Time for Harvest - September 29, 2013
Scripture
Hebrew – Amos 6:1a, 4-7
Christian – Luke 16:19-31
Anthem
Autumn Splendor by Dan Gibson
Sermon: “Time of Harvest”
As the year slowly winds down, it's also the time for us to harvest what's within. For me at least, summer is a whirlwind time of swim meets and practices, beach visits, gardening, and running around like crazy. With autumn comes the more quiet time. It's time to process through all that we've done in the summer, and time to focus on preparations for the winter.
So with autumn comes apples. Have you ever harvested apples? Apples are funny things. They're pretty hardy fruit, as fruit goes. Still, there's a reason we have a saying about how one bad apple will spoil the rest. It's very true; if one apple has a bruise, the one next to it will soon have a bruise, and the damage will spread through the whole batch. When I evaluate my autumn internal harvest, I have to be just as picky about what to keep and what to let go of. One little bad habit can easily spread through my life and ruin a whole batch of good intentions.
This is a good time to take inventory. It's something I learned years ago from the Alcoholics Anonymous program: make a “searching and fearless moral inventory”. It's a great idea, whether you're talking about your pantry or your soul. Take note of the good and the bad, what's set to stay and what has to go. When you take inventory, it does you no good to only write down the items that are good, ignoring and leaving the negative things on the shelf. Neither is it profitable to simply remove all the negatives and ignore the positives. The approach must be balanced.
It's not EASY though. It hurts, sometimes, to bring out the things from your past that you'd like to forget. Still, like lancing a boil, it brings relief and healing. The negatives pour out, emptying you of their influence, and the positives become the bandage to help you be healthy until you heal.
What you do on a daily basis directly affects what happens to you as your life unfolds. In gardening terms, you reap what you sow. The seeds you choose to put into your metaphorical ground today will grow into plants tomorrow and all the days to come, and while outside issues can affect that growth, the base responsibility is yours and no one else's.
There are questions you can ask. “How does (this trait) affect my life, physically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally... even financially? How can you improve on it if it's positive? How can you reduce it if it's negative? If it's neutral, perhaps its time to investigate whether it has any real use in your life.
In our Hebrew Scripture, Amos talks about how he mourns for those who are “at ease in Zion”. It's not that he thinks their physical items are bad, but that in enjoying their material goods they are neglecting their spiritual health. Spiritual health is just as important as physical, something we know for a fact from studies done. When spiritual health declines, physical and mental health quickly follow.
In Luke, Jesus talks about the rich man and the poor man dying, and how the rich man went down, and the poor man went up. The rich man didn't descend into torment because he was rich; he descended because he did nothing with his material gains. He did not help the poor man, nor did he encourage his younger brothers to seek wisdom in the Torah and from the wise men. Instead, they just enjoyed their riches and ignored everything else. Had they taken a moral inventory, they would have learned how much they lacked in their wealth.
So let's take a moral inventory, here, now. Let's take a moment to investigate our spiritual health. What are some of the positives that are in our lives?
So we listen to this list, and I say to you – you are rich people! I feel rich just standing here talking to you. I know that when I list out my positives, I'm absolutely floored by the sheer number of them.
But knowing the good things alone isn't enough. We have to examine the shortcomings, as well. So what are some of the negatives that are in our lives?
There are times when I can come up with a list of negatives a mile long, and the positives are hard to find. There are other times when the positives are shining and the negatives hide and I have to really think about them. Regardless, it's important to unearth both. Clean off those spiritual shelves, and make room for new stock to come in: things like hope, and joy, and love!
Going back to the rich and the poor in our Scriptures, we see Jesus and Amos both mourning those who are indolent, who have a lot of money and do nothing with it. They're both angry at those who have influence in their society, in their era, the ones who are supposed to be leading the people but are instead too busy loving money and thinking about themselves.
