The Gleaners' Union

Sermon delivered by Gordon Pullan at the North Hadley Congregational, United Church of Christ, July 21, 2019

Sermon text Amos 8:1-12 and Leviticus 19:9-10

You just heard a couple of interesting scriptures. In Amos 8:1-12 God shows Amos a basket of summer fruit and asks him to tell him what it is. When Amos speaks the obvious—it’s a basket of summer fruit--God then rails against those who trample on the needy, and bring ruin to the poor of the land, The LORD has sworn surely, I will never forget any of their deeds.

In Leviticus 19:9-10 we’ve got that same God telling his people not to harvest all the way to the edge of their fields, but rather to leave those rows of produce for the poor and the foreigner, the stranger.

I don’t believe that you can understand the first scripture—the one where god is so angry, angry about abundance and inequity—written somewhere around 750 BC--without understanding the second. Primarily because the second one from Leviticus was written some years earlier, In the era sometime shortly after Moses—1400 BC or thereabouts.

By the way, there is also something you should know about the older of the books--Leviticus. It is more aptly described by its early rabbinic name, “the Priest’s manual” and like any good and well established Priest’s manual it has rules that just won’t stop—rules about what is clean and what is unclean, and rules about ritual purification that raises the common to the holy, but more importantly, rules of ethical behavior that inform those rituals and creates a cultural definition for moral behavior.

What I really find interesting about this charge from the Priest’s Manual is not just the fact that it instructs the children of Israel to build their personal boarders with edible plants, rather than brick walls, but that the command--to leave the harvest at the edges of the field and the fallen fruit on the ground—for the poor and the foreigner—is a refrain to the Holy word, not just a stanza. It is to be repeated, to be memorized, to be held up as a moral imperative to the entire nation. Hear the word of God;

Deuteronomy 24:19-21

"When you reap your harvest in your field and have forgotten a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it; it shall be for the alien, for the orphan, and for the widow, in order that the LORD your God may bless you in all the work of your hands. "When you beat your olive tree, you shall not go over the boughs again; it shall be for the alien, for the orphan, and for the widow. "When you gather the grapes of your vineyard, you shall not go over it again; it shall be for the alien, for the orphan, and for the widow.

Leviticus 23:22

Verse Concepts

'When you reap the harvest of your land, moreover, you shall not reap to the very corners of your field nor gather the gleaning of your harvest; you are to leave them for the needy and the alien. I am the LORD your God.'"

In total there are at least 19 scriptural references to gleaning with the majority of those in the Hebrew bible, including the story of Ruth being sent out into the gleaning fields to find her second husband, Boaz.

The whole concept of gleaning is about abundance and sharing. There is enough for the foreigner and the poor and the widow and the orphan. We are blessed, our baskets overflow, and why would we not want to share this abundance? The laws of the universe, Karma, God, will all bless us.

Remember what I was saying, how these earlier scriptures inform how we read that passage from Amos. When God shows Amos—and by proxy shows us-- a basket of summer fruit that is ripe and overflowing and asks Amos/us what it is, God knows full-well that we know the shared moral obligation, the obligation that raises us from the unclean to the clean. He is pointing to the fact that what we have is not our own, but it is a gift from God.

Like the children of Israel in the year 750 BC, we too are brought to task simply by that vision of a basket full of summer fruit. In this valley we know what that basket of fruit means. So, if we trample on the needy, if we bring ruin to the poor—whether intentionally or unintentionally, whether directly or indirectly, then Karma is going to get us. Our summer baskets will be replaced by famine—spiritual or physical. We will have lost our moral authority. It happens. It is happening today.

~~~

A few interesting facts:

American’s waste about 150,000 tons of food a day—nearly a pound per person—about 40% of the food that we produce is actually thrown away—grocery produce that isn’t perfect, leftovers and overstocks from your fridge, food from processing plants that get dumped in order to keep prices higher, food thrown out because of date labels that are unrelated to food safety.

