March 12, 2023

Exodus 17:1-7; John 4:31-38

For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”

This is a common Biblical metaphor. You reap what you have sown. That is a more accusatory version of the metaphor, however. Some after the fact, finger-wagging as someone laments their downcast fate. You made your bed, now lie in it. I always wondered about the purpose of such statements. It strikes me as taking satisfaction in the suffering of others, a spiritual version of schadenfreude with a chaser of self-satisfaction.

Notably, Jesus is not doing that here. He is trying to explain his mission in the world. It began with a cryptic statement about how Jesus has food that they do not know about.

You would think by this point in the story the disciples would have picked up on Jesus being intentionally vague to make a point, but no such luck. It is perhaps comforting to imagine that even those remarkably slow on the uptake disciples eventually managed to get an entire religion up and running. There’s hope for the rest of us.

Jesus is talking about the spiritual food they are producing, not one person, not even Jesus himself. One sows and the other reaps. One person begins the work and another steps in along the way. This is an ongoing process rather than a single project. And because it will continue, someone must be ready when the time comes.

Last weekend, I was away. I was participating in an ordination. A friend of mine asked me to offer what is known as the right hand of fellowship. This is a practice originating with the disciples, beginning when Peter, James, and John invited Paul and Barnabas into ministry.

And this recent ordination process began a few years ago. A friend of mine asked me a question. He was interested in going to seminary and wanted to ask me about my experiences and to get a sense of whether it might be right for him. He thought he had a sense of vocation, that this work of the ministry was calling to him. And after our conversation, he left even more certain that he would apply to seminary. And it was going along well by all reports. But there was one problem.

My friend had an underlying illness. He was a diabetic. And he was not always good about taking care of himself. At one point, he suffered a heart attack and had to take time away from his studies to get his health back. He returned to his schooling after a time. But sadly, he never finished. He had another heart attack and died months later.

I realize you might be scratching your heads at this point, wondering how my story about an ordination could end with someone dying. Well, it does not end there.

A few months later, I received a call. It was his wife, another dear friend. And she wanted to ask me about going to seminary. Of course, the first thing I asked was whether this was somehow about finishing what her husband had started. Trying to reap in a different way what had already been planted. She said that it wasn’t about that.

Over the course of his efforts, I guess she was looking over his shoulder, seeing what it was all about. What it meant to take on the religious life and what it meant to serve the faith. She was involved in her own ways, serving her home congregation as a volunteer, as a board member, as any number of things. One sows and another reaps, as our story this morning tells us. And it might not always seem clear in the moment what is being planted and what might grow from those efforts.

My first friend was planting in his own right, but it seems that someone else would be the beneficiary of what had been planted. And my second friend had her own work to do, but that work was at least in part inspired by the work of her husband. Sowing and reaping are connected but that connection can take unanticipated directions. And so last Sunday, I helped my friend take the next step in her journey even as we remembered who had started her onto that long road.

Think about your own lives. Think about how you got to this place at this time. The many circumstances that made it possible for you to be here this day. Where did that journey begin? How did it start? Was it down the street, across the country, or around the world? And who has been there for you? Who has spent time with you along the way? Maybe yesterday, maybe decades ago.

What one sows, another will reap. There are many ways of understanding that metaphor. And it can extend far back beyond our lives. We can think back to our childhoods and about how and where we were brought up. They might be wonderful memories or they might be complicated. Or, they might be both.

But in any case, we are the product of those experiences, those memories, those encounters. We are in a sense what was reaped by what those others had sown. For children are born and raised. They are taught and they are guided. And they are us. Some children have continued that process, sowing for themselves, bearing and raising their own children. The pattern holds.

For me at least, it is amazing to think back along those generations, to consider the chance circumstances that led to any one of us being here today. How mom met dad. How grandpa met grandma. How each generation that preceded them somehow resulted in the next link in the chain of life. I think that is one of the fascinations with genealogy, as you try to imagine back in time to the people who made you possible but who died before you were born.