Back then, just as today, people believed a lot of different things about money. In fact, in the Bible there is a kind of "prosperity theology" that says God wants you to be rich, and if you're rich, well, God must be rewarding you. It's a sign of God's favor. The other side of this belief, we can figure, is that the poor somehow deserve their fate. It's their punishment for something they did or didn't do. Or maybe their parents did or didn't do. Of course, that doesn't fit with other parts of the Bible that tell us to live justly and to take care of those in need. Let's face it – the Bible has many different voices in it.
Money itself is neutral – it can be used for good or evil. It's the love of money, we hear, that leads us astray. That's comforting, especially if we have a little money, or a lot. Money is not evil. Just the love of it is, the mother of all evils, someone has said. After all, money brings with it power, prestige, security – it's an easy thing to love, I guess.
In another Scripture, Paul tells Timothy what to tell his wealthy church members: "As for those who in the present age are rich, command them not to be haughty, or to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but rather on God who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. They are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share, thus storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of the life that really is life."
I don't know about you, but I feel a bit of tension here. Which is it – do you have to give up all your possessions to follow Jesus, or not? Can we be both rich and faithful? Paul seems to think so. Jesus…well, that's not so clear, is it?
What I do see is that there's a very fine line between riches on earth and riches in heaven. What we have here sustains us in body, and this is indeed a body we were given by God, and commanded to care for. It's the temple through which we worship God. Yet, that temple is going to pass away, just as every other temple has and will. Remember the old adage: “You can't take it with you.”
But you can share it. And that brings us back to apples and giving thanks for what we do have.
I spent the last three weeks processing apples. I was lucky enough to be given access to a heritage apple tree in Peterborough, NH, owned by my husband's boss. It was full of apples which I expected (from their size and color) to be tart. Instead, they turned out to be honey sweet. And so I've been peeling and coring and slicing and simmering and adding sugar and cinnamon to them, making applesauce. I have pints and quarts of applesauce in my pantry right now.
Come Thanksgiving and Christmas, that applesauce will go out to friends and family, and to anyone in need that I know of and is local enough to me to allow me to get it to them. I share my harvests, even the tiny ones, because in giving away the fruits of my labor, I get back so much more.
Both physical and spiritual riches are like that. The more you give them away, the more you get in return. Our blessings can be gifts that give and give and give, and expand like ripples over a pond. One act of happy giving, whether of money or time or material goods, opens up doors all the way across the globe.
In our Scriptures, Luke is trying to warn us, to teach us, that the blessings of this world can turn us inward, or outward, Margaret Shuster observes, and these words really ought to go right to our hearts: Our money and possessions – and our love of them – she says, can make us "self-consumed, self-important, self-satisfied, self-indulgent, and insensitive to others…it will not be enough to say that we just did not pay attention or that we had intended to help someone tomorrow, or that we surely meant no harm to the helpless around us…" (The Lectionary Commentary: The Gospels).
What if, instead, we turned ourselves over to the imagination of the kingdom of God, an imagination that leads to empathy, to feeling with others who are suffering and in need, and then, to acting on their behalf? I think the readings are saying that this is the path to the life that really is life. It's also the path to joy.
I think, too, that it's difficult for those of us lucky enough to live in this country to understand what it means to be poor in Israel or Palestine. If your family income is $10,000 a year, you are wealthier than 84 percent of the world. If it's $50,000 or more a year, you make more than 99 percent of the world. That's one of the more oft-cited stats. The World Bank, Poke's Global Rich List and various economists have a bunch of perspective-gathering statistics to chew on if you have some time to go online and find out just how rich you are. They can also back up their numbers.
When we think of it from that point of view, when we think that, as a people, we generally spend most of our time comparing prices on items rather than scrounging to find something, anything at all... it changes how we approach being Godly people. Even our poorest people have more than 99 percent of the world's population. How sad and yet how wonderful is that?
What if... what if we're not the rich man, or the poor man? What if we're not the people Amos is mourning for? What if instead, we are the five brothers? What if... we just have to open our eyes? That is the hardest part, after all, seeing what's right in front of us. Spiritual and moral inventories are one way to learn how to open our eyes, to see the obvious things before us. Are we ready, then, to listen to the words of Moses and the prophets, as they speak to our souls?
