Rogation Sunday
May 21, 2006
Rogation comes from the Latin rogare, meaning “to ask.” When the church
began observing rogation days in the fifth century, the prayers asked
that God protect the corn from mildew, but now we ask more generally
for God’s blessing on all things agricultural. Many churches still set
aside time to do this, but as far as I can tell, only the Anglican
church still calls that time Rogation season.
Of course, the custom of praying for the gods to bless the harvest is
as old as civilization itself, and the further you go back in
history, the more frequent and intense these prayers will be. In the
ancient world, people’s lives depended on the harvest in very direct
ways. When the crops failed, they would not just be
inconvenienced as we are today--they could die.
It is not surprising that the earliest civilizations all had a strong
female deity, an Earth Goddess connected with fertility and worshiped
with acts and images that we would today rightly consider in bad taste.
In Egyptian cultures this earth goddess was known as Isis, in Greek
cultures as Aphrodite or Demeter. In American Popular Culture, we call
her Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Anniston. Among the Canaanites who
occupied Palestine before the Hebrews, she was called Astarte or
Ashtoreth. You hear a lot about her in the Old Testament, (along with
her boyfriend Ba-al) because the Hebrew leadership had a lot of trouble
keeping their people from straying away to worship a goddess whose
shrines were conveniently located, and whose rituals sometimes involved
temple prostitutes. Other than Eve and a shadowy figure called Lilith,
the Hebrew culture pretty successfully banished fertility goddesses
from their life, but their major festivals, including Passover and
Pentecost were connected with harvest time.
Some people think there is even a deep connection between
morality and rural life. In a book called Trees, Why Do You Wait, the
writer Richard Critchfield observes that it hard it is for
a farmer or a rancher to be isolated and irresponsible. On the
farm or the ranch, crops and animals depend on their stewards. If a
farmer takes a day or even an hour off at the wrong time, he and his
crops or animals may suffer direct and painful consequences. And
likewise, the members of a farm family are more dependent
on one another than the city dweller’s family. The rural life is
at the heart of family values and one reason for their decline is
probably our transition from a rural culture to a culture based
on service and technology.
Even in my childhood people were more connected directly to their food
source than they are today. My mother killed chickens with an axe
and cooked them for dinner, though my grandfather taught me to wring
their necks, a much neater process. I still remember my father shooting
an old ewe between the eyes with a .22 rifle and butchering it for us
to eat, though the process was already so unusual that it horrified me
and I will not eat mutton to this day. But most young people have
never seen an animal slaughtered and they do not eat much grown by
their own hands except a few tomatoes. We get our bread from the store
after it has been made from flour grown in Argentina. We get our fruits
and vegetables from the store and neither know nor care where they were
grown. Those who garden enjoy a deeper connection, and those of us
married to gardeners, as I amn can at least participate vicariously.
The secular world has tried recently to strengthen our connection with
nature through the environmental movement. April 22, just one month
ago, was Earth Day. How many of you noticed? I for one, did not. It
came and went almost without a ripple. If these efforts are not more
compelling, perhaps it is because most of them use the language of
survival rather than the language of stewardship. Rather than saying
that we have a duty to use God’s bounty in responsible ways, the
environmental movement usually says we will all die if we don’t clean
up our air and water. That is probably true, but in the economics of
the Kingdom, life and death are never as important as our relationship
to God. As Christians, our primary motive should never be to extend our
life; it should always and only be to discern and do the will of God.
But our church offers a couple of deeper ways to recapture some
connection to the cycles of nature. One is through our church calendar.
The other is scripture. Let us talk about the calendar first. If we
will pay attention to it, we can discern how our cycle of liturgical
seasons resonates with the agricultural cycle. It is no accident that
we celebrate the birth of the son (that’s S-O-N) near the winter
solstice when the sun (that’s S-U-N) begins to lengthen our days, and
we celebrate our Lord’s resurrection near the spring equinox when new
life is stirring in the land. One of our sons was raised as an
Episcopalian and actually became one. Then he joined the Christian
Reformed Church as condition for teaching in a church-sponsored
college. But sometimes he sneaks back to an Episcopalian worship
service and always reports a sense of joy and relief at coming back to
see the different colors of altar hangings and all the other verbal and
non-verbal ways we connect our liturgical cycle to the cycle of the
seasons.
Some people might look at this and say that our worship of God is just
what’s left over from our worship of Nature. Some people will tell you
that when we are talking about the birth and death of a savior, we are
really talking about the birth and death of the crops. I thought this
myself for many years, until I realized that I had things backward. It
makes much more sense to say that when we talking about the birth and
death of the crops, we are really talking about God. The great cycles
of nature are just one aspect of a God whose total being includes not
only the nature of agriculture but untamed nature as well: earthquake
and wind and leviathan and behemoth and mountains and stars. Even
beyond that, God’s spirit encompasses the moral universe as well, for
God rejoices with every act of kindness and sacrifice and winces with
every act of cruelty and indifference.
