Peace with Creation: Celebrating the Harvest

If I had a nickel for every time that someone came up to me and said, “Preacher, I think you just need to preach more out of the book of Leviticus!” I…wouldn’t have a single nickel.

Today’s text is split between the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, two books that are filled with a lot of rules and regulations and instructions for God’s people as they received the Torah on Mt. Sinai, and later prepared to enter the Promised Land. And let’s just say that it is…less than intriguing writing. In fact, I wonder if either of those books would be in the top 3 of your favorite books of the Bible? Anyone? Top 10?

Now, I would say that one thing I very regularly do hear is something like “Why do we even need the book of Leviticus!?! Jesus made all of those old laws obsolete, and the prophets preached that God hates our feasts and festivals, and it wouldn’t be OK if we just cut that part of the Bible out entirely?” If I had a nickel for every time that someone said something like that, we could pay off our mortgage tomorrow!

But, as I try to remind folks when they say such things, let us not presume that we know more than Jesus, who said the complete opposite. He was very clear in the Sermon on the Mount when he said that he did not come to abolish any single law from Leviticus, or Deuteronomy, or the Torah, but to fulfill them. It seems that Jesus acknowledged that the ways that some of these laws had been interpreted, and how some of the festivals had been practiced, had fallen away from their original intent, but that there was still value in the life that they were originally meant to instruct.

Which means, as we read Leviticus and Deuteronomy today, it is up to us to figure out how to split the difference. How might we acknowledge that many of those laws and regulations and feasts and festivals are no longer relevant to us in pure, literal form…but that there is something good and valuable about their intention that Jesus meant to preserve as he delivered his own ethic based on the law of love? Today, we will hear two texts about an ancient festival known as the Feast of Booths, or Tabernacles, or the Ingathering. And while we are not planning to observe this festival literally, what might Jesus have meant to preserve from its observation? What spiritual teachings might we glean from these texts? Let’s play with these questions as we read and hear today’s text.

Leviticus 23.39–43

³⁹ “Now, the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when you have gathered in the produce of the land, you shall keep the festival of the Lord, lasting seven days, a complete rest on the first day and a complete rest on the eighth day. ⁴⁰ On the first day you shall take the fruit of majestic trees, branches of palm trees, boughs of leafy trees, and willows of the brook, and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God for seven days. ⁴¹ You shall keep it as a festival to the Lord lasting seven days in the year; you shall keep it in the seventh month as a statute forever throughout your generations. ⁴² You shall live in booths for seven days; all who are native-born in Israel shall live in booths, ⁴³ so that your generations may know that I made the Israelites live in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”

Deuteronomy 16.13–15

¹³ “You shall keep the Festival of Booths for seven days, when you have gathered in the produce from your threshing floor and your winepress. ¹⁴ Rejoice during your festival, you and your sons and your daughters, your male and female slaves, as well as the Levites, the strangers, the orphans, and the widows resident in your towns. ¹⁵ Seven days you shall keep the festival to the Lord your God at the place that the Lord will choose, for the Lord your God will bless you in all your produce and in all your undertakings, and you shall surely celebrate.

Number one: Go Camping! Am I the only one who read this text and thought that this whole thing is really about a big, nation-wide camping trip? I mean, God commands the people to leave their homes, go out into the wilderness, build a tent, and sleep in said tent for seven days! Which is a little tongue in and cheek, but only a little. Again, what’s the spiritual lesson here? There is something about moving into God’s Creation…a recreation of Eden in part, which happens whenever we go camping or enjoy nature.

But there is another experience that seems to be as important: a recreation of the Exodus. In that part of their history, God’s people left any sort of civilization behind in Egypt and began what amounted to a forty-year camping trip. Thus, in this annual festival, God is commanding the people to remember and even recreate that experience. God’s people were meant to remember the time when they did not know where they were, they did not know where they were going, they were at the mercy of the wilderness around them, surrounded only by the thin walls of a tent. So, when we call it camping, this is not taking your fifth wheel with all of its pop-outs to an RV park with electricity and water hookups and good Wi-Fi. This is more comparable to tent camping, maybe an unsupported backpacking trip in some part of the world with no cell phone coverage. The vulnerability would be the point. God wanted the people to recreate that vulnerability, even if it was for just a week.

