Faithfulness is a value true to a Sunday-after-Thanksgiving sermon. I am learning to be faithful; we all are. Thanksgiving is that holiday in honor of the harvest. That being so, Thanksgiving might well be a holiday in honor of faithfulness.
One can not have a harvest without being faithful. Seeds pitched at the field and left to their own will likely not grow. The farmer must first spend time and conscientious attention to the soil. It must be amended and tilled even the season before the spring planting. The seeds that hold the promise of harvest remain in the bag - or in the home gardener's envelope -- for a long time before planting. Only after months of preparation are the seeds dropped into the soil and covered over. Still there is no harvest. Harvest is months away.
Probably, with so much attention at the beginning, there will be a harvest. But there are no guarantees even with care at the beginning. So much can go wrong: too much rain, not enough rain, rain at the wrong time; frost too late in spring or too soon in autumn.
The harvest itself is a no-brainer. Once the summer's conditions have not seriously gotten in the way of the plant's needs, the fruit of the field will come whether is it corn or wheat or my garden's tomatoes and geraniums. -- Zucchini will take care of itself no matter flood or drought, bad soil or the sun decides to take a vacation.
But the rest of it requires so much steady attention, so much ability to wait and trust; so much unwavering devotion and patience and faithfulness. So. WE GIVE THANKS --for the harvest; and for the faithfulness that helps make it so.
If the images of planting and the harvest do not evoke what faithful might mean --or what the abstract words such as devotion and patience, attention, mindfulness, steadiness, tell us of faithfulness --think of dairy cows!!
Those cows fill with milk two times every single day of every single week all year long, year after year. The cow is dependable; the farmer must be faithful to the cow. The farmer can't leave the cows at home for even one single whole day. The cow must be milked twice a day every day. I don't know that I have such endurance in me. Such faithfulness is the farmer's life.
Patience is akin to faithfulness, yet not the same. Patience is more like quiet, tolerant waiting. Patience is how the grandfather understands witnessing his son at the beach letting his daughter, pour sand from a cup she held into a cup he held and then his pouring the sand back into her cup, back and forth for as long as the toddler wanted -- long past the grandfather's ability to stand it. He reported the story amazed that his son had such tolerance.
To wait in conversation for your partner to get just the right word or thought and not fill in the blank for him or her. To graciously answer, "How are your mother and father?" or some such question asked five times in twenty-five minutes by your Alzheimer-stricken mother-in-law. To just be able to stand it over and over is patience.
Faithfulness is akin to patience. It isn't the same. Faithfulness is any of the above examples of patience recognized as TOWARD some value. Patience plus thoughtfulness and hope, perhaps.
Faithful response to a toddler's imperative to pour and pour sand for some invisible developmental need or mysterious toddler joy, faithful recognition of a partner's satisfaction in holding a moment in order to fulfill a thought's deeper meaning; to make witness to the mother-in-law's unyielding hospitality and deep care for others in the terrible knowing of the loss of her mind.
There are so many faithful acts and lives. Most of them lost in the invisibility of what we thoughtlessly call the mundane: LIVING.
There are faithful acts and faithful lives that we recognize and honor.
Faithfulness describes Nelson Mandela's decades in prison. He didn't survive just because he had the ability to be patient. Mandela survived decade after decade in the horrors, the isolation and the degradations of prison out of his powerful commitment and allegiance - his faithfulness--, to human equality in his homeland.
Faithfulness is patience -- plus thoughtfulness and hope. ---a focus toward tending something of MEANING. Something that hasn't come into its fullness, its maturity. Something concrete or living in the deep recesses and reaches of life, that needs time AND minding and caring, Something that is worthy of our tending.
Worthschippen is the old English word that describes and honors all that has worth. It is the word from which we derive the term worship. Faithfulness and worship, in that way, become kin to one another. Tending with patience and care toward the wholeness and maturity of something of worth is faithfulness -- is worshipful, worship filled.
From the father in the sand teaching sandness and cupness and his love for his daughter --to a political prisoner suffering the torture of prison on behalf of a larger vision.
AN EXAMPLE: Feminist biblical scholar and Roman Catholic Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza was the keynote speaker at the Unitarian Universalist Women's Federation annual meeting some June a decade or so ago. Dedicated to use her scholarship to mine the integral role of women in the early church --as both history and context for all of Christianity, not just for feminist Christians, Fiorenza endures, in powerful.
