The Week The Harvest Comes

The first thing every year is the sound of the big doors going back on their track.

They are twenty two feet of sliding door on the Renner machine shed and they groan like something in a barn owes somebody money, and when that sound comes across the fields on a Saturday morning in September, four families up that road stop what they are doing and start loading the truck.

The harvest supper has been in that shed for longer than anybody can settle in an argument. The tables are old doors laid over sawhorses, seven of them end to end down the middle. Deke Halvorsen brings the string of lights every year and swears every year he is going to replace them. There are two washtubs of ice by the wall, a coffee urn that has to be started an hour early, and a boy named Peter with a fiddle who was frankly terrible three years ago and is now good enough that people go quiet.

Hollis Renner has hosted that supper for thirty one years.

He has never once eaten at it.

That is not a figure of speech. He gets the combine out of the shed at first light and parks it on the pad. He sweeps a floor the size of a basketball court. He hauls the doors up from the fence row where they live under a tarp all year, and sets the sawhorses, and runs the extension cord, and when everybody arrives he is the one moving between the tables with a coffee pot in one hand and a rag in the other, and when it is over he is the one stacking. Ask his wife Junie and she will tell you he enjoys it. Ask her again and she will tell you the truth, which is that a man can be glad about a thing for thirty one years without ever having been inside it.

Hollis could tell you what he does any given week of his year, because the year tells him. Bookwork in February. Ground in late March if it dries. Planting, then spraying, then waiting, which is the hardest work of all. Wheat off in July. Beans and corn from the end of September into whatever November allows. Cows all the way through. There is no week in that calendar that belongs to anything but the work, and there never has been, and it did not feel like a loss because it never occurred to him that it could be otherwise.

Then this September, the third Saturday, Junie came at him between the second and third table with a plate already made up.

She took his cap off his head.

"Sit," she said. "Right there, on the end."

And he sat down, and he did not know what to do with his hands for about a minute.

Peter got through a slow one without dragging it. Somebody's grandmother laughed at something further down the table and everybody turned to see who. The light in that shed went the color it goes about seven, when the sun gets under the roof edge and comes down the whole length of those doors on sawhorses and turns the dust into something worth watching.

Hollis ate his supper, and about halfway down the plate his eyes went, and he had to look at the rafters for a bit.

Then at the end, before anybody started for the trucks, Deke Halvorsen got up on an overturned bucket the way he does, and said the thing that gets said every single year.

"Third Saturday of September. Right here. Next year."

And the whole shed said it back to him.

Hollis stood there with a stack of plates in his hands and worked out that for the first time in thirty one years he had something out in front of him that was not a deadline.

He put the gladness in the calendar Himself

Nobody has to tell you that your year is mostly work. You know the shape of it better than anybody.

What you may not have been told is that when God laid out a year for a nation of farmers, people whose whole existence ran on weather and animals and getting a crop off before it rained, the very first thing He did with that calendar was take days out of it and put His own name on them.

Leviticus 23 calls them His appointed times. Not the nation's traditions. His. A set time, marked in advance, on a calendar He was handing to people who would otherwise have worked every day they had.

You are invited to something that was scheduled before you were born, and that is what Leviticus 23 is doing when it calls those days the appointed times of the Lord. The Spirit who moved Moses to write that list down is reading it over your shoulder now, which is why it sounds like an invitation and not a syllabus.

And look what He said to do on them. Not brood. Not audit. Read the anchor.

Seven days shalt thou keep a solemn feast unto the LORD thy God in the place which the LORD shall choose: because the LORD thy God shall bless thee in all thine increase, and in all the works of thine hands, therefore thou shalt surely rejoice.Deuteronomy 16:15

Therefore thou shalt surely rejoice.

Sit with how strange that is. Here is a God who looked at a working people and built gladness into the year the way a man builds a doorway into a wall, on purpose, at a measured place, because a wall with no way through it is not a house. He did not leave the rejoicing to whether they felt up to it. He put it on the calendar.

You have a Father who is not stingy with gladness, and Deuteronomy 16:15 is His own wording on that. He said it once and His Spirit has never stopped saying it, which is how a line that old loosens something in a chest that has been braced for years.

Now, I am not going to tell you which days you should be keeping. That question has had people arguing since the first century, and Colossians 2 says plainly that nobody gets to sit in judgment over you about a feast day, and I am not about to be the exception. You cannot fail this page. If you have never marked a single one of these days in your life, nothing about your standing is different from the person who marks them all, and anybody who tells you otherwise is adding to what was announced.

What I want you to see is what those days were doing.

Every one of them looked forward. They were rehearsals. Passover rehearsed a lamb and a rescue, and Paul says outright that Christ is our Passover. The harvest feasts rehearsed an ingathering nobody had seen yet. Colossians 2 calls the whole set a shadow of things to come, and the interesting half of that sentence is the last three words. A shadow means something is standing in the light casting it, and it is coming.

It is already settled that you are on the list for what all of it was pointing at, and Revelation 19 says blessed are they who are called to the marriage supper of the Lamb, and His Spirit is the one who makes that read like a date rather than a doctrine.

And here is the part I would put in front of a tired person before anything else on this page. On the last night, in an upstairs room, with everything He knew about the next day, He said He would not drink of the fruit of the vine again until He drank it new with them in His Father's kingdom.

He set a date for Himself.

That is what is written in Matthew 26, and it means the Son of God is looking forward to a supper with you at a table, and the same Spirit who put that sentence in front of you today has kept the appointment on the books ever since.