It's time to open our ears, I say, and our eyes. It's time to witness what's going on around us, to listen to the words of our ancestors and also to the contemporary wise men and women who populate the world around us. It's time for us to harvest and to share that harvest with our family, our friends, and those around us who need what we can provide.
Let me share with you a prayer written by Ray Stedman some years ago. Please join me in this prayer:
Lord Jesus, we thank you for these clear and precise words that cut through the haze and vagueness of much of our thinking, and help us to set things in right perspective, to bring life into focus again. What is life, Lord, if it is lived apart from relationship to you? It is but an empty dream, a mere fantasy, filling our days and hours, months, and years with nothing but emptiness and that which is illusion. Lord we pray that we may, understanding this, give ourselves to you, that even now young people and older ones alike may in this moment of clarity of thought, give themselves to you; to begin where they ought to begin, with Moses and the prophets, and the One of whom the prophets spoke, the Lord Jesus Christ. Thank you for this in his name, Amen.
Benediction
As you go out into the world today, to put the finish on your glorious autumn weekend, take with you the words of this prayer. It's called, simply,
The Harvest Prayer, and we don't know who wrote it, although it was penned in the 17th century as part of a sermon.
Please be gentle with yourself and others.
We are all children of chance,
And none can say why some fields blossom
While others lay brown beneath the harvest sun.
Take hope that your season will come.
Share the joy of those whose season is at hand.
Care for those around you.
Look past your differences.
Their dreams are no less than yours,
Their choices in life no more easily made.
And give.
Give in any way you can.
Give in every way you can.
Give whatever you possess.
Give from your heart.
To give is to love.
To withhold is to wither.
Care less for the size of your harvest than for how it is shared,
And your life with have meaning
And your heart will have peace.
Amen, and may you have a fantastic week!
Hebrew – Amos 6:1a, 4-7
Christian – Luke 16:19-31
Anthem
Autumn Splendor by Dan Gibson
Sermon: “Time of Harvest”
As the year slowly winds down, it's also the time for us to harvest what's within. For me at least, summer is a whirlwind time of swim meets and practices, beach visits, gardening, and running around like crazy. With autumn comes the more quiet time. It's time to process through all that we've done in the summer, and time to focus on preparations for the winter.
So with autumn comes apples. Have you ever harvested apples? Apples are funny things. They're pretty hardy fruit, as fruit goes. Still, there's a reason we have a saying about how one bad apple will spoil the rest. It's very true; if one apple has a bruise, the one next to it will soon have a bruise, and the damage will spread through the whole batch. When I evaluate my autumn internal harvest, I have to be just as picky about what to keep and what to let go of. One little bad habit can easily spread through my life and ruin a whole batch of good intentions.
This is a good time to take inventory. It's something I learned years ago from the Alcoholics Anonymous program: make a “searching and fearless moral inventory”. It's a great idea, whether you're talking about your pantry or your soul. Take note of the good and the bad, what's set to stay and what has to go. When you take inventory, it does you no good to only write down the items that are good, ignoring and leaving the negative things on the shelf. Neither is it profitable to simply remove all the negatives and ignore the positives. The approach must be balanced.
It's not EASY though. It hurts, sometimes, to bring out the things from your past that you'd like to forget. Still, like lancing a boil, it brings relief and healing. The negatives pour out, emptying you of their influence, and the positives become the bandage to help you be healthy until you heal.
What you do on a daily basis directly affects what happens to you as your life unfolds. In gardening terms, you reap what you sow. The seeds you choose to put into your metaphorical ground today will grow into plants tomorrow and all the days to come, and while outside issues can affect that growth, the base responsibility is yours and no one else's.
There are questions you can ask. “How does (this trait) affect my life, physically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally... even financially? How can you improve on it if it's positive? How can you reduce it if it's negative? If it's neutral, perhaps its time to investigate whether it has any real use in your life.