Despite papal determination that women are not eligible for ordination, not fit for priesthood, she remains in the church. During the question and answer period, someone in this UU audience, asked why Dr. Fiorenza didn't just leave the Roman Catholic Church since it is so clearly abusive of women. Fiorenza's response was that no one asks the Pope why he doesn't leave the Catholic Church. The Church is hers as much as his, she was saying in this answer; she isn't about to leave it -- or leave it alone.
So, some words about faithfulness and some larger and smaller examples. Which are larger and which smaller I will not determine. The sermon title also links "kneading bread dough with faithfulness.
When I learned to bake bread my approach to kneading was to pick up the lump and throw it back down and to do that repeatedly until I was sick unto death of doing it. I would then lump it up, dump it in a bowl, cover the mess and wait.
Kneading was an angry process, impatient, non-reflective and very frustrating. I had no goal except to get it over with. There is no element of worthschippen or faithfulness in the goal of "to get it over with" -- no matter the task: planting, milking, kneading bread, caring for a child, remaining in an busive religious tradition. Literally, when I kneaded bread I would bang the dough angrily on whatever surface I had floured for the purpose.
You can imagine what sound that might make in the kitchen. Slap, whack, thwack on the counter. A noise occasionally interspersed with mumbling or mild cursing as the dough became stuck to my fingers and hands. If I'd forgotten to take my rings off before I started -- well, the cursing wasn't so mild.
But my mother had made cinnamon rolls when I was a child and I would, too. So I went at the task despite the foul mood that grew in me during the process. That foul mood a nasty yeast.
When one approaches life the way I approached bread making there is surely little joy. Definitely there is no faithfulness in such an approach to life. There is likely to be little success. Not success in the sense of fame, fortune and power. I mean success in the sense of harvest.
Remember the farmer's seeds cradling the germ of harvest, the dairy farmer's cows filled with the milk of life, the toddler, my mother-in-law, the women in the early church whom Elisabeth Fiorenza will not let the church forget.
Religions and cultures around the world, and through time have made witness to the power of the harvest through the many harvest festivals flowing over with religious overtones.
Religions and cultures around the world have seen in the preparation of bread and in its eating many metaphors-"give us our daily bread; the bread 'we need' for our 'everyday' lives", the staple of life, the body shared in fellowship; bread, both the harvested grain and the staff of life was the basis of the Egyptian administrative system. Among Muslims bread is an archetypal food, regarded as a symbol of Allah's generosity that must be treated with respect. Dipped in honey, bread becomes a prayer for "a good and sweet year" at Ro'sh ha-Shanah in Judaism. Harvest and bread, ----symbols of life, fellowship, generosity, --and faithfulness. I first witnessed faithfulness and its impact on human life -on me - watching Libby Carson knead bread dough. Libby is a woman who has lived a life of faithfulness; it comes through in everything she does including kneading a simple loaf of bread. I sat at her ancient round oak table watching her finish kneading the dough for a loaf of whole wheat bread; it was almost hypnotic but too meaningful to just be hypnotic.
I can only say she honored the bread in her kneading, done care-fully and intentionally. Even more so when she finished the kneading and took several WHOLE minutes to clear her hands of the dough that had stuck there, to put even those tiny bits of the bread back into the whole where it belonged. No need to hurry, no need to waste. More than that, honor the bread and all its parts, take the time -- I saw in Libby's work,-- to make this loaf as whole as possible. Libby was faithful to the bread working it thoughtfully toward its wholeness.
We have entered more than a month of holidays. Some of us will trip through these next weeks joyfully. Others of us will struggle --a little like me kneading dough. We will shop until the list is crossed off, bake or buy platters of cookies, cook the meals and serve them. Go to church Christmas Eve, get up early with the children, fill trash bags with the litter of wrapping paper and abandoned boxes. Most of us have the patience to make it through this next month without a lot of muttering and cursing. I ask myself and I ask you -- how are we each girded with faithfulness in the matter of these holidays, girded with a faithfulness in the matter of these holidays in a way that impacts, at least a little, the whole of our lives lying before us? Patience, thoughtfulness, hope, worship-filled joy toward wholeness in all things.
What is the patience we exercise "toward" what wholeness that we name as worthy of our faithfulness for just the month of December?
May our faithful attention to the seeds we plant and the soil in which we plant them promise a harvest of wholeness.
May the examples of faithfulness we have witnessed in our lives remain with us to teach and to.
May our ability to knead the dough of life in faithfulness carry us through this month and all the coming days.
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