Reaping What We Sow

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton, Nov. 23, 2008

Well, we’ve made it to harvest time once again - the crops are in and we’re celebrating the bounty.  That’s what Thanksgiving is about in this country:  counting our many blessings and giving thanks for them communally.  But perhaps this language – harvest, crops, reaping, sowing – is archaic to our ears, which means it’s from a time long, long ago and a place far, far away.  Does anybody know what harvest is?  Reaping?  Sowing?  (Broadcasting seed…)

In agricultural terms, at least, we won’t have anything to reap, we will have no harvest if we don’t sow something.  And what we reap depends on what we sow.

In my own garden at home, I’ve sown or planted tomato plants, and then guess what I harvest?  Tomatoes!  I’ve sown sunflowers, which I put three tiny seeds in each pencil-size hole in the dirt, and lo and behold, in a few weeks, up come huge sunflower plants that get covered with bright orange Mexican sunflowers.  I’ve sown grass seed in my yard, which all I have to do is just throw it all around and, funny thing, up come all these tiny little blades of grass that grow bigger and stronger and turn into a carpet of green over the summer.

What I reap at harvest time depends on what I’ve sown during planting time.  Sometimes it only takes a few days or a few weeks to see the results of my work.  But sometimes it takes a long time for the things we plant to show us anything.  For instance, apple trees take much, much longer to bear fruit than tomato plants – I like how fast tomatoes grow so I keep planting them every year.

I read a story this week about some farmers who are now reaping what they’ve sown over many, many years.  Cheryl and Ralph Broetje bought their first few acres of land decades ago out in Washington State.  Someone had planted cherry trees on the land and, even though they had no experience farming, Ralph and Cheryl decided to see if they could farm cherries.

The first year, the cherries all froze and weren’t any good.  The second year, there was too much rain and all the cherries went bad.  The third year, a plague of fruit flies ate up all the fruit.  After three years of failure, why would anyone keep trying?

But they did keep trying, and it got better, and Cheryl and Ralph bought more land and they switched to apples, and they planted more and more apple trees.  And over the years, what they’ve sown – apples – they’ve finally reaped by the ton.

But they’ve sown something else over the years, too.  As they grew from would-be farmers to small land-owners to successful mega-producers, they kept their employees in mind.  When they had the chance to buy new technologies that would make their operations more efficient, they chose to add equipment that would give their employees better jobs rather than to purchase machines that would replace people and wipe out jobs.  A couple of years ago, when hail ruined 70 percent of the crop on the trees, Ralph and Cheryl could have received an insurance settlement that would have covered their steep losses but, because of insurance company rules, would have kept them from harvesting what apples they could, meaning the loss of several hundred jobs for that season.  They discussed it, even prayed about it, and told the insurance company, “No, thank you.”  As a result, they kept hundreds of workers working, they kept hundreds of families provided for, and Cheryl and Ralph broke even financially that year.

Cheryl says this about the people who work for them:  “I think we as white people still remain so unconscious of our white privilege.  We have visas and tools and opportunities we didn’t earn.  We were just born here.  Now what the workers (almost all former migrants) do have – what they brought here with them – is an incredible spirit, a spirit that wants to work, that wants to give whatever they have to the community.  They may not have much, but what they have, they share.  What these people bring has enabled us to pull off something we couldn’t have imagined ourselves.”

What Ralph and Cheryl have pulled off is a modern success story, starting out with not much – just a few cherry trees, sowing hundreds and hundreds of apple trees, giving hundreds and hundreds of working people opportunities unlike they’d had before, and reaping so much good for so many people that they’ve now formed a charitable foundation that each year donates about 75% of the company’s profits to local, domestic, and international projects.  The Broetjes’ won’t separate their business goals from their spiritual values:  in fact, they believe that their spiritual foundation is the main reason for their company’s success.  Cheryl says, “Sure, we have to make money or we’d have to shut the doors.  But profit isn’t our main motive. (Our profit is) the by-product of treating people with dignity, respect, and mutuality, and as equals in every sense of the word.  We all have a role to play in creating a community of people who care for a business that then cares for them.  We believe that if we ever stopped doing that, we would implode.”

 

That’s a company, and this is a church.  We reap today the fruits of what others sowed so long ago.  The founders of this church a hundred and seventy-two years ago couldn’t even have imagined we’d be here today sharing the bread of so many traditions.  The folks who a hundred and three years ago had the courage and made the decisions and took the risks, both personal and communal, to build this beautiful building could not have foreseen this fine group of kids being here to share bread with us today.

We harvest a bounty from seeds sown by others who came before, and we give thanks for their work and dedication and selflessness.  As we go about our work, hopefully we sow new seeds that will bear new fruit for new generations to come, generations that we cannot know or even imagine.

In agriculture, we sow only what we wish to harvest.  In business, we sow only to make money, and maybe to do right by our employees.  In spiritual terms, we sow because we’re grateful, we sow in praise of our created world, we sow because we can.

May your sowing by itself feed you, and may the harvest be bountiful for all those to come after.

So may it be.