Harvests of Joy — A Sermon for Thanksgiving

Rev. Rachel preached this sermon on Sunday evening, Nov. 18th, for the Berea Ministerial Association’s Community Thanksgiving Service.  It was an interactive sermon — read the italics to understand what else was going on!
 
“Harvests of Joy”
Rev. Rachel F. Small Stokes
Nov. 18, 2012 (c)
Psalm 126
 

Psalm 126 

(read half on one side of the congregation, half on the other)

¹When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream.
²Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy; then it was said among the nations, “The Lord has done great things for them.”
³The Lord has done great things for us, and we rejoiced.
⁴Restore our fortunes, O Lord, like the watercourses in the Negeb.
⁵May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy.
⁶Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves.
 ————————-
 
Welcome to the season of giving thanks.  We’ve made it through the long growing season and the hard work of the harvest, and now we rejoice!
This psalm, at first glance, is perfect for Thanksgiving.  What better holiday than the feast of pumpkin pie to read of shouts of joy and mouths full of laughter?  What a great time of year to say, “The Lord has done great things for us!” and to rejoice.  Indeed, it is a great time of year for this, and for many of us it will be easy to give praise to God for all that has been done for us.
But for the writer of this psalm, this was not the case.
This psalm was written not a time of joy, but at time when the only thing they had going for them was the memory of joy.  It was written in a time of sowing seeds in sorrow, of weeping for all that has been lost.
It was written long after the Israelites had been joyfully reunited with their homeland, and things had gone sour once again.  It was written when the waters of wealth and blessings seemed to have dried up like the now-dusty riverbeds.
It was written in a time of Hurricane Sandy, and a time of renewed violence in Israel, and a time of economic uncertainty and political fear in our nation, and a time of harvesting what’s left of a drought-ridden field.
This is a psalm of hope in what is likely to be only the beginning of winter.
From where does this hope come?  In this psalm, the hope does not come from the hills — that’s Psalm 121 you’re thinking of.
Rather, in this psalm, it comes from memory.
It comes from the recalling of the stories of our ancestors, whose faith brought them through one desert after another only to experience blessing and renewal once again.
It comes from faith in the cycle of life that teaches us that, even when we feel far from our God, it is only a matter of time before we will be reunited.
It comes from the belief that trouble does not last always, and joy comes in the morning.
It comes from the foolish but somehow trustworthy faith that, with God, you can sow seeds in the tears of winter, and reap a joyful harvest in the spring.
Just like the psalmists, we learn this faith from our own experiences of joy, and from those that have been handed down to us.
I’d like to open this up for a little interactive time.  Think, for just a minute, of a time when you felt true joy, and I will invite you to share those moments of joy with the congregation.  To get you started, I’ll tell you about a friend of mine who brought her two year-old baby to the ocean for the first time.  She set him down in the surf, and expected to hear a cry, but instead he sat back, looking shocked, and then, suddenly got a huge smile on his face, threw his arms up in the air, and laughed and laughed.  Pure joy.
 
(The reader is invited to remember other times of joy, just as the congregation shared their own times of joy.)
 
In sharing all these experiences of joy, did you feel something happen in the room?  Did you feel a tingle?  Or perhaps, since we’re in the house of John Wesley, your heart being strangely warmed?
These memories are our food in times of drought, in times of winter.
They are our hope.
The amazing poet and writer Nikki Giovanni was here on the Berea campus this week, and she read a poem that reminded me of this phenomenon.  The poem is called “Migrations,” and it reflects upon the ways in which animals endure great hardships for the joy they hope to reap in the future.  I’d like to read it for you now.
 
“Migrations”
(by Nikki Giovanni, from Bicycles: Love Poems, Harper Collins, 2009.)

When the sun returns
to the arctic circle
from its winter rest
The grasses sprout
seducing the winged
and the hoofed
Polar bears and their cubs
must flee
Before the ice
breaks up
Although others begin
a northern journey
The Snow Goose flies
from the Gulf of Mexico
to mate and birth her young
Two million Mongolian Gazelles move
over the tundra where each gives birth
at the same time defying
the will of predators
who would consume
the gazelles’ future
Though only, of course,
to provide nourishment
for their own
young predators
Let’s not judge
too harshly
Salmon swim upstream
jumping falls
and grizzly bears
Grasshoppers
ignoring the advice
Of ants
make music
to celebrate
Winter’s end
Monarch butterflies
leaving the safety
Of Zihuatenejo
forge north
Beginning the longest winged journey
of Spring
With only the hope of warmth
and the promise of grasses
They unflinchingly face:
Hunger
Thirst
Predators
Winds
Rains
Uncertainties
As would I
For you
 
As would God, for you.  And perhaps, given the right memory of joy and hope that it could return, as would you, for God.
I have done a strange thing today.  I have set before you cups of soil, and beans that are ready to plant.  It wouldn’t be so weird if this were the spring.  But in fact, it’s a VERY weird thing to do at harvest season.  So weird, in fact, that Wal-Mart did not have a single seed to sell me, unless it was pasted to a pine cone Christmas ornament!
This is not a season for sowing seeds.  It’s a season for reaping, and, as our culture tells us, what you reap is what you deserve.  If you’ve been good, you get a lot of food, or toys, or gifts.  If not, your crops are dry, your stocking will be full of coal, your plate will be empty.
The winter harvest is where you find out how you’ve been judged.
Well.
That might be what our culture tells us, and what advertisements work very hard to make us believe, but it is NOT what this psalm suggests.
This is a psalm that tells us to go ahead and plant seeds in the winter.  It’s a psalm that tells us to journey on, no matter what, because the harvest WILL be great.  Joy will come.  Laughter will bubble out.
Sometime, somehow, it will happen again.  We know this because it has happened before, and we walk in the faith that our God will lead us there again.
 