Barbara Brown Taylor talks about this spiritual experience in her book An Altar in the World. Taylor writes that just about all of our lives are spent under so much predictability and control that we lose the opportunity to experience what it might feel like to depend more on God than on our GPS. There is value, she writes, in getting lost, of not knowing where we are and what is around the corner. There is learning there, including learning the experience of vulnerability. Learning to trust that God is with you. Learning to trust those beside you. Getting lost in small ways can begin to prepare you for the inevitable times when we get lost in big ways. When the marriage ends unexpectedly. The family member’s death leaves a hole we aren’t sure we can survive. We end up in a job or even in a career that we never expected. Life can be described as a series of big “getting lost” moments, and BBT suggests that we can practice in small ways to prepare for them. Barbara Brown Taylor suggests ways that we can experiment with lost-ness, without our loved ones having to file a missing persons report! Travel to a new place. Take a field trip. Take a walk with no specific destination in mind. Or, as the ancient Hebrews learned, go camping!

Because what we are experiencing, and perhaps what God meant for the people to remember in the Festival of Booths, is not just the vulnerability of the lostness, but the reliability of God in the midst of it. They were vulnerable but also totally reliant on God’s provision to care for them. In order to remember that experience, God commanded the people to take a yearly camping trip, and recall the vulnerability from whence they came. And the reliance that they learned to practice. Both were important.

There is a second spiritual lesson for us today: Live out of abundance, not scarcity. Scholar Walter Brueggemann suggests that this is an underlying theme of the entire Torah, including Leviticus and Deuteronomy. It is a story of the shift between scarcity to abundance. The scarcity mindset says that there is not enough. There is never enough. You are not enough. Brueggemann writes that there is no evidence that the Egyptians ever took a Sabbath day off. They definitely did not allow the enslaved Hebrew people to take a day off. When we live in a mindset of scarcity, every day, every moment, every ounce of energy must be spent earning our value. That mindset of scarcity causes us to fear. It causes us to hoard. It causes us to endlessly produce and consume. To work and work and work until we have enough. But there is never enough.

In contrast, Brueggemann writes that we must live out of a different set of values: “The gospel story of abundance asserts that we originated in the magnificent, inexplicable love of a God who loved the world into generous being….And the story of abundance says that our lives will end in God, and that this well-being cannot be taken from us.”

Thus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy teach us how to dismantle a scarcity mindset from the inside out. The tithe teaches us to give away money and resources and control over them because we trust that God will provide. The Sabbath teaches us to sacrifice a full day of productivity because we trust that it honors the God of sustainability. Letting the land lay fallow for an entire growing season means that it will not produce crops and the food that they provide. The gleaning system was a welfare practice of leaving a portion of crops so that others can take what they need, even if it means that you will not be able to maximize your harvest. All of these practices, taught in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, are principles in which individual resources are “wasted.” Money. Time. Crops. Security. Because, out of trust in God and trust in one another, the values of community, sustainability, and shared flourishing take priority. Perhaps it is not a surprise that these are the practices that are consistently ignored in our culture today.

The Festival of Booths was meant to take place in the seventh month, in the sabbatical month of the year, as a way to remind the people that they were to live out of gratitude of that abundance, not in the fear of scarcity. It was a harvest festival, when the people could look around them and see God’s abundance right in front of them. They were to take tree branches—palms, willows, majestic trees—and use them as symbols of worship. These were not trees that grew in the scarcity of the wilderness, but grew in abundance in the land of promise. Layer upon layer upon layer, the Festival of Booths taught the people to worship in gratitude, instead of live in fear. Abundance instead of scarcity. Perhaps you’ll notice that the songs we sing today are usually reserved for Thanksgiving, when we celebrate God’s abundant harvest grace. It is an ancient tradition that shouldn’t be kept to one day a year. When we tithe, and practice sabbath, and share resources with one another, we are practicing abundance, even though the world around us thinks we are crazy to do so.

