Sermon

Raking leaves with a little bit of God...upon request..

As summer flowers give way to autumn leaves and the warm weather evolves into crisper weather, a quick glance outside reveals that we truly have a lot to be thankful for. The smell of brisk autumn air, fall festivals, pumpkin spice lattes from Starbucks, and, of course, the notoriously beautiful New England fall foliage. We are right now in the peak of fall, when the leaves are at their most vibrant and shades of red, orange, and yellow color the trees. We are blessed to be surrounded by such natural beauty.
However, these same leaves that we marvel at now were the reason why my brother and I dreaded the onset of fall when we were children; fall meant leaves and leaves meant raking. Needless to say, we found every possible excuse to try and get out of raking the leaves. One year, we tried to convince Dad that the leaves were a sort of lawn ornament that made the yard look more colorful and so should be allowed to stay on the ground. Another year, we discovered that our rakes were made of weak plastic and that if we pushed instead of pulled the leaves then the rakes would break we couldn’t resume raking until Dad bought new ones. There were a lot of broken rakes that season. Despite these and other furtive attempts, every year was the same. We would rake up a pile of leaves that my Dad would then stuff into a barrel and carry across the street to dump in the woods. While he was disposing of them, my brother and I would frantically try and throw as many of the remaining leaves as we could into the neighbor’s yard so that we wouldn’t have to deal with them ourselves.
Our plan always seemed to backfire. Sooner or later the leaves would blow back into our yard and we would have to rake them up. We thought we were fooling Dad and outsmarting the system, but we were only fooling ourselves. Sometimes he would play along, consciously ignoring the huge pile of leaves that lay just over the neighbor’s fence, but he knew what we were up to.
I wish I could say that we eventually learned to embrace the inescapable task of raking leaves and undertook it with a renewed sense of satisfaction in knowing that the hard manual labor that we put in would be well worth it in the end when we were left with a beautiful, leaf-free yard. But what really happened was that we both left the yards behind and went to college, I in New York where “vegetation” is a foreign word and Nick in California where the only thing falling from the trees are coconuts. However, we can both look back and appreciate the lessons that leaf raking and our unsuccessful attempts to avoid it taught us.

We always tried to get rid of the leaves because we didn’t appreciate the subtle forces inherent in leaf-raking that were surreptitiously shaping our characters every time we raked. The leaves kept coming back to us for a reason; because raking was really a call to having faith that the benefits would out weigh and long outlive the suffering.
Having faith is a theme that we have heard over and over again in the Gospel readings of the past month. Two weeks ago the gospel reading was about Christ calming the Sea. Last week we saw him healing the Gentile demoniac, and this week, he heals the woman with a flow of blood and raises the daughter of the ruler of the synagogue. We are called to place our faith in God, just as the young woman with the flow of blood did when the touched Jesus and as the ruler of the synagogue did when he asked Christ to heal his dying daughter. We place our faith in Christ so that we might know and marvel at his works just as we know and marvel at the changing colors of the autumn leaves.