The Story of a Man [Lent 1C]

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

Deuteronomy 26:1-11

The Story of a Man

The man’s eyes welled up with tears at the calming sound of the stream, not another mirage this time, but an actual stream.  The blue waters called out to him as if to say, “This place is nothing like the desert.”  The desert was all he had ever known.  He was born there: a wanderer from birth.  He grew up there, a there that was always changing and yet somehow always the same.  Food was scarce, water scarcer.  And they, his people, were always on the move, just walking through purgatory.

But no longer; it was a miracle: to stand still.  And even more: to stand still on a patch of green.  The man, born in desolation, thought to himself, or was it out loud, “This must be what the Garden of Eden was like.”  And to have his own plot of land, after wandering for so long, a stranger in strange lands, it felt to him like the Promised Land.  And so his eyes rejoiced in the only way they knew how: he wept.  And that beautiful green beneath his feet accepted his tears – a drink offering of thanksgiving to the land and its Creator.

The man loved his land and the land loved him back.  Now settled, he plowed the land and planted seeds and watched as green shoots broke through fertile soil.  And God provided all that the man and his garden needed: water from the skies and sunlight from the heavens.  And the mysterious Spirit that once danced on the waters of creation, now danced through his fields.  He watched with awe and delight as the stalks of grain bent under her delicate weight.

He sweat and toiled in the garden – but with a kind of joy that belied his labor.  He loved that he could grow his own food, could care for his wife and children.  His parents, they labored under the harsh rod of the Egyptians; he labored for love.  It would be impossible, he knew, to explain to his children and grandchildren that this work was actually a privilege, a blessing, but in his heart he was so grateful to work with God to create a life, to create life.

When harvest time came around, the man would carefully pluck the fruits of his labor.  He would fill a basket with his first fruits: grain, vegetables, and fruits.  His children would look at it lustily.  But the man would gently remind them, that this basket was actually good enough for God.  They could wait.  And then he would recall with a wink that their ancestors waited in the desert for forty years for such a colorful bounty, surely they could wait a few more days.

And as the sun rose the next morning, the man would take hold of his basket, and start his journey to the tabernacle – a proud smile on his face as he walked through the village.  And, arriving at the tabernacle, he would take a deep breath, fight off any tears that might try to escape, and step through the entrance carrying his offering.  Despite the heat of the Mediterranean sun, he always felt chills being so close to something so holy.  He would hand the basket to the priest.  The priest would place the man’s first fruits, the fruits of his labor, before the altar.  And, unable to win the fight, the tears would escape.  And through trembling lips, he would recite the story of his people, his story: “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor….”

Many years later the man’s grandson looked out over the same fertile land – his inheritance, passed down from one generation to the next.  This garden was now his.  He was born to plow and sow and tend and harvest, as was his father and his father’s father.  But many years had passed and what seemed once miraculous was now just the family business.  Not so much blessing as obligation.  And so the man’s grandson did the work in the garden because it was what he was born to do.

It was hard work.  It demanded of him sweat and toil.  He would return from the garden each day exhausted to the bone.  He was frustrated to have to rely so heavily on things beyond his control: water from the skies and sunlight from the heavens. 

And he despised the expectation that his first fruits, some of his finest produce, would end up not on his family’s table, not at the market, but on the altar of the tabernacle – where it would be distributed to the priests and the tabernacle staff and to the immigrants and refugees that now lived off of his land.  It was his hard work that produced the harvest that someone else would enjoy.  It wasn’t fair.  In his mind danced the nagging thought that he never quite got what he deserved, the grandson of the man.

He would begrudgingly basket up some of his produce at harvest time and march it down to the tabernacle.  He would walk through the door – always annoyed – and hand the basket to the priest, who he knew was always smiling because he got to eat the produce but never had to sweat in the fields for it. 

And then the priest would make him recite some irrelevant old story.  The priest would make him say that it was God who gave him the first fruits.  But in his heart he refused to believe it.  He was the one who labored for that produce.  His hard work made it happen.  He was self-reliant, a self-made man, and how dare the priest suggest that he hadn’t earned everything he had.  If others worked as hard as he worked, he wouldn’t have to give the fruits of his labors to the Levites and the resident aliens.

Depending on the state of one’s heart, the old story can be rote or can be a song of deepest gratitude.  The man, the man born in the desert, the man who wept by the blue stream, on the green grass, he knew the old story well.  To him it mattered.  His parents were the Exodus people; he was the desert wanderer.  But at some point history aged into fairy tale.  And generations passed.  And details were lost.  And the story faded.  And as the story faded, reality changed.  And new stories displaced the true stories. 

We are always in danger of forgetting our stories – the stories that shape us, the stories that remind us of who we are and to whom we belong.  In the Hebrew Scriptures God constantly warns the people against this kind of dangerous amnesia.  Because God knows when we forget our stories, the stories that tether us to gratitude, the love stories deep in our history, we begin to drift away from our first love, from the God who first loved us. 

And that is why the liturgy.  The liturgy, then and now, allows us to relive the past, brings the past into our present; it reminds us that the ancient stories still have the power to shape our lives.  Their truths are still true.  “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down to Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there became a great nation, mighty and populous.  When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression.  The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and signs and wonders; and the Lord brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.  So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me.”

The man’s story, his old, old story, is now our story.  It is the history we carry to the altar every Sunday.  We are the latest generation of those who bring the first fruits of our labor, gifts that the Lord has given us, into a holy place.  We bring gifts born of thankful hearts, hearts that still beat to the rhythm of the ancient salvation songs.

The Lenten season invites us to be honest, to tell true stories about ourselves, to trade the harmful mythologies of our consumer culture for the songs of thanksgiving we have inherited from our ancestors.  The Lenten season invites us to remember; to remember that there is no such thing as a self-made man, no such thing as a self-reliant woman, no rugged individual.  There is only us: an us that includes those who have come before, those who surround us now, those who will stand on our shoulders and tell our stories.  And, of course, there is God – the very soil in which we are rooted, without whom we would fade into oblivion. 

In this place, in this season, in these liturgies we will tell the truth, this truth: all of life is gift – a gift freely received to be freely given.  As Moses warns us earlier in the same book of Deuteronomy, “When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, who led you through the great and terrible wilderness, an arid wasteland…. The Lord your God made water flow for you from flint rock, and fed you in the wilderness with manna…. Do not say to yourself, "My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth."

Say something else, say something true, say, “Thank you.”