At the end of the sermon, I’ll invite each of you to come up, and as you do you’ll walk on the news of the day (newspapers were spread along the floor of the sanctuary), the headlines of the battles being fought and the sorrows for which tears are shed around the world today.
In faith, come anyway, come, and take a bean, and place it in your cup.   (The altar rail was filled with small cups of soil, beans, and markers.)

 
We’re doing this because Thanksgiving can be tricky.
For some, this is a season not filled with the joy of reunions and delicious food, but darkened with the dread of a family dysfunction, or death, or a lack of ability to provide the meal so heralded by media and tradition.   It’s a season in which the glossy dream of a turkey is cut open to reveal the sawdust of dashed expectations.  It’s a season in which a summer-long drought ended in a forest fire that took everything but your faith, and maybe that, too.
If that is your thanksgiving experience this year, take one of these seeds and plant it.
Plant it in the foolish hope that a little bean, with a little sun and water and love and gratitude, will grow – even in winter.  Plant it with audacity, and know that even if THIS particular bean doesn’t grow, some bean, somewhere, will, and one day that bean will be yours to feast upon.  One day, you will have sheaves of joy.
 
For others, this is a quiet time – a time to reflect on the gifts we have, and to practice the more-difficult-by-the-year discipline of believing that what we have is actually enough.  It is one small but deep breath of gratitude that we hope will fill us with enough sanity that it will allow us to safely navigate the craziness of Black Friday without bankrupting ourselves in soul and wallet.  It is a moment to look around the table and notice that everyone looks beautiful in the candlelight.
If that is your thanksgiving experience this year, take one of these seeds and plant it.
Plant it in full gratitude, knowing that whether or not this seed grows, it is a symbol of your blessings.  It is a reminder that your gratitudes need watering and care, and that your sanity is a gift that will keep giving as long as you keep attending to it.  Plant it and know that, when the craziness does hit, you have a stronger soil from which to be nourished.  You have the promise of joy.
 
For still others, this is already a joyous holiday.  It may not be Norman Rockwell, but it is a time to reconnect with beloved family and friends, to share a meal that is mostly an excuse for gathering and then relaxing (or napping) in close proximity to those you feel most comfortable with. There might be football or pie-making or card-playing, or mapping out the perfect shopping route for the next day.  There will be mouths full of both laughter and turkey, shouts of joy and squirts of whipped cream.
If that is your thanksgiving experience this year, take one of these seeds and plant it.
Plant it and set it carefully in the windowsill where it will continue to be nurtured by the sunshine of God’s love and the water of your gratitude. Let your joy become contagious, with this little bean plant reminding you not only of those things of which you are grateful, but also of the ways you can help others. Let this be the inspiration for you to help others have enough beans, enough corn, enough turkey and dressing.
Invite the lost and lonely to your feast.
Let this little bean remind you of your connectedness to your family and friends, as well as to the wider world that so needs the joy you have to share.
 
Wherever you are on the journey this thanksgiving, you are part of the great migration.
You are part of this annual festival of thanks in which we flood our God with pent-up gratitude, in which the sunlight of God’s love is invited to shine a bit more strongly through the cracks in our darkened places.
Whether it’s a winter of our discontent, or, as a picture on facebook that’s been going around says, “the winter of our disco tent,” yours is a journey toward warmth.   It’s a journey past hunger, thirst, predators, winds, rain, and uncertainties, and into the arms of a loving God who has been migrating toward you this whole time.
It’s a journey that makes it worth planting a seed of faith and hope, even in winter, and believing that one day again, our mouths will be filled with laughter, and our tongues with shouts of joy.
Come, and plant your seeds.
Amen

(The congregation came up the altar and planted seeds while musicians played hymns of Thanksgiving.  After all were finished, we blessed them with this blessing.  Attributions below.)
       Blessing For Seeds
      
       Leader:   Giver of Life,
Pour out your blessing like rainfall
upon the seeds we have planted,
That they may grow to nourish your people.
Make us vigilant caretakers of these plants as they grow.
       People:   We trust you to do your part and we will do ours!  Amen.

 
The blessing comes from “A Better Harvest, An Intergenerational Liturgy for Thanksgiving Day,” written by the Rev. Dr. Laurel Koepf Taylor.  Copyright 2012 Local Church Ministries, Congregational Vitality and Discipleship Ministry Team, United Church of Christ.