PRAYING IN THE BARN WITH THE LOCAL FARMERS

Thursday evening, September 28, I attended a Harvest Prayer Service and dinner in a barn down in Meade County. I was asked to select a Scripture and offer a short reflection. It is an annual affair for the farming communities at that end of Meade County and is held in one of the Pike family barns just outside of Payneville. I was honored to be asked to be part of this amazing event.  

Children brought up water, seeds, soil and equipment to be blessed. They had three musicians who led the group in singing three hymns during the service. Some of my relatives, some of my friends from growing up and even some people I did not know were there. Father George, the local pastor, and a priest friend of his from Edmonton, Kentucky, attended. The local deacon, Greg Beaven, was Master of Ceremonies.  

HARVEST PRAYER SERVICE REFLECTION

Gratitude in Good Times and in Bad

And one of them, realizing that he was healed, returned

and fell at the feet of Jesus and thanked him.

Luke 17:11-19

We are gathered here today to give God thanks for another good harvest. While expressing our gratitude is fine and good, I have a challenging question for you today and it is simply this! What would you have done if we had not had a good harvest this year? Would you have (a) cancelled this year’s Harvest Prayer Service or would you have (b) held it anyway? Think about it for a minute as to why you would do one or the other!

How we answer that question is a lot like how we think of airplane crashes. In my estimation, failed crops can be a lot like airplane crashes. It is extraordinary how safe flying has become. We are now statistically more likely to be elected president of the United States in our lifetime than we are to die in a plane crash. But what we end up focusing on are the catastrophic plane crashes that are incredibly rare but do happen every now and then. Likewise, we have more crop successes than tragedies, but that doesn’t stop us from sometimes withholding gratitude when a rare crop failure does happen. Maybe a periodic crop failure serves the purpose of reminding us not to take all our good harvests for granted!

All this caused me to remember one of my favorite stories about farmers praying for rain on the crops. In the early 1980s, I was a country pastor of a church down in Marion County in the town of Calvary, Kentucky. Back then, I liked to stand out in front of church before Mass to talk to the farmers who came early to gossip a little. One day, one of those farmers asked me if I would pray for rain at Mass that day so that the crops would not fail. I agreed right away, of course! However, one of the other farmers interrupted us by saying, “Wait up! Let’s think about this for a minute first! A few years ago, we were in this same situation and I went into the church and lit one of those 30-day candles and prayed for rain! Well, it started raining right away, but it wouldn’t stop! After three or four days of rain, I finally had to go into the church and blow that candle out!”

In the touching story that I just read about how ten pitiful lepers, standing at a distance as required by Jewish law, call out to Jesus for help and healing. “Jesus, Master! Have pity on us!”

All ten lepers were healed, but only one, a non-Jew, a hated Samaritan, bothers to come back to say “thanks.” The other nine lepers either forgot or thought that it was Jesus’ duty to heal them or simply saw no need to return to thank God for their healing. Nevertheless, grateful or not, they were all healed and the liberality of God’s mercy is revealed to us in the ungrudging generosity which is showered on all of them, the grateful and the ungrateful alike. As a passage from the Gospel of Luke puts it, “Your heavenly father makes his sun rise on the bad and the good and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.”

This story, then, is not so much about leprosy, as it is about God’s universal and unconditional love for all people, the good and bad, as well as the grateful and the ungrateful.

This message, the liberality of God’s mercy even for the ungrateful, is the essence of the “good news.” If we don’t “get” that point, we don’t “get” what Jesus was all about and we don’t “get” what Jesus came to this earth to tell us.

If I have preached it once, I have preached it a thousand times: God’s love is unconditional. It is not based on whether we are deserving, or grateful or whether we love God back. Many people, including people who claim to be very religious, still don’t “get” this truth. They think, and sometimes preach, the opposite. They think, and sometimes even preach, that God loves us, if we love him back, if we are grateful and if we have done enough to deserve it. If, if, if…….!

Jesus asks, in the gospel of Matthew, “If you love those who love you, what merit is there in that? Do not tax collectors do as much?” Jesus practices what he preaches. The Scriptures are clear! “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” The parables of Jesus tell us clearly that God loves the lost sheep and the prodigal son; those who work all day in the vineyard and those who work only an hour all get paid a full day’s wages and the good and the bad alike have an invitation to the king’s wedding reception.

This does not make sense by the world’s standards of conditional love: I’ll love you, if you love me. God’s love is unconditional: I’ll love you whether you are grateful or love me back or not. This is the way God loves us! This way of loving is the way we have been called to love each other.

It is just one small thing, but I try my best to continue to be generous to my friends, to strangers and to my nieces and nephews, whether they bother to thank me or not. I choose to be generous to them because God is generous to me, whether I am grateful or not, deserving or not!

In the same way, I hope you would have come here to thank God tonight, even if it had been an awful year for farmers. Whether it is crop failures or a plane crashes, gratitude should never be withheld because of that one plane that crashed last year or that year that crops didn’t do well, but expressed because of the hundreds and hundreds of planes that didn’t crash today and the many years when crops didn’t fail!