~~~

There is a film entitled, Just Eat it that I am planning to bring to the church this fall. It is a movie about a couple who decides that they will live and eat for six months strictly by gleaning—in modern culture, we can translate that as dumpster diving. Can you imagine. –checking out the Stop and Shop dumpster, after hours, lurking around “Real Pickles” in greenfield after a day of food packing. The movie chronicles the absolute abundance and wastefulness that is ours. But rather than making the abundance available to those in need, we simply throw it away—like someone given ten talents who throws away four of them.

One of the most prized finds for the couple over the course of their six months, was a dumpster—you know, the giant kind they use outside of construction sites—full of perfectly good humus, still sealed in their plastic tubs, nowhere near the stamped expiration date. They ate humus for weeks until they were sick of humus. When they dug deeper to find out why it had been thrown away, they discovered that it was discarded because of a glut in the market, it was more profitable for the company to throw this batch away in order to keep prices higher. We will make the ephah small and the shekel great.

~~~

It makes you question, what happens to the food at the salad bar at the end of the day. What happens to week-old bread when they take it off the shelf, and apples that aren’t perfectly round. What happens to the pies at the local bakery that aren’t sold? What happens to the buffet at the local restaurant at the end of the day or the pizza slices at the pizza parlor, or the three heads of lettuce you bought on sale for buy one, get two free only to have two rot in your crisper? What happens to the 13 million kids in this country who are considered to live in food insecure homes? That is 18 percent of all children. What happens to our neighbors in poverty, in Guatemala, in El Salvador, in Honduras?

I don’t have all the answers to this conundrum of our abundance. I’m not standing up here saying you should give money to anything. My message is much simpler than that—cheaper-- involves less packaging, is amazingly old school Yankee at its core. The answer begins with creating a conscience around this so that it becomes a moral imperative, one that breaks down barriers and finds ways that all may share in the abundance, a union of Gleaners.

The answer comes in these simple words.

When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the Lord, your God.

Translate that into our language. Join the union of gleaners. Do the will of God.

A Mother's Day Sermon

Sermon delivered by Rob Powell at the North Hadley Congregational, United Church of Christ, September 2, 2019

Mother’s day offers the opportunity to celebrate and honor the mothers and motherly people in our lives, a time to reflect with gratitude on the ways that we have been mothered by our mothers and by others in our lives. And, a time to honor the ways that we mother ourselves and others. For some, Mother’s day brings with it sadness, the sadness of a mother lost or the sadness of a fraught relationship and history of hurt with a mother.

When I think about my mom and think about how to hone in on the essence of her mothering, I tend to gravitate towards a single topic- my curfew. Now, before I tell you all about this, let me be clear- I have a great mom. But, a certain truth about great moms is that to be a great mom you also, sometimes, have to be a pretty annoying mom. Boundaries and rules and expectations aren’t much fun in the short term, and so mothering and parenting, can at times not make a child very happy.

When I was in high school and driving, I had a curfew. It wasn’t a hard and fast time, but rather something that was negotiated based on the activity. But usually, it landed somewhere around 11:00. This is pretty standard for kids, but what always made my mom stand apart from the parent’s of my friends was her refusal to go to bed until I got home. So, if I was running late or intentionally trying to pull one over on my parents, I wouldn’t just get in trouble for missing my curfew but I’d also be saddled with the burden of making my weary mother stay awake until I returned. Now, this was really pretty effective. One or two times of looking my mom in her sleepy eyes after returning home late, left me committed to getting home on time.

Now this is all well and good when you’re a teenager, but imagine that you are a 28 year old, home for the holidays, and there’s not so much a curfew anymore, but your mom will still wait up for you to get home- it is essentially a curfew. As an adult, when I’d go home to visit I would know that my mom would stay awake until I returned and so I was always inclined to get home sooner than my friends. It’s in these later years that my mom’s commitment to waiting up really started driving me mad. I’d say “mom, go to bed! I’m fine” and she’d stay up each night that I was out, waiting for me to return.

It really drove me crazy.

