I’m feeling a little guilty about the Hunan Restaurant being torn down in Aurora. I have a sneaking suspicion it had something to do with me not going there any longer.  I used to eat there quite regularly.  I got the same thing every time—Sea Spicy Chicken Szechwan, medium hot with steamed rice and wonton soup.  The waiter never needed to take my order.  As soon as I took my seat he showed up with the soup.  That’s what I liked about Hunan—immediate gratification.

Or nearly so.  I did have to drive over from the church, which took every bit of two minutes.  But that was two minutes more than I wanted to wait.  So I had Nancy start packing a lunch that I could dip into whenever I wanted.  I always get a sandwich, carrots, both grapes and raisins, a bagel with cream cheese, some pretzels and a candy bar masquerading as a granola bar.  Now I start grazing around 10:00 am and continue on until about 2:00 pm.  What a shame, though, that my need for immediate gratification has led to an Aurora business not only closing up shop but having the whole shop torn down.

Most of us demand either fast food or fast service during the lunch hour.  We cannot stand delays of any kind.  Sitting in traffic drives us nuts.  Anything that slows down our computers is a definite problem.  Paying a bundle for overnight shipping is almost worth it.  Where did this need for immediate gratification come from?  Maybe it has come from technological progress.  A trip that took the good ship Mayflower 165 days to negotiate, at great risk to the Pilgrims I might add, can now be made in 6 hours and relative safety by airline.  Fast cars, superhighways, the information highway—all of it has made immediate gratification more and more possible and so that is what we want.

But is there a downside to immediate gratification?  There usually is a downside to any technological advance you know.  Common folks used to have a great capacity for memorization before the printing press came along.  Likewise, common folks used to be able to do simple math in their heads before the calculator came along.  Could there be a downside to immediate gratification?  Could we be losing useful capacities like persistence, perseverance and patience for example?  Patience is a virtue, and a biblical virtue at that.  Is virtue suffering because of our need for immediate gratification?

I would like to explore that issue in our message for this morning entitled, "Looking to the Harvest"—an appropriate title in light of the coming Thanksgiving holiday don’t you agree?  Between planting the seed and reaping the harvest there is a necessary period of waiting according to what Eugene Peterson says in the quote at the top of our bulletin: "The person who looks for quick results in the seed planting of well-doing will be disappointed."  If I want potatoes for dinner tomorrow, it will do me little good to plant them in my garden tonight.  There are long stretches of darkness and invisibility and silence that separate planting and reaping.  During the stretches of waiting, there is cultivating and weeding and nurturing and planting still other seeds."

During the stretches of waiting there is a need for the virtues of patience, persistence and perseverance—just the opposite of immediate gratification.  Let us turn to our text for this morning to see what we can learn from a psalmist who is looking beyond immediate gratification—who is, rather, "Looking to the Harvest."  But before we get to the part about the harvest, and even before we get to the verses that precede it, you will notice that this Psalm is prefaced with the words, "A song of ascents."  Indeed, Psalms 120 through 134 are all prefaced with these words.  What was the purpose of these songs of ascents?

There were three annual feasts that brought all the Hebrews to the capital city of Jerusalem, one of which celebrated the early harvest and one of which celebrated the late harvest.  The third was the Feast of Unleavened Bread.  The capital city of Jerusalem was built atop Mt. Zion.  Hence, three times each year, we find the Hebrew pilgrims ascending the roads up Mt. Zion to the feasts in Jerusalem.  The "songs of ascent" were to be sung while they were marching upward to Zion.

In our hymnal we have a song of ascent (number 555) entitled, "We’re Marching to Zion."  The tempo of the song suggests a slow march up a mountainside.  Some Sunday mornings as the choir and I are ascending the stairs from the practice room in the basement to choir loft up here, I will begin singing: "We’re marching to Zion, beautiful, beautiful Zion; we’re marching upward to Zion, the beautiful city of God."

The songs of ascent include the beautiful 121st Psalm: I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.  My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth (Psalm 121:1-2, KJV)—an appropriate sentiment to keep in mind as one is ascending the hills to Jerusalem.  Likewise the opening words of the next song of ascent: I rejoiced with those who said to me, "Let us go to the house of the Lord" (Psalm 122:1).  The Hebrews were reminded to rejoice and sing as they approached Jerusalem because there was once a time when they lamented their exile from the Holy City, indeed the whole of the Holy Land.

First the Assyrians defeated the Northern Kingdom of Israel, and then the Babylonians defeated the Southern Kingdom of Judah, and all the inhabitants of the Land of Promise were carried away into exile as slaves to their conquerors.  Then there was no singing or rejoicing to be heard from God’s people.  As the psalmist wrote: By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.  There on the poplars we hung our harps, for there our captors asked us for songs, our tormentors demanded songs of joy; they said, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion!"  How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land? (Psalm 137:1-4).

