Northern Harvest, Northern Thanks
Thanksgiving Sunday - Year A
Sunday, October 12, 2008

Let us pray: God of abundance and grace, Creator. May our hearts, words and actions be ones which give praise to you for the blessings, gifts and wonder that we receive from you. Amen.

It hasn’t been the kind of week that leads one to the thought of thanksgiving - not if you are an investor, or the member of a registered pension plan, or an American homeowner with a mortgage that was owned by a bankrupt mortgage company. Sometimes insight into a situation can come from a most unlikely source.

I was driving to Lamont in preparation for a meeting of the Alberta and Northwest Conference Executive this past Wednesday. Certainly the traffic, which was fortunately mostly going the other way, did not indicate any kind of slow down in the Alberta economy at least. As I was nearing Lamont, Anna Maria Tremonti was interviewing Ted Rogers, the Canadian broadcasting mogul. Unfortunately, I arrived at my destination before the interview was finished. Now there’s one good thing about cuts at the CBC over the past few years, and that is that they replay a lot of the content at different times of day. So, I experienced one of those strange deja vu situations where I was able to hear the same interview on the very same stretch of road except that I was going the other way. Ted Rogers, among other things, conjured up the following image - as a response to a question about the current financial situation, particularly in the USA. He said, imagine working for one of the financial institutions that was allowed to fail recently. Imagine a young employee receiving notice that her or his job is terminated, driving home with the prospect of no job, only to realise that the house you live in has a mortgage owned by the same financial institution. Suddenly a secure future - a good, well paying job, and a comfortable home, is all replaced by nothing - no job, no house, and probably not a lot of prospect for either any time soon.

Of course, this all came from someone who is sitting pretty secure in his own life. He admitted that he doesn’t know how much he is worth, nor does he know how many radio stations he owns. He probably lost a pile of money this past week in the market collapse, but I doubt he’s worried about where he is going to live and where he’s going to find the money for the next grocery store shopping trip. Despite all this, I was surprised at the compassion he expressed, and I was surprised at how deeply the scenario he described affected me.

Sometimes we need to get specific before we can understand the true impact of a situation that is described in general terms and which is so widespread. One of the very sad outcomes of the worldwide economic crisis is that there are people who were living comfortable lives who are suddenly going to have a crash course in what it means to be homeless. I hate to think this, but I somehow wonder if it won’t be worse for people in that situation than it has been for the working poor or homeless people all along. The working poor, as desperate as their situation is, at least have had to learn how to be resourceful. They are survivors, despite how dismal and degrading that surviving is and has been, but I wonder how many of the casualties of the current crisis will be able to discover the same resourcefulness quickly enough.

I feel quite apologetic for painting these kinds of pictures on a day when we are invited to celebrate the bounty of harvest and the gifts we have from God. But I also feel compelled not to whitewash a situation, the like of which humanity may never have experienced before.

There were other insights from my trip to Alberta this week. We circled over the still green farmland around Edmonton in preparation for landing, and the fields with swaths of canola waiting to be combined after they dry out. During check-in at the aforementioned meeting, we heard stories of very bad harvest with rain and drought at the very wrong times - drought when the crops needed water, and rain when the already bad yields needed to be dried and stored. We also heard stories of good yields as well. It’s been a mixed bag of weather for the next year people we know as farmers.

It was probably a good thing for me to be reminded of harvest on this short trip to the south. Prior to that I was thinking about harvest time from a northern perspective. ”Context is everything” is one of the most important learnings I took from my time at seminary. It informs the way I understand the bible, it informs the way I understand the people I live among, it informs my understanding of the way in which God is present and active in the life we lead. And so, starting into our fourth year north of sixty, it was pleasing to me to think that I am familiar enough with the context to realise that thanksgiving songs of harvest don’t quite suit the situation we experience here in the north. Of course we have a harvest of sorts - I’m sure we have enough potatoes for perhaps a week - but that may say more about how green my thumbs are than it does about the bounty we have from garden and farm. Even so, I don’t see a proliferation of farmer’s markets here. I’m glad there were community gardens, and I’m glad to see that the gardeners had a harvest bountiful enough to spread their produce around the community. No, our harvest is different and not to be overlooked. We may not have a farmer’s market, but we do have Archie in old town, and I must say that the whitefish we had this week provided a couple of pretty good thanksgiving meals all on their own. I was hurriedly picking hymns on Wednesday morning before the meeting began in Lamont and happened upon a hymn with lovely words including a mention of “northern lights”. I had no other choice but to pick it, for it matched my thoughts about celebrating a northern thanksgiving just perfectly. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a piano keyboard handy to try the tune, nor did I have much time to find one. Quite rightly the choir had a different perspective on the hymn - liking it a lot, but not sure, and rightly so, that the tune would be a good one to sing lustily at a Thanksgiving service. So, instead of singing it today - we will sing it some other time, I will simply let you look it up and read the words - not a bad hymn as well to consider just prior to voting in a federal election. It’s number 523 in Voices United. Not only does it mention northern lights, but it also has the word Arctic in it - I don’t know of any Voices United hymns that can fit that bill. What the hymn doesn’t mention is the people who have lived here for thousands of years. And that’s what I ultimately came to consider in my Northern thanksgiving ruminations. And in so doing I came upon an infinite abundance of things for which to be thankful. People have lived here for generation upon generation. They’ve endured the cold. They’ve found bounty in places unique to this place in the world - fish from the lakes, berries of many kinds, and of course the caribou - that staple of the northern diet. We southern immigrants might scoff at the very idea of a one hundred mile diet in this northern locale, forgetting that people lived here quite successfully for generation upon generation with a diet that had a radius substantially less than those same hundred miles. Somehow talk of a “world economy” just doesn’t seem to fit this place as it was only a few decades ago, unless “world” means the world as defined by much narrower boundaries, and much closer connection with each other and with the earth.

Of course, thanksgiving is not just about a hearty meal - it’s about living our lives in thankfulness, for the wonder and beauty and bounty that God has given us in all parts of our lives. Northern Lights indeed - and snow draped boreal forest, and lichen coloured granite, and a pretty lakefront view on almost every corner along the road to nowhere that starts right out there. Diamonds and gold, ravens and foxes, mink and marten, water and trees, lakes large and small, lily pads and bulrushes, whitefish, char, pike and grayling. Communities of people gathering to give praise to God in thanksgiving. This is our thanksgiving. Let us never forget who and whose we are. Praise God for what we have and be God’s people in sharing the bounty with justice and equity. And that's not a bad thing to think about when we head to the polling station on Tuesday as well. Amen.