One final spiritual lesson from today’s two-part text: All flourishing is mutual. This is a line from a short book by Robin Wall Kimmerer titled The Serviceberry, which happens to be the book that we are reading for this month’s Purple Team discussion. Kimmerer is not a Biblical scholar, and she is not commenting on the practice of the Festival of Booths or the book of Leviticus. Not specifically, at least. But as I read the book this week, I couldn’t help but see all kinds of connections. She writes about this rather curious economic mindset that EuroAmericans have practiced for a couple of hundred years, which suggests that we must violently compete against one another for a set of limited resources that exist, and if we don’t compete, we lose. That mindset, she writes, is the impetus behind capitalistic greed, the tremendous gap between the haves and the have-nots, the commodification of natural resources, and the resulting ecological disaster that we now face. This economic mindset is summed up by the American Economic Association, who write on their website their definition of economics: “It’s the study of scarcity, the study of how people use resources and respond to incentives.” Hers is not a theological book like Brueggemann’s, but it is eerily similar in its indictment of scarcity.

Could there be another way, she asks? Instead of this scarcity economy, what if we practiced what she calls a gift economy? Kimmerer is a biologist, and suggests that nature is built differently: ecological systems where microbial fungi feed the trees which feed the birds which carry the seeds to plant more trees which stimulate more fungi. All flourishing is mutual! For humanity, as well. The majority of human existence has observed ancient practices of land conservation, festivals in which neighbors gather and give away their possessions, and yes, harvest feasts where everyone is invited to share the abundance with one another. Did you notice in today’s text who gets invited to the party? Everyone! Men and women. The poor and the rich. The citizen and the immigrant. The young and the old. Those in families as well as widows and orphans. Those who have enough and those who are dependent on the national government to survive. Everyone goes camping! Everyone shares in the abundance. An ancient example of a gift economy. In fact, in a way, it is the most vulnerable who lead the way…those who are not used to relying on their money or their houses or their stability, could show others how to trust in God in ways that the rich and powerful could not begin to know. We are all in this together. All flourishing is mutual.

This scarcity economy, which we have suggested for a couple hundred years is the only way, is actually the opposite of what most humans have practiced for the majority of their existence. In fact, there are still plenty of examples of this gift economy in today’s world: Little Free Library’s that offer used books to neighbors (which is not unlike Big free libraries based on the same principle). Free fruit stands that offer the abundance of the earth at harvest time. YouTube videos that offer free advice for fixing your toilet or your 1993 Chevy S-10 (both of which we have used at the Sturtevant household in the last few weeks). The mobile food pantry, which will be held in our parking lot, in six days! All stand in stark contrast to an economy of scarcity. There is enough for everyone. All flourishing is mutual.

EuroAmericans have resisted this gift economy, assuming that it won’t work. They have shut down indigenous potlaches, festivals of sharing abundance with one another. They have insisted on private ownership when shared communal property had existed for millennia. Ironically, even Christian missionaries have proclaimed as unbiblical the very practices that Leviticus and Deuteronomy have commanded.

Robin Wall Kimmerer tells a story about a Brazilian tribe where a hunter was especially successful and brought back more meat than his family could eat before it went bad. So, he sent out invitations to all of the community, inviting them to share in the abundance. Anthropologists were amazed at the waste, and asked why he wouldn’t store the meat for a lean season. The hunter was confused: “store my meat? I store my meat in the belly of my brother.”

What if we lived by that abundance? That trust in God’s providence? That refusal to be shackled by scarcity? That willingness to share with all? May it be so!