In our Hebrew Scripture, Amos talks about how he mourns for those who are “at ease in Zion”. It's not that he thinks their physical items are bad, but that in enjoying their material goods they are neglecting their spiritual health. Spiritual health is just as important as physical, something we know for a fact from studies done. When spiritual health declines, physical and mental health quickly follow.
In Luke, Jesus talks about the rich man and the poor man dying, and how the rich man went down, and the poor man went up. The rich man didn't descend into torment because he was rich; he descended because he did nothing with his material gains. He did not help the poor man, nor did he encourage his younger brothers to seek wisdom in the Torah and from the wise men. Instead, they just enjoyed their riches and ignored everything else. Had they taken a moral inventory, they would have learned how much they lacked in their wealth.
So let's take a moral inventory, here, now. Let's take a moment to investigate our spiritual health. What are some of the positives that are in our lives?
- health
- good friends
- good food
- enough money to get by
- church family
- happy family at home
So we listen to this list, and I say to you – you are rich people! I feel rich just standing here talking to you. I know that when I list out my positives, I'm absolutely floored by the sheer number of them.
But knowing the good things alone isn't enough. We have to examine the shortcomings, as well. So what are some of the negatives that are in our lives?
- overweight
- depression
- family member passed away
- bad health
- smoking/drinking/drugs (self or family)
- get frustrated easily
There are times when I can come up with a list of negatives a mile long, and the positives are hard to find. There are other times when the positives are shining and the negatives hide and I have to really think about them. Regardless, it's important to unearth both. Clean off those spiritual shelves, and make room for new stock to come in: things like hope, and joy, and love!
Going back to the rich and the poor in our Scriptures, we see Jesus and Amos both mourning those who are indolent, who have a lot of money and do nothing with it. They're both angry at those who have influence in their society, in their era, the ones who are supposed to be leading the people but are instead too busy loving money and thinking about themselves.
Back then, just as today, people believed a lot of different things about money. In fact, in the Bible there is a kind of "prosperity theology" that says God wants you to be rich, and if you're rich, well, God must be rewarding you. It's a sign of God's favor. The other side of this belief, we can figure, is that the poor somehow deserve their fate. It's their punishment for something they did or didn't do. Or maybe their parents did or didn't do. Of course, that doesn't fit with other parts of the Bible that tell us to live justly and to take care of those in need. Let's face it – the Bible has many different voices in it.
Money itself is neutral – it can be used for good or evil. It's the love of money, we hear, that leads us astray. That's comforting, especially if we have a little money, or a lot. Money is not evil. Just the love of it is, the mother of all evils, someone has said. After all, money brings with it power, prestige, security – it's an easy thing to love, I guess.
In another Scripture, Paul tells Timothy what to tell his wealthy church members: "As for those who in the present age are rich, command them not to be haughty, or to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but rather on God who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. They are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share, thus storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of the life that really is life."
I don't know about you, but I feel a bit of tension here. Which is it – do you have to give up all your possessions to follow Jesus, or not? Can we be both rich and faithful? Paul seems to think so. Jesus…well, that's not so clear, is it?
What I do see is that there's a very fine line between riches on earth and riches in heaven. What we have here sustains us in body, and this is indeed a body we were given by God, and commanded to care for. It's the temple through which we worship God. Yet, that temple is going to pass away, just as every other temple has and will. Remember the old adage: “You can't take it with you.”
But you can share it. And that brings us back to apples and giving thanks for what we do have.
I spent the last three weeks processing apples. I was lucky enough to be given access to a heritage apple tree in Peterborough, NH, owned by my husband's boss. It was full of apples which I expected (from their size and color) to be tart. Instead, they turned out to be honey sweet. And so I've been peeling and coring and slicing and simmering and adding sugar and cinnamon to them, making applesauce. I have pints and quarts of applesauce in my pantry right now.