But if there is a redeeming purpose in the humiliating experience of finding ourselves powerless to help ourselves, it is in looking up to finding a higher power that can help us.  When the Exiles looked to God he responded by rescuing them from their bondage and returning them to the Promised Land.  Hence the opening words of our "song of ascent" for today: When the Lord brought back the captives to Zion, we were like men who dreamed (translation: they had to pinch themselves to see if they were dreaming because it was almost to good to be true).  Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy.  Then it was said among the nations, "The Lord has done great things for them."  The Lord has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy (Verses 1-3).

We can imagine the joy of the returning exiles as they passed from bondage to freedom, and from being aliens without a country to being a people with a land to call their own.  But we might also be able to imagine the shock of returning to a land whose fields had been overgrown for decades, whose olive trees and vineyards had long been uprooted, whose wells had been defiled with the rotting carcasses of their livestock and then filled in and whose cities had been reduced to ruins, including their temple in Jerusalem.

Indeed, when the former exiles laid the foundation of a new temple over the ruins of the old temple, not everyone was joyful about it.  We read, But many of the older priests and Levites and family heads, who had seen the former temple, wept aloud when they saw the foundation of this temple being laid (Ezra 3:12).  And why did they weep?  Because the foundation of the new temple was so much smaller than that of the old temple, and because the glory of the new temple would be a mere shadow of the glory of the old.

That is why our song of ascents makes a transition from the joy of the returning exiles to the proper attitude they will require to rebuild their homeland.  The psalmist continues, Restore our fortunes, O Lord, like the streams in the Negev (Verse 4).  The Negev is in the desert south of Judah and lies at the foot of a mountain range.  As a desert, it is often bone dry.  But during the winter months rain on the mountains fills the wadis with a cascading rush of life-giving water that supports the desert flora and fauna and people who drink from the oases replenished by it.   Now we know what the psalmist may have meant when he wrote: I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.

God has promised to do his part to supply our needs at the proper time and in the proper way.  In the meantime, we must do our part to work with him as he gives us every opportunity.  Hence the psalmist shifts images once again in our text.  He writes: Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy.  He who goes out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with him (Verses 5-6).

Now we might ask ourselves, why would anyone sow in tears?  Who goes out weeping carrying seed to sow?  We don’t see farmers sowing in tears.  We don’t see gardeners weeping as they sow their seeds.  But we also do not normally experience famines in this land—at least not in this modern day and age of agribusiness, irrigation and food storage. But for most of human history, an occasional famine was a part of life.  You never knew when too much rain or not enough rain, or maybe a late spring or early winter was going to negatively affect your yield.

If you grew wheat to grind into flour to make bread, maybe you were not able to store enough to get you and your family through the winter months when nothing grows.  That is when you rationed what you had and went hungry for a couple of months—if you were lucky.  If you were unlucky, somebody in your family might starve or otherwise die from a weakened condition.  At the very least you had to listen to your babies and children cry out in hunger.

If that is not bad enough, imagine having bags and bags of wheat on hand that you absolutely cannot touch.  Why?  Because it is your seed for the next growing season.  If you eat that seed you will have nothing to plant and therefore nothing to harvest. In other words, you and yours will surely starve the next winter.  So while the baby is crying and the children are complaining and your wife is looking terribly thin and your own stomach is growling, imagine how hard it would be not to dip into that sack of wheat to make a couple loaves of fresh bread.

Now imagine that after a winter of staring hungrily at those bags of wheat, it is at long last time to go out and sow the next year’s crop.  Imagine taking handfuls of perfectly good wheat and throwing it on the ground as if you are just throwing it away.  Now you can begin to imagine what the psalmist was talking about when he spoke of those who sow in tears—who go out weeping carrying seed to sow.  But they sow that seed anyway because they are looking beyond their need for immediate gratification.  They are "Looking to the Harvest"—a hundred-fold harvest that will give them more than enough to eat and store for the next season’s planting.

The psalmist is writing to the returning exiles who are joyful about returning to their homeland, and yet who are also weeping as the face the magnitude of the rebuilding task before them.  The psalmist is encouraging them to do what they can, to plant the seeds of faith they have and to trust that God will supply the life-giving water and weather and whatever else is needful to bring forth a hundred-fold harvest that is more than sufficient to meet their needs.

Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy.  He who goes out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with him.  Even in this world of immediate gratification, we still hunger and thirst for something more.  Even here and now there are some who feel exiled from the Promised Land, or who feel that some great expanse of dry desert wilderness stands between where it is and where we are.  But if we think about it, we will realize that God has given us a step to take in that direction today.