I knew about my grandparents, but the next prior generation have become the stuff of legends. There was my great grandmother, who emigrated from Italy but who had absolutely no intention of staying in America. She was saving up money to buy land back in the home country, to build a great house, to have start a big farm.

And she did so by bootlegging, by making bathtub gin during Prohibition. It was probably bathtub wine, but you get the idea. And she sent money back to a relative, a Catholic priest, in trust for when the time came for her to go home. And that priest stole all the money. He took it and lived a dissolute life, all at the expense of my great-grandmother and her ill-gotten gains. Another way of considering what it means to reap what you have sown.

And then there was my great-grandfather. He was a carpenter, but actually he was more of a finish carpenter, a joiner. He did fancy work like we have here in our sanctuary. Well, the story goes that he was hired by the local count to do work in the manor house. There was still a nobility in Italy back then. My great-grandfather completed the work and went to the count for payment. The count said that my great-grandfather should be honored to have done the work for the count. And honor was all he was going to get.

Well, legend has it that my great-grandfather punched the count in the face, knocking him unconscious. That gave my great-grandfather enough time to run away and to tell my great-grandmother that he was hopping on the next boat to America. In time, they all made the journey to the North End of Boston.

And I am the beneficiary of these people’s lives. The bootlegger who got swindled by a priest. The carpenter whose fists were faster than his wisdom. How do I imagine that those aspects of their lives have factored into my own, or into the lives of my grandparents and parents?

Both sides were fairly poor, having left Italy for better prospects across the Atlantic. Both sides had little to no education. My grandmother was notable for having finished high school in the 1920s in Orange, New Jersey. She had a secretary’s job during the Depression, kept a roof over her family’s head, and sent her brothers and sister to college.

Each generation plants what the next generation will harvest. My mother and father both went to school, my mother becoming a nurse and my father graduating from Boston College just down the road. My own generation all went on to get degrees and now my children have done so as well. Education is one form of life’s harvest.

But what else was planted? It is not simply schooling but also learning. What it means to be a good person. What it means to be an upstanding citizen. What it means to care about others. These ideas were at one point sowed within us. Sometimes that took the form of lessons, but more often they took the form of what we were seeing around us. My great-grandparents, for all their illicit activities, were hard working people. They raised families during difficult times and through great personal challenges. A new country, a new language, a new culture.

What did that look like to the next generation? And how might it have changed them? Because what we plant is not always what we think we are planting. Everyone wants to pass along grit and determination, but there are other messages that might have been picked up less intentionally. My great uncle apparently took after my bootlegging great-grandmother and her conniving ways. He had a business falling out with my grandfather that was never truly mended.

I do not mean to get you all freaked out about how you might have unduly influenced the next generation. It is not even necessarily anything that one person has done compared to generational differences over time. The so-called Great Generation was known for its grit and determination but that did not necessarily endear them to those that came after. That hard-working mentality of the parents might have led to children being always hard at work.

To be fair, every generation diverges from the prior generation. Times change. Wars end. The depression eases. And so, the outlook of those who come after those experiences also change. They do not want to save every piece of string and twine in a giant ball just in case. They do not have a basement filled with scavenged parts in case the furnace needed work. That’s my own grandfather.

Each generation reacts to the experiences of the prior generation, often making a different set of choices. I looked up lists of qualities that broadly describe the generations. Those of the Baby Boomer Generation are said to be independent, competitive, and goal-oriented. They equate authority with experience, but they are also inclined to question authority. How that works is obviously a question. They are also optimistic and have a desire to see equality in the world around them.

Then comes Generation X, my own group. We are self-sufficient, probably because we had to be, with our parents working all the time. We for that reason prefer a better work/life balance because we experienced ourselves to be less of a priority compared to a parent’s career. These are generalities, mind you, not any one person’s experience. In Generation X, we are less loyal when it comes to workplace. Why? Because our generation began to see the loyalty of our employers fade over the years. We are therefore skeptical and cynical, questioning the rosier outlook of the Boomers in light of our less positive life experiences.

