By the Rev. Dr. Lucille Marr, Chaplain, The Presbyterian College Montreal
This reflection is from a sermon that Dr. Marr preached in the college chapel in the 2024-2025 academic year.
Deuteronomy 26: 1-11 is a Psalm of Thanksgiving that marks the significant Day of First Fruits. This text is unique in the Old Testament in its description of the simple yet moving ceremony where the Jewish people presented the “first fruits” of the harvest as a thank offering to God. This is a typical Psalm of Thanksgiving with a telling of the experience of difficulty, a calling out to God for help, and an offering of praise to God for his salvation.
The Psalmist highlights the brokenness of the Hebrew people’s ancestor, Jacob, a wandering Aramean; a lost sheep who found himself living as an alien in Egypt. The Psalmist recalls how, as the Hebrew community grew, the Egyptians treated them harshly and imposed hard labour on them. They cried out for help—to the God of their ancestors—and God heard them. The Psalm thanks God for bringing them out of Egypt with a mighty hand, a terrifying display of power, with signs and wonders.
Now they are in this place that they call home—this land flowing with milk and honey, a land where they have found stability and peace. In thanksgiving, the Hebrew community offers the first fruits of the harvest, those first tender stalks of barley, to God, and they worship him.
This text calls out the question: Where is God calling us to thanksgiving?
The relief and development agency of the Presbyterian Church in Canada (PWS&D) invites us to show our gratitude to God by our response to the harsh realities of poverty, hunger and conflict in our global village.
Take the example of Abdul Razak Ayawin, a 23-year-old man from Bugri community in Northern Ghana. Razak experienced a major accident that resulted in his left leg being amputated. His education stopped dramatically when he faced severe financial constraints and the challenges that people living with disabilities face. This young man didn’t know where to turn, until the Presbyterian Church of Ghana’s Community-Based Rehabilitation (CBR) program chose to provide him with support.
Razak enrolled in a dressmaking apprenticeship that gifted him with a sewing machine and a small income. A quick learner, he soon became self-employed and regained his confidence. Razak is saving money to fit himself with a prosthetic leg.
A first-fruit of God’s creation, Razak is living his Psalm of thanksgiving with the aid of The Presbyterian World Service and Development Agency.
My nephew Eric has a similar story. Eric is full spectrum autistic. He is thirty-eight years old and has the intellectual and emotional development level of an eight-year-old child. Eric is a big man, six feet four, three hundred and fifty pounds, but requires constant attention and care.
Eric’s parents, my brother and his wife, stopped attending church many years ago because they felt that there was no place for them as a family. This is a sad and too-common story for many in the church with disabilities, and their families.
But Eric knows God. He has a heart that is deeply compassionate, and he lives each day in gratitude. Eric has a really surprising and honestly wonderful way of expressing his gratitude.
He is constantly sketching and painting the prolific stories of good and evil that spill forth from his imagination. As the attached image makes clear, he paints those stories in vivid colours. He has become quite well-known as an artist in his community. His social workers organize exhibitions, and he has cultivated a following of enthusiastic supporters and benefactors, some of whom purchase his work.
Eric’s way of attending church is by watching World Vision on television on Sunday mornings. A couple of years ago when I was visiting, he confided in me: Aunt Lucille, he said, I promised God that for every piece of my art that sells, I’ll give half of the money to help those children that I see on TV whose communities don’t have wells. And I promised God that I’d give half of my earnings so that they can dig wells.
Razak from Ghana and Eric from southern Ontario are among the first-fruits of God’s creation. They are overcoming the difficult circumstances of wandering in the deserts of their lives by offering their gifts, their first-fruits to the God who created them.