Soil, Soul, And Thanks

Deuteronomy 26: 1-1 1; John 6:25-35

Thanksgiving is a land thing. It is a soil thing. Thanksgiving is a harvest thing and because of that, in many ways, our Thanksgivings are somewhat artificial. On the whole we are people who are disconnected from the land and from the soil. The first Pilgrim Thanksgiving was one that must have been radically different from ours in tone and spirit.

The Pilgrims had left England, or had planned to leave in the spring of the year, heading for a new home and hoping to land somewhere along the shore of what we now call Virginia or North Carolina. They got a late start as things happened and as the best laid plans often go astray, the ship in which they started across the Atlantic sprung a leak. Feeling it was no longer safe to cross the Atlantic in this ship, they turned around and went back to England and transferred all their possessions and all their belongings to another ship, one called the Mayflower. It was long past May; by now all the flowers of May were gone when they finally started out the second time. The Atlantic was stormy that summer and the storms blew their ship north of the route they intended to take so that land-fall occurred in the fall of the year in Massachusetts rather than in Virginia. They had intended to arrive in time to have a full growing season before winter and they had intended to, be far enough south to have a mild winter. They did not get anything they had bargained for. They arrived in one of the harshest climates on the continent and they arrived late in the year when it was impossible to grow any more food, so they had to find a way to try to survive a full winter on the leftover provisions that were only meant to carry them across the Atlantic.

They built crude shelters as best they could and they died in great numbers during the winter. They died of starvation. they died of disease, they died of the cold. When spring finally came to Massachusetts, there were +basket and take the basket to the Temple. When you give the fruits to the priest, say who you are. Say, "My ancestors were wandering Aramains and they went down into Egypt few in number and became mighty and prosperous and they were oppressed and the Lord our God with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm liberated us from Egyptian slavery and brought us to this land, this good land of milk and honey, and so, God, honoring what you have done, here is the first fruit of the harvest. It is perhaps the oldest affirmation of faith in liturgy existent in the world.

Ah, we are so removed from it all, so landless, in our little city lots or condominiums or apartments, so isolated from the soil and yet--in American folklore and in the romance of the Middlewest--there is still the dream of the time when we were people of the land. There is a wonderful little book full of the romanticism of the soil and of the farm. It is called Clabbered Dirt and Sweet Grass. It is written by Gary Paulsen and I'd like to read for you a little bit of the romance in the words he uses about the soil. "Plowing. The first great music of summer. Plowing and watching the black dirt turn, the blue--black dirt so dark you can see into it, turn and turn, over and over, like an earthen braid, while the seagulls float over the blade of the plow by the hundreds, float on invisible air, one foot two feet above the turning black beauty dirt, looking down for worms to grab and swallow without landing, to shoot up into the air while another a gull sweeps down

for worms turning like gifts in the black, rich earth, furrows straight, straight aimed at a tree, then turn and straight aimed at a rock, down the middle of the field, straight as a chalked line, straight as a machine, straight as a cutting steel in a machine to make them straight, straight, straight. You can tell a man by how straight he plows, they say. The uncles smile, laugh when they pick up the soil in their hands and rub it against their pants, smile with faces burned and dirted dark, with white circles around their eyes so that they seem always surprised, happy. Pick up the dirt and smile and say, 'Drop a seed in this and you won't make it to the edge of the field before it's up to your knees, tripping you.' Pick up the soil and taste it. Taste a piece of it and smell it and throw it down and smile and say, 'clabbered dirt, sweet grass. Even though dirt doesn't clabber and sour, but still, still there is a thing to taste there that tells things."¹ The romance of the soil.

This Thanksgiving I invite you to try to reconnect with some of the romance for I remind you that though our Thanksgiving is not so much for soil and toil and harvest, it is rather for the bounty of a material and technological culture. We sit at our bountiful tables with our families in our nicely warmed or cooled homes, with all the gadgets of modernity around us and I say to you, "Give thanks for the gadgets." Not very many preachers will tell you that, but give thanks for the gadgets. Give thanks for the material things and understand that they are all ultimately and intimately related to the soil. A couple of feet of topsoil on a tiny percentage of the earth's surface nourishes all of human life. If your work is about paper and books and tests and forms, it is about the product of the trees, of the soil.

So it is, with all the gadgets and all the trinkets and all the blessings of our lives. Finally they root themselves back in that precious couple of feet of topsoil on a tiny percentage of the planet. When you give thanks, go ahead. Go ahead and give thanks for the trinkets and the gadgets, but remember where the came from. Remember their ultimate source is the soil, whose ultimate source is the Creator.

So also, then, give thanks for the soul. Give thanks for the faith that knows, as Jesus says, that humanity cannot live by bread alone. All the gadgets and all the harvests of the world do not quite entirely satisfy the hunger in our souls for bread that nourishes something deeper than the stomach and the body. A hunger of the soul for beauty and art and literature and music and finally, most of all, for faith and prayer and hope. A hunger that is satisfied only in the end by a sense of intimacy, not just with the dirt, but with the Creator.

Understand that the great danger of this season and all seasons that we claim credit for our prosperity. The farmer knows better. The farmer knows that though you work and work and slave and work, ultimately the harvest comes from the miracle of creation. You cannot force it and you cannot guarantee it and you cannot make it happen. The same is just as much true for those of us who work in other areas of the world. Our prosperity is not the result of our labor, but of the hand, the gracious hand, of God. Let us give thanks. Let us not just celebrate abundance, let us acknowledge from whence abundance comes. Let us understand with the ancient Israelites who we are and whose we are. For all of us, our ancestors were wandering and by the gracious, loving, fruitful hand of God, the wandering ones find a home and we give thanks--with our lips, with our pledges, with our labors, with our hearts. We give thanks for soil, soul, and God, the source of it all. Amen.

Carl L. Schenck

Notes

1. Paulsen, Gary, Clabbered Dirt and Sweet Grass.