I was driving across Saskatchewan in the summer of 1983. It was late August, and the wheat was ripe for the harvest. I had never seen such golden grain in all my life! Fields full of it, stretching all the way to the horizon. The scene was so beautiful that it almost took my breath away.
Imagine those same fields several months earlier. They were empty. At least they appeared to be. Just black earth, showing no signs of life at all. What a miracle, that in the course of a summer those empty fields – those seemingly dead acres – should produce all of that golden wheat: food for cattle and feast for human and a delight to my heart and my eyes.
These things have come to mind as I’ve pondered the window over here on the north side of the Sanctuary dedicated to the glory of God and given in memory of Ben Gordon Thomson. Ben was born on a prairie farm in southwest Saskatchewan. He knew something about fields of wheat, and grain elevators filled with the fruit of the harvest, and the transformation of that wheat into bread for the table, and the miracle of growth.
Several months ago I was telling a friend about these marvellous windows in the Sanctuary, and she said, “If only those windows could speak.” Well, it occurred to me that these windows can speak. They speak to me every time I wander through the Sanctuary and I ponder one or more of them. They have spoken to me so profoundly that I’ve heard something like the voice of God through their symbols and their beauty. Now the voice of God – the Word of God – is precisely what we listen for from the pulpit, so I thought it was high time that I shared with you all some of the things that these windows have said to me; and some of the things that God has said to me through them.
Summer seemed like a good time to do it; a series of sermons based on these windows of faith. But there are 17 windows and not nearly enough Sundays in one summer to consider them all. So I’ll do the first nine this summer and the remaining eight next summer, in no particular order.
These windows can speak. They speak through their symbols. They speak through the stories of the people whom they honour. Consider the symbols of the Thomson window: prairie wheat and Ontario grapes, which become bread and wine for the communion table and bread and wine for other tables around which gather family and friends. When I think of these symbols in the context of today’s gospel lesson, they speak of growth and trust; of communion with God and each other, of reconciliation with God and each other; of the Kingdom of God. They speak of the providential care of a God who loves us very much; a God who loves us so much that we are given food and drink for body and soul; and how it all happens is ultimately a mystery.
Jesus knew about that mystery. He said, “The Kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.” Perhaps Jesus had witnessed something of this growth from childhood. Maybe Mary had a vegetable garden when he was a boy; coaxing a few plants out of the hard Galilean soil. He might’ve helped her spread the seed. Maybe every morning for the next week he got up and rushed outside to see what was growing, only to be disappointed because the garden looked just as dead and empty as it had the day before. Maybe little Jesus even despaired of ever seeing anything grow in that garden. He turned his thoughts to other things and forgot about it.
Then one morning, a miracle happened! There were little green sprouts in that garden. And day by day they grew into a grape vine, and a few stalks of wheat, and a mighty mustard bush. And how that growth occurred, little Jesus could never figure out. And maybe how those empty Saskatchewan fields turned into a sea of golden grain little Ben couldn’t figure out. But that miracle of growth inspired awe in Jesus and, I suspect, in Ben and perhaps every farm boy and farm girl who ever lived. And maybe that sense of awe is the beginning of the trust and hope and wonder which lies at the heart of biblical faith.
You can trust God to transform an empty field into food to eat and wine to drink.
You can trust God to transform the emptiness of a grieving soul into a heart which is filled with the fullness of life.
You can trust God to transform a world divided by hatred and indifference and war into the Kingdom of love and justice and peace.
There are times when our spirits feel as dead and empty as those spring fields. Part of the miracle of that joy-filled drive across Saskatchewan in ’83 was that I had recently emerged from such a time. I had several bouts of depression and despair in the 1980’s. One of them hit in the late fall of ’82. And perhaps you know how it is when you stumble into that dark pit of depression: you want to roll up in a ball and hide from everything and everyone. You’re alienated from God, you’re alienated from others; most of all, perhaps, you’re alienated from yourself. And it feels like you’ll never again come alive.
But a strange thing happened to me on the way to oblivion that fall and winter: I learned how to pray. The church secretary where I was serving at the time introduced me to a book called Bread for the Wilderness, Wine for the Journey. It was all about the blessing of contemplative prayer. It was about the way in which God can feed our hearts through such prayer; how God can nourish our souls in the wilderness of despair, just as God nourishes our bodies with bread and our hearts with wine. So that winter and spring this old liberal, this old sceptic who had little or no use for prayer; well, he started to pray. I was praying with the scriptures. I’d read a verse slowly and then sit with it in silence and listen for whatever God would say to me. Out of the depths of my fallow heart I asked the Lord to speak to me; and God answered me in my day of trouble (see Psalm 20:1). God rescued me from the pestilence of despair which threatened to render barren the field of my soul forever. I was heading back east across the Prairies that summer of ’83 after spending a week on a prayer retreat in the foothills of Alberta. And there the Spirit spoke to me with such power and embraced me with such warmth that I found new life springing from the fallow soil of my soul. And by the end of that week I was well on the way to being reconciled with myself. And I spent the weekend with a new friend from whom I would’ve been easily alienated a year before because you see he’s a free market capitalist who thinks that government should do as little as possible and in the arrogance of my youth I hated people like that! But I was reconciled to myself and reconciled to him and found myself trusting that if God could bring peace and reconciliation between a free market capitalist and a left-leaning liberal who was almost a socialist, then there was hope for the whole world!
A few months earlier the soil of my soul seemed incapable of ever again bearing fruit. But you see, the seed had already been sown. God had scattered the seed of salvation deep in my soul years before, and even during my dark night of despair, that seed was beginning to sprout and grow.
Part of the mystery of God is that we can never see what God is doing until the miracle of growth and reconciliation is well begun. Grass is growing and seeds are sprouting and food and wine are starting to come forth from the earth, while all that we can see is an empty field. Sometimes the new growth is still buried beneath the surface of the earth. And sometimes the new things that God is doing are still buried by the shadow of our own despair, or perhaps by the shroud of holy mystery.
To walk in faith is to live into the mystery. If one is afflicted with a disease of body or soul, we don’t know how God is going to bring healing anymore than the farmers of Jesus’ day knew how God brought the grain and the grapevines out of their fields. But they trusted that the growth would come. And we can trust that healing will come. We don’t know exactly how God will continue the process of growth and renewal that we’re only now beginning to see here at Knox. We don’t know exactly how God will help us reconcile our different views about what the church is meant to do and be. But we can trust that by God’s grace, growth and renewal and reconciliation will continue. We don’t know exactly how God will bring peace to the Middle East, or end the nuclear proliferation which is starting to look really scary as the likes of North Korea and Iran acquire nuclear weapons. But we can trust that under the providential care of the One who brought a halt to the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union 20 years ago, peace will come. Already the tiny seeds are sprouting beneath the dusty soil of the Holy Land. And like the mustard seed of Jesus’ parable, they will eventually bring forth a great bush in which the dove of peace can find a nesting place.
That’s the way it is with the Holy One. The how and the when are often shrouded in mystery. But sometimes when we least expect it, the world is fed by the bread of God’s justice, and our hearts are gladdened by the wine of God’s love. Like the Saskatchewan farmers whom Ben Thomson knew as a boy, sowing their seed even amidst Depression drought, so we too can live into the mystery of faith, and trust in the abundance of God. Amen.
The Communion Window Honouring Ben Gordon Thomson
Texts: Psalm 104:14-15; Mark 4:26-28
Preached by Bruce D. Ervin
28 June 2009
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