7th Sunday of Easter
Matthew 6:24 – 29
‘No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.
‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Creator feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.
Honorable Harvest
When I was in the sixth grade, my classmates and I spent a week at outdoor school. It was this really cool program; local schools would send their sixth graders to stay at this school in the woods. We slept in cabins, and there were camp counselors and a big mess hall, and a big campfire every night. And during the day, there would be different activities we could participate in like hiking, or making arrowheads out of stone, or even chess. It was basically like summer camp.
One of my clearest memories of that week was when the counselors took different groups of us out to go on a nature walk. The counselor in charge of my group was a short and slender woman in her 40s or 50s, I think. She had short black hair and an olive complexion. Looking back, I think she was probably Native American or Latina. I remember her being soft-spoken, but she spoke with such reverence and respect for the land and the wildlife, that we all listened with rapt attention. She would point out different plants to us and talk to us about their traditional uses. There was a bush with sour red berries that could be used to make lemonade. She showed us how to identify miner’s lettuce and chickweed, in case we ever wanted to make a salad while we were out in the forest. There were these purple flowers on long skinny stems growing up out of the ground that had starchy bulbs that supposedly tasted like fried rice. But, she wouldn’t let us dig any up, because there were too many of us, and not enough bulbs to go around. I’ve never tasted the fried rice bulbs, but I’ve been curious about them ever since.
I was reminded of this moment because of the book that I’m reading right now with the conference Green Team: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. We just finished a chapter called Honorable Harvest, which is a term that I’ve noticed has been popping up here and there over the last couple of years. The Honorable Harvest is a way of interacting with the natural world when a person is gathering resources, and doing it in such a way that nature is being cared for, which in turn allows nature to care for the person. So, this can be the gathering of food, or medicines, or other resources from the wild, which means things like picking huckleberries or collecting mushrooms, deer hunting, fishing, even picking sweetgrass. You often hear, when people speak of the Honorable Harvest, that the desire is to keep the world as rich for the seventh generation as it is for us.
There is no one canon set of rules for the Honorable Harvest, but some of the guidelines would be ideas like:
Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them.
Never take more than half. Leave some for others.
Take only what you need.
Never take the first, and never take the last.
Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.
Use everything that you take.
Give thanks for what you have been given.
Sustain the ones who sustain you, and the Earth will last forever.
There’s a particular part of this practice that can be tricky for those of us not raised in the Native American traditions, which is recognizing the plants and animals that are being harvested as beings with consciousness and wisdom and self-determination, that we should ask permission before harvesting, and that we should in some way be able to understand whether or not permission has been given. I think what it boils to, at least for those of us not well-versed in the Native American traditions, is that we need to respect our environment, whether that’s wild, rural, suburban, or urban, foraging is not restricted to wild spaces. We need to harvest responsibly in order to protect the spaces in which we live and to make sure that there will enough for those who come after us.
Just as we did with Earth Sunday a few weeks ago, today, with Camp Sunday, we recognize God’s gift of the Earth to us, and we try to locate ourselves within Creation as a part of Creation, rather than above it. We are a part of nature, and we depend of the ecological systems of the Earth for our survival. We can see in the story of creation how God has set up a system to support us. Light is the energy that moves almost all of life as we know it. Water is the medium through which life happens. Plants use air, water, and light to make food, which animals consume. Some animals eat other animals, and all us, all of the plants, animals, fungi, and everything in-between, need clean air and water to survive.
When we think about these ecological systems, we are not above them. Our actions have a direct effect on all of the other life on the planet, on all of Creation, which is a feedback loop, because then it come back to us. Which leads us back to the Honorable Harvest. Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them. Sustain the ones who sustain you, and the Earth will last forever.
This is why I love getting out into nature, especially when it’s something like camp, when we can separate ourselves from so many of the trapping of modern life, those things that trick us into thinking that we are separate from nature. I don’t think I have ever elected to give up the Internet for a period of time when I didn’t have to, but on those rare occasions when it was simply not available, it has been such a welcome break. I was able to let go of so much that was preventing me from seeing my place in the world, my real place, not the place that social media and the regular is always telling me that my place is.
Our place is with the trees. Our place is in the current of the water, the lifeblood of the Earth. Our place is picking huckleberries and braiding sweetgrass. Our place is to be a fully integrated part of Creation.
Kimmerer ponders in her book what the world might be like if we applied the principles of the Honorable Harvest to all aspects of our lives, all aspects of our economies. Would the earth give us permission to mine for coal or drill for oil. As non-renewable resources, is it even possible to gather fossil fuels with the intention of leaving as much for the seventh generation as we have right now? What does it mean to ask for permission before buying a new dress, a new car, or even a head of lettuce at the grocery store? When we purchase a plastic squeeze bottle of dishwashing liquid, how to we care for the sources of all of those materials that had to come together to be processed into that product? Is it even possible?
I don’t think it’s possible for all of us to wake up tomorrow and apply the principle of the Honorable Harvest to every aspect of our lives. But, I do think that it’s worthwhile to ask these questions, to think about which parts of our lives we might be able to change, which parts of our live we might be able to apply the principles of the Honorable Harvest to. As we move into summer, and we continue to lose days to the smoke of wildfires, as the temperatures rise all over the world, wreaking havoc with the weather, we have to ask these questions. We need to remember our place in Creation, to honor God’s gift, and protect our resources not only for ourselves, but for our children, and our grandchildren, and on, and on, down to the seventh generation, and beyond. Amen.
~ Rev. Charles Wei
