AUTUMN / / 2021 / / ISSUE NUMBER 8
THE TRISAGION A JOINT NEWSLETTER OF THE EPISCOPAL CHURCHES OF HUNTINGTON, WV
The Stewardship Edition
Sowing While Weeping DAVID JOHNSTON, Trinity Lay Pastoral Associate Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves. Psalm 126:6 In seminary, my Old Testament professor, Dr. Ellen Davis, told us she was long puzzled by why those in Psalm 126 would be weeping while sowing seed. She would occasionally teach for short periods in Sudan, and it was one of her Sudanese students who shed light on it for her. The seeds being sown come from one’s food reserve. The grain one sows is the grain one could also eat. So to sow the seed is a risk and might require lean and hungry days ahead, hence the weeping.
Psalm 126, a staple of the noon prayer office in the Book of Common Prayer, is a psalm for a time like the one we are in. We are unsettled, grieving loss, disrupted and uncertain of when we will see God restore our fortunes and when our mouths will be filled with laughter again. We know God has acted for us in the past. We have seen God’s goodness and faithfulness. We pray in hope “Restore our fortunes, O Lord” (Psalm 126:4) while anxiously waiting for some decisive break in this pandemic. In times of loss and uncertainty, God is faithful even when we cannot see it. We have assurance from scripture that whatever famines, wars, and plagues may come, that Jesus Christ will be victorious in the fullness of time. We live each day empowered by this hope. So much more than shirking responsibility because it’s in God’s hands, God invites us to faithful and hopeful living in light of God’s own faithfulness and assured victory. In the words of Psalm 126, we sow in tears now in hope that we will reap with shouts of joy later. We make use of the resources we have for the sake of God’s kingdom knowing that we will harvest in joy when the kingdom comes in its fullness. Few of us are probably relying on sacks of grain for the future, so how do we live this out? We continue to be faithful stewards of what God has entrusted to us, things such as Continued on page 2 1