Come Thanksgiving and Christmas, that applesauce will go out to friends and family, and to anyone in need that I know of and is local enough to me to allow me to get it to them. I share my harvests, even the tiny ones, because in giving away the fruits of my labor, I get back so much more.
Both physical and spiritual riches are like that. The more you give them away, the more you get in return. Our blessings can be gifts that give and give and give, and expand like ripples over a pond. One act of happy giving, whether of money or time or material goods, opens up doors all the way across the globe.
In our Scriptures, Luke is trying to warn us, to teach us, that the blessings of this world can turn us inward, or outward, Margaret Shuster observes, and these words really ought to go right to our hearts: Our money and possessions – and our love of them – she says, can make us "self-consumed, self-important, self-satisfied, self-indulgent, and insensitive to others…it will not be enough to say that we just did not pay attention or that we had intended to help someone tomorrow, or that we surely meant no harm to the helpless around us…" (The Lectionary Commentary: The Gospels).
What if, instead, we turned ourselves over to the imagination of the kingdom of God, an imagination that leads to empathy, to feeling with others who are suffering and in need, and then, to acting on their behalf? I think the readings are saying that this is the path to the life that really is life. It's also the path to joy.
I think, too, that it's difficult for those of us lucky enough to live in this country to understand what it means to be poor in Israel or Palestine. If your family income is $10,000 a year, you are wealthier than 84 percent of the world. If it's $50,000 or more a year, you make more than 99 percent of the world. That's one of the more oft-cited stats. The World Bank, Poke's Global Rich List and various economists have a bunch of perspective-gathering statistics to chew on if you have some time to go online and find out just how rich you are. They can also back up their numbers.
When we think of it from that point of view, when we think that, as a people, we generally spend most of our time comparing prices on items rather than scrounging to find something, anything at all... it changes how we approach being Godly people. Even our poorest people have more than 99 percent of the world's population. How sad and yet how wonderful is that?
What if... what if we're not the rich man, or the poor man? What if we're not the people Amos is mourning for? What if instead, we are the five brothers? What if... we just have to open our eyes? That is the hardest part, after all, seeing what's right in front of us. Spiritual and moral inventories are one way to learn how to open our eyes, to see the obvious things before us. Are we ready, then, to listen to the words of Moses and the prophets, as they speak to our souls?
It's time to open our ears, I say, and our eyes. It's time to witness what's going on around us, to listen to the words of our ancestors and also to the contemporary wise men and women who populate the world around us. It's time for us to harvest and to share that harvest with our family, our friends, and those around us who need what we can provide.
Let me share with you a prayer written by Ray Stedman some years ago. Please join me in this prayer:
Lord Jesus, we thank you for these clear and precise words that cut through the haze and vagueness of much of our thinking, and help us to set things in right perspective, to bring life into focus again. What is life, Lord, if it is lived apart from relationship to you? It is but an empty dream, a mere fantasy, filling our days and hours, months, and years with nothing but emptiness and that which is illusion. Lord we pray that we may, understanding this, give ourselves to you, that even now young people and older ones alike may in this moment of clarity of thought, give themselves to you; to begin where they ought to begin, with Moses and the prophets, and the One of whom the prophets spoke, the Lord Jesus Christ. Thank you for this in his name, Amen.
Benediction
As you go out into the world today, to put the finish on your glorious autumn weekend, take with you the words of this prayer. It's called, simply,
The Harvest Prayer, and we don't know who wrote it, although it was penned in the 17th century as part of a sermon.
Please be gentle with yourself and others.
We are all children of chance,
And none can say why some fields blossom
While others lay brown beneath the harvest sun.
Take hope that your season will come.
Share the joy of those whose season is at hand.
Care for those around you.
Look past your differences.
Their dreams are no less than yours,
Their choices in life no more easily made.
And give.
Give in any way you can.
Give in every way you can.
Give whatever you possess.
Give from your heart.
To give is to love.
To withhold is to wither.
Care less for the size of your harvest than for how it is shared,
And your life with have meaning
And your heart will have peace.
Amen, and may you have a fantastic week!
