Part of what sustains God’s people, in every time and place, is the telling and retelling of the things God has done. Today’s reading outlines a liturgy for harvest offerings. But it’s so much more that fulfilling a religious responsibility. We can imagine children learning the refrain that goes with the offering, memorizing the words that create the framework for how they will understand the world, so that when it’s their time, they will be able to participate in the story. Think of the people coming, year after year, to offer their gifts and recite the same lines that roll off their tongues as naturally as breathing.
And as they do, they situate themselves, and everyone who hears, in a world where God is living and active, working through the most unlikely of people (“a wandering Aramean”), drawing near to those who are suffering, making a way through injustice, setting free and sustaining in power and grace. Whatever the harvest this year, whatever the circumstances this time around, they know themselves to be in the presence and under the care of the God who does marvellous things.
That’s what liturgy - “the work of the people” - does. The peculiar things we do when we come together in worship shape us, and teach us what it means to be a people caught up with the God who sets free and raises the dead. When we carry in the light and Word and water, when we stand to sing together, when we confess our sin and lift our prayers, when we hear that we are “loved, forgiven, and all part of God’s family,” when we meditate on Scripture and gather at the Table, when we give our offerings and sing our blessing, all of these things work to orient us to the ways and means of God in the world. And seeing that clearly, we are equipped to move into the rest of our lives, trusting in the One who has called and claimed us, living towards the world as it will be when God gets the world God wants.
Holy God, let us never get tired of telling Your story, and finding ourselves in it. When other stories overwhelm our senses, draw us back to Yourself, that we might celebrate all You are and all You do, in, with, and for us. In Jesus’ name, amen.