And then there are the Millennials. They are highly tolerant of others, which is not the same as seeking equality. They value differences without trying to make everyone the same in one big melting pot, in case you were wondering how that 1970s metaphor fell out of fashion. They are more moral, more spiritual, and less religious, in case you were wondering why it is a challenge to get people to go to church these days. And they care more about children than work.

And those children, Generation Z, are still figuring things out. They’re kids. Give them a break.

Each generation was planted during a different time than when they did their own planting. And so how someone grew up differs from how they might have raised their own children. Sowing and reaping are the same activities across time, but it is as if the growing season somehow keeps changing. And so, while the general practices have things in common, our experiences will be markedly different.

I think about my granddaughter being raised by my son and daughter-in-law. I do not feel like I can simply download my parental wisdom to them and expect it will be terribly useful. It is not so much a question of knowledge to be delivered but wisdom to be shared. And wisdom is not about having the right answers, but having the humility to know both babies and circumstances change across the years. Because wisdom is what you get if you pay attention through a lifetime of mistakes.

I think about my friend who was ordained. I have been a minister for 15 years now and I might have some experiences worth sharing if she asks a question. But wisdom should tell me that I do not know everything. I do not know who she is dealing with or their circumstances. What they have sowed and what they have reaped. The good and the bad, the ugly and the beautiful.

Two thousand years ago, Peter, James, and John invited Barnabas and Paul into the life of the church. That moment was unique as was the ceremony last Sunday. We enter into the flow of history and stand between the generations. We are each trying to find our place in the world, to make meaning during our all too brief moment under the sun.

I say “make meaning” rather than to find meaning because meaning is a creative response to the unique moment of any one life. It will not be the same for my children or my granddaughter as it was for me. And it was not the same for me as it was for my parents or grandparents or certainly my legendary great-grandparents.

But we are still joined together despite these unique lives and differing circumstances. We can look out upon the good fortune of ourselves and others, or hold close as we go through hard times and difficult moments.

And those occasions are at the heart of congregational life. They are the work of the church. To celebrate and to mourn, to laugh and to cry, to dance and to rest. To be born, to live, and then to die. These are the moments of life. Even as they are each our own personal experiences, so too will we have joys to share and sorrows to carry among those we meet. For we are here in this place to share and to shoulder them together.

For thousands of years people have gathered to hear tell of the wisdom of the prophets, the lessons of Jesus, and the life of the church. We join in the flow of those experiences across time, as children, as young adults, as new families, as old friends. And in that flow of events and in that community that is church, everyone’s life is unique and everyone’s life is well-known. The hopes and dreams, the disappointments and sorrows. None are exactly the same and none are entirely different. There is change and there is continuity. There is comfort in what has been and there is hope for what might yet be.

To sow is to start the work, to reap is the finish the work. But it continues. It goes on and on. It is the work of a lifetime, of a generation, of a people gathered together with purpose. The work of the church is about the seasons of the year. About the milestones of living and yes in time dying.

Which means that we have to keep on sowing and reaping. We have to tend to the gardens we have planted even as we give thanks for the bounty of the gardens others have offered to us.

We plant and we harvest, we toil and we gather, we sow and we reap. And we will in time place down our burdens, even as others will come to take up their own. It is the flow of life, like a river we enter for a time and leave at some point downstream. We do not know how long we will be on the water, but we know generally which way we are going. Where the hope and promise of new life will take us.

For I believe that God waits for us there, across the waters. To hear the stories we have to tell. To laugh with us and to dry our tears. And to remember always and forever the blessings of this life and the blessing we tried to be to others we have known. That is the true harvest of our days, the gift we have been given and the gift we have been. The harvest of our days to be shared at the table of God in the sweet by and by. Amen.