Excerpt from Philippians 1:3-14

 ". . .having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God."

Reflection by Quinn G. Caldwell
 
In the Northern Hemisphere, we're in the midst of the great season of harvest and thanksgiving, when the food that we've been working to grow all year will be gathered into granary and store, there to see us through the winter.  Well, in theory, anyway.  For most of us, the only fall vegetables we'll actually be gathering in will be the plastic ones that spill out of the cornucopia we haul out of the upstairs closet every Thanksgiving.

Nevertheless, this is a good time to ask what a "harvest of righteousness" would look like.

Are the vegetables in your fridge righteous?  How many pesticides, how much fuel, how much labor under what conditions and pay did it take to get them to your table?

Or the deli meat in your lunch bag.  Under what conditions would the turkey or the pig have had to live—and die—for your sandwich to be a righteous one?

Or the water in your bottle.  How much plastic, how much fuel goes into a righteous drink?

By definition, a harvest is what you get from the combination of God’s gifts and human efforts.  As we—who are most of us so removed from the sources of our food that it's easy to believe it’s grown in the back of the grocery store—enter the great harvest season, it seems a good time to pause and ask:

Is what I’m about to put into my mouth a righteous harvest, or something else?

Prayer

God, I'm hungry.  Fill me up not with things that will not satisfy, but with righteousness.  Amen.

About the Author Quinn G. Caldwell is Associate Minister of Old South Church in Boston, Massachusetts, and co-editor, with Curtis J. Preston, of the just-published Unofficial Handbook of the United Church of Christ.

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