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.
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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.
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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.
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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.