People, Look East

Saturday, December 7, 2013
Pearl Harbor Day
"People, Look East"

Between realizing as I typed the date and writing the name of the song, I realized how "People, Look East" on Pearl Harbor Day could be deeply ironic, although at least it would have been from the west that the attack flew in.

I already knew this was not going to be a particularly inspired entry.  I sang several songs this morning, and I can't find any of them now.  I looked at this song in the end, and the second verse continues my weekly theme.

Furrows, be glad, though earth is bare.
One more seed is planted there;
Give up your strength the seed to nourish,
That in course the flower flourish.

The repetition of Love the X is on the way is also wonderful, especially the last "Love, the Lord is on the way," but all that I really connected with this evening is the second verse as a beautiful metaphor for what it is to be a person of faith.

Jesus told us that we would reap what we did not sow, and I always responded with something of a quirked eyebrow.  I wish a few more of his parables came with simple explanations like the seed in the different kinds of soil.  A lot of them seem self-explanatory, but a lot of them have been twisted and others are just sort of...opaque.  The dishonest steward is a perennial head-scratcher for me.

But every so often (and sometimes multiple times on the same parable which just shows how patient God really is), I get a window into understanding His meaning.

Sometimes we are asked to be the furrows where the seed is planted.  We didn't plant it, we don't have proof it's there.  We are asked to act as if we did and do a lot of sweaty, dirty work.  And others might reap the rewards of it.  Of course, it can be even more disconcerting when we go and harvest the work that others have painstakingly done.

This is what it means to be a person of faith.  We toil at communal work, that we may or may not see come to fruition.  We toil for a shared responsibility, when we may not have been there when the seed of hope was planned.

To be a person of faith is to believe that "Love, the Rose, is on the way."  To believe that something will grow in the soil we till.

It is hard, but we harvest other fields, that we did not sow or plow.  We are the Body of Christ.  We share the burden of all the different crops.