Gleaning with their Hands

Greetings, You remain invited to stop by my workshop for a visit or to try out a new skill working with you hands. I might even have made a snack with garden produce. Just call or write ahead if you can. You can also contact me about a spiritual direction appointment. I’m working up some classes and retreats for later in the year, and excited to be able to share them here soon. Below is a sermon I preached recently, a meditation on hands, gleaning, and God’s desires for our daily living on earth.

Evan Clendenin

Sermon for June 2, 2024, Church of the Holy Spirit, Vashon WA, The Rev. Evan Graham Clendenin

The gospel passage today tells of Jesus and his companions living their life on earth. They enter grain fields on a sabbath day and plucking grain to eat. I wonder what time of year this would have been? Now to state what may or may not be obvious, they would have plucked the grain with their hands. Not with an antique allis chalmers gleaner combine! They must have been hungry, and they couldn’t just go to the corner store, it being the 1st century in roman palestine. And they wouldn’t have toted that picnic cooler either, it being a sabbath. So they plucked the grain at hand with their own hands. A group of Pharisees noticed this and said “look what they are doing contrary to religious guidance!” Their concern was not that these disciples were trespassing on another property, or stealing, but that they were working on the Sabbath, when man, woman, child, servant and animals were not to work.  

Allis Chalmers Gleaner E, Saskatchewan, Dmodderman, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

We can rightly share this concern with the Pharisees, a concern for mercy and righteousness and holiness before God in our activities of daily living on earth. We might look at the American food system to direct this concern about work and rest and land to today. I’m reading Austin Frerick’s new book Barons right now. He describes a food system that provides little rest to animals and humans, spoils water, air and land. And he tells of the political interests and persons who shaped this food system in new ways over the last 20 years. Food prices go up, corn gets burnt in cars as ethanol, and feeds pigs housed in misery barns. Profits are doing well, even better during the pandemic, while children work and slave in slaughterhouses.

And Jesus and his companions would have shared this concern with the Pharisees and us about earth and land, and work and rest, to keep the sabbath holy, to allow for all creatures to rest, because the people knew what it is was to slave away, because God himself rested. And they bring to the Pharisees faithful study their own perspectives from field, workshop, fishing boat, kitchen and street market. What they say by their deeds and the story Jesus tells reveal the life in him.

First, we might look at the story Jesus tells. It tells us more about what Jesus is doing, and who Jesus is. Jesus tells a story about King David and his companions, as they fled from King Saul. We’ll hear more about Saul and David over the summer in the Sunday readings. You might read along in 1 and 2 Samuel to fill the story in for yourself. David and his companions were hungry. So David convinced the priests in the tabernacle of the Lord to give him old bread. There was fresh hot bread placed there regularly-just imagine that, like going into the bakery- as a making real of the presence of the God who had fed them in the wilderness. David is asking for the old bread, which was eaten by the priests or disposed of in a certain way. David and his companions were like religious dumpster-divers.

In telling this story, Jesus claims a kingly lineage and purpose. But what of his deed, the plucking of grain, that raised the pharisees concern that they were working? What does it say that Jesus leaves unsaid? They are plucking grain with their hands, they are gleaning. Jesus gleans, like King David’s great grandmother, Ruth, who gleaned grain. (You might read the book of Ruth this summer, it’s short, and good story!) Such are his ancestors.

And Jesus and his companions are gleaners, they exercise the right, perhaps forgotten or unused, the right of the poor, widows and outsiders, their right accorded by God to glean grain after harvest and from corners and edges of fields. When they plucked with their hands, rubbed the kernel from the chaff and ate, Jesus proclaimed with the psalmist that “the earth is the Lord’s, and all its fullness.” Jesus made visible the life in him for land and its people.  

Drawing, Les Glaneuses/The Gleaners, Jean-François Millet, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

People like the man with the withered hand, a hand like those of the disciples plucking grain. Jesus restores his hands and ours. Hands that can keep and till, pluck grain, or shell dry beans, hands that can feed, heal, console, hands that might make visible the life of Jesus even here and now. Your hands, my hands showing the way to the light of God that shone in the face of Jesus Christ.