The second way we can connect up our faith in the God Yahwah is through
scripture. Open any page of scripture and you will find agricultural
images, which is no surprise since the economics of Palestine depended
on agriculture in both OT and NT times. Adam and Eve were not given a
factory to run but a garden to tend. Abel was a herder and Cain a
farmer. The OT can be said to share Thomas Jefferson’s prejudice
against city life: The first cities we hear about in the OT are Sodom
and Gomorrah, and we know what happened to them.
We find scripture drawing in particular on a couple of sets of images:
One has to do with water and drought. Today’s passage from the 47th
chapter Ezekiel is one example. Ezekiel is one of the 6th century
prophets who lived through the destruction of the temple in the
587 B.C. but at the end of his life was shown a vision of the new
temple as he imagines it might be rebuilt when the Jews come back from
exile. What got built was something more modest than what Ezekiel had
in mind, but what was important was not the size of the temple but its
moral force as the center of the nation’s commitment to Yahwah.
One image Ezekiel chooses to express that moral force is water.
He imagines a stream of water flowing out from the threshold of the
temple, growing broader and deeper the further it goes—first ankle deep
and then waist deep and then too deep to cross. I hope you noticed how
powerful that image is, how it works at every level. Ezekiel says
the water was deep enough to swim in and yet too deep to cross—an exact
description of the spirit of the living God. We DO swim in it; that is
our task and our joy. And it IS too deep to cross; you can never
get to the other side of God because there IS no other side of God.
John of Patmos clearly had Ezekiel’s passage in mind when he
wrote chapter 22 of the book of Revelation. Water flows out from the
throne of God and waters the tree of life. It does not take a rocket
scientist to interpret the image in either the new or old testaments:
the water is living spirit of God, that flows from the temple and later
from the throne of God, through the land, gathering strength as it
goes, nurturing the trees that spring up beside it. Water is
life—physical life as it nurtures the land, and it is a powerful symbol
for the spirit of God that nurtures our spiritual lives. It gave both
physical and spiritual life when Moses struck the rock and brought it
forth at Meribah. It gave life as it was poured over your head at
baptism when it grafted you to the body of Christ, ushered you into the
Kingdom of God, and marked you as Christ’s own forever. We even keep a
bowl of it at the entrance of the church and some people dip
their fingers in it and cross themselves—too Roman a gesture for some
but a powerful acknowledgement of the place of water in the story of
our faith.
If water is a symbol of spiritual fruitfulness, it follows that drought
would be a symbol of spiritual barrenness. And we find it so when
we turn to another of the 6th century prophets, Jeremiah. When Jeremiah
wants to talk about how the Hebrew people have wandered into a
spiritual wasteland, he uses images of drought. We didn’t put
that in the bulletin, but let me read you a few lines from chapter
14: “Judah mourns, her cities languish, they wail for the land
and cry goes up from Jerusalem. The nobles send their servants for
water; they go to the cisterns but find no water. They return with
their jars unfilled, dismayed and despairing, they cover their heads.
The ground is cracked because there is no rain in the land; the farmers
are dismayed and cover their heads. Even the doe in the field deserts
her newborn fawn because there is no grass. Wild donkeys stand on the
barren heights and pant like jackals; their eyesight fails for lack of
pasture.”
The American poet T.S. Eliot, who became a convert to Anglicanism in
his 30’s, had the Old Testament in mind when in 1922, he wrote a
very famous poem, called The Wasteland, which was widely seen as a
portrait of the life of Western culture after the first world war. It
has some of the most compelling images of drought ever written. “Son of
man, you cannot know or guess, for you know only a heap of images where
the sun beats,/ and the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no
relief/ and the dry stone no sound of water.. . . Come in under this
red rock and I will show you . . . fear in a handful of dust."
Another set of images that runs through the Bible from beginning to end
is that of seedtime and harvest. In seeking to convey what he means by
the kingdom of God, Jesus again and again turns to agricultural images:
a farmer went out to sow seeds and some fell on stony ground and some
on good ground ; a farmer sowed his ground but his enemy came and sowed
weeds, but rather than pulling out the weeds, the farmer let both grow
up together because they would be easier to sort out; the kingdom of
heaven is like a mustard seed, or it is like yeast mixed with dough
(all from MT 13), or it is like a sheep farmer who leaves the 90 and 9
and goes to search for the lost sheep (MT 18), or like a landowner who
hires some workers in the morning and others later for the same wage
and refuses to listen when the ones hired earlier complain (MT 20). Or
like the other landowner who rented out his vineyard to some farmers
who killed the messenger he sent to collect the rent (MT 21).
The more urban St. Paul does not turn to agricultural images nearly so
often as our Lord, but in today’s epistle lesson he pictures nature
itself, which he calls the whole creation, groaning in labor pains to
give birth to the recreated kingdom of God.
By entering into the power of these biblical images we can begin to
recover some of the deep connection to nature that has slipped away
from us as we have used technology to insulate ourselves from it.
Let us pray. Lord in this season of seedtime, help us to appreciate
those who till the land so that we may have food to eat.
Send us seasonable rains that crops may flourish. Make us good stewards
of your bounty and help us to acknowledge you as the source of
all life. We give you thanks for your gifts of the living church and
for the gift of scripture. Help us to use those gifts to connect
ourselves to the great cycles of nature that have their origin and end
in you. .