walked, they would sing—sing the great songs of their faith. These were the songs we find tucked away toward the end of the Book of Psalms, the part called, in Hebrew, sire hamm’’elot—the Songs of Ascents. They’re the psalms numbered 120 through 134 in our Hebrew Bible, and they talk about the vast resources God intends for us along the way of discipleship: resources of worship and repentance and service, of perseverance and hope and humility, of obedience and community and providence. They are such wonderful songs for the road, ways of expressing God’s amazing grace and of quieting anxious fears. For those of you who are a little younger, here this morning, your parents and your grandparents, when we were little, we didn’t have video games or DVD players in the car when we went on a trip, so we would sing together to make the trip go faster. It’s kind of fun—something you might want to try sometime… And that’s what we’ve come to here, this morning—a song for the road, Psalm 126, set right in the middle of this songbook, the Songs of Ascents, this word about God’s intended joy for us.
I didn’t grow up on a farm. Not even close. Got to go to my Aunt Luetta and Uncle Roland’s farm every now and again in South Dakota, so I did know a little bit—just enough to blind me into thinking farming is all romance and not much work… (“Yeah, right!”) Which may be why a story I read years ago so spoke to me (and still does). It was told by a guy who had grown up a pastor’s kid in sleepy little towns across Minnesota and South Dakota, spending most of his free time on tractors with his buddies who were farmers’ kids. And it was out there in the field on those John Deeres and International Harvesters, those Cases and Minneapolis Molines, that he learned to drill oats and plant corn and cultivate. But never once did he see a farmer behave like it says here in Psalm 126, this nonsense about “sowing in tears.” To the contrary, the Spring of the year was always so exciting, such a time of anticipation, as planting season began. This was the season of promise and expectation and hope--what in the world was there to weep about at sowing time, he wondered. He said:
I was always perplexed by Psalm 126, until I went to sub-Saharan Africa, that is--that vast stretch of land more than four thousand miles wide just below the great Sahara desert. It’s called the “Sahel,” a place where all the moisture comes in a four-month period: May, June, July and August. After that, not a drop falls for eight months. The ground literally cracks from dryness, so do your hands and feet. The winds off the Sahara pick up the dust, throw it thousands of feet in the air where it then comes slowly drifting across West Africa as a fine grit. It gets in your mouth. It gets inside your watch and stops it. It gets inside your refrigerator (if you’re lucky enough to have one).
It means the year’s food must all be grown in those four wet months. People grow sorghum in fields no bigger than this sanctuary, their only tools being the strength of their backs and maybe a short-handled hoe. No Massey-Fergusons out there--the average annual income between eighty-five and a hundred dollars per person (that’s annual income).
October and November—right about now in Africa—those are the beautiful months. The granaries are full—the harvest has come. People sing and dance. They eat two meals a day—one about ten in the morning, after they’ve been to the field for awhile, and the other just after sundown. The sorghum is ground between two stones to make flour and then a mush the consistency of yesterday’s malt-o-meal. They roll it into little balls with their fingers and then drop it in a bit of sauce and pop it in their mouths where the meal lies heavy in their stomachs so they can sleep.
December comes and the granaries start to recede. Most families omit the morning meal. Certainly by January not one family in fifty is still eating two meals a day. By February, the evening meal diminishes. People feel the deep clutch of hunger. The meal shrinks even more during March, and children succumb to sickness. You simply cannot stay healthy on half a meal a day.
April is the month that haunts the memory-- the month you hear babies crying in the twilight—from the village over here, the village over there. Their mother’s milk has stopped. Parents go this time of year to the bush country, where they scrape the bark from the trees--dig up roots and collect leaves, grind it all together to make a thin gruel. They may pawn a chair, a cooking pot, or bicycle tires in order to buy a little more grain from those wealthy enough to still have some, but most days are passed with only an evening cup of gruel.
But then, inevitably, it happens. A six- or seven-year-old comes running to daddy one day with a burst of excitement. “Daddy! Daddy! We’ve got grain!” Father says, “No, no--you know we haven’t had grain for weeks.” “Oh yes we have!” the child insists. “Out in the hut, where we keep the goats, there’s a leather sack hanging up on the wall. I reached up and put my hand in there. Daddy, there’s grain in there! Give it to Mommy so she can make flour and tonight our tummies can sleep.”
The father stands without moving. “Child, we can’t do that,” he explains, ever so softly. “That’s next year’s seed grain. It’s the only thing between us and starvation. We’re waiting on the rains, and then we must use it.”
The rains finally come in May, and when they do, the child watches as the father takes the sack from the wall and does the most unimaginable thing. Instead of feeding his desperately weakened family, he goes to the field and—there are those who have witnessed this—with tears streaming down his face, he takes the precious seed and throws it away--scatters it in the dirt. Why? Because he believes in the harvest, that’s why. The seed is his; he owns it. He can do anything with it he wants. But, as African pastors say when they preach on Psalm 126, “Brothers and sisters, this is the law of God’s harvest. Do not expect to rejoice later on unless you have been willing to sow in tears.” (From Missionary Del Tarr)
And so I want to ask, this morning: What might it cost you to sow in tears? What might it cost me? I’m not talking about giving God something from our abundance. I’m talking about finding a way to say, “I believe in the harvest, and therefore I will give what makes no sense to give. The world will call me unreasonable to do this, but I must sow regardless, in order that I may one day celebrate with songs of joy.”
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