But, there’s a thing that happens as you grow older and reflect on the quirks and annoyances of your parents. For the fortunate, those quirks and annoyances start to look more like building blocks of the person you became. For me, I think about what it meant to know someone was always waiting up for me. In what ways did that truth get woven into the person that I became? What would my life and myself look like if that wasn’t true? That I don’t really know- because it was true for me. If I was away, there was someone waiting on me. I was expected somewhere.

I can remember asking my mom- “mom, why do you do this? None of my friends have to deal with this.” And her response, a response heard by so many children so many times, was “well, they aren’t my kids”. How many of us have heard that at some point or another? At the root of it, that I was meant to adhere to the expectations of my parents, and it didn’t much matter what other people were doing.

In looking to our Psalm today, I’m struck in a new way by the language. Particularly the language of “he makes me lie down in green pastures”. I suppose it is reflecting today on mothers and mothering, but I got a little bit of a chuckle out of that language because it sounds a lot like what we do with our little one and what was done with me when I was a little one. You see, our son doesn’t always totally understand that he is tired. He feels something- frantic, upset, irritable- but he’s not really aware of the solution. But, Chris and I are, oh boy are we. We know that that little baby needs a nap and so...we make him lie down. We make him rest. He doesn’t always like it, but we know that he needs it. We know when he is thirsty and so we make sure he drinks his milk. We know when he is scared so we make sure he feels comfort. I think this looks a lot like the way I was mothered, the way many of us were, and the way many want to be. A firm hand leading us and even making us rest, eat, and feel peace. Maybe sometimes when we don’t necessarily know that’s what we need or what we want.

And as a Christian people, we are called to listen to God in the same way that a child is called to listen to their parent. We are given guidance, some wanted some not, and asked to heed it with the belief that it is in our best interest. We see this play out a bit in our reading from John.

I have to be honest, I struggled with this reading. In this world we live in, full or polarization and us vs them mentalities, I cringed when I read it, wanting little do with anything that creates a who’s in and who’s out kind of framework. But, in the light of mother’s day and with my own reflections, I started to think about this in a different way.

I think about that common refrain of parenting, when I would do something I wasn’t supposed to and then I’d say “but so-and-so did it!” and my mom or dad would says “but i told YOU not to do it”. It’s not often a judgement on the other kid, it’s a judgement on me for not listening.

It seems like when we started talking about us and them a lot of the focus ends up on the “them”. What are they doing? How are they wrong? But in reading this scripture today something new stands out, not the question of who doesn’t hear but rather a call to those who do hear. We are the people God is talking to, we needn’t waste time figuring out who God isn’t talking to, but rather think about what it means that God is talking to us, God is calling us, God is promising us. What do we do with that. My mom never much cared what the other kids were doing, she cared about what I was doing. I think it is similar for the church.

I think a perfect place to start on this Mother’s day is to consider how we are mothered as children of God and how we mother a hurting world. As we are made to lay down to rest, how do we offer rest to a weary people? As we are made to eat, how do we offer food to the hungry? As we are given peace and comfort, how do we extend peace and comfort in moments of fear and sorrow?

For God is talking to us, it is us who are expected to do the work of God here and now, may we be so bold as to heed that call.

In thinking about my mom waiting up for me all those nights for all those years, I’m now touched by it. Let’s be clear, if I was visiting right now and she was waiting up for me to come home, I’d also be annoyed. But, in the big scheme of life, I’m grateful to have lived a life where there was always a light on for me. Sometimes, I look at our child and I feel such deep gratitude that he too will always have a light left on for him (in his case, it might be a metaphorical light because Chris and both like to sleep- but a light nonetheless).

Every Sunday we are all here and in that I believe that we are answering that call- we are coming home to a place where the light has been left on for us, but also in being here, week after week, year after year, we are leaving a light on for all the people ready to come home. As God keeps a light on for us, we respond by keeping a light on for a hurting and weary world. In that way we are mothered and mothering as the children of God. May it always be so. Amen.