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Sermon: The Feast of Tabernacles

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Photograph of David Kennedy The Reverend Canon Dr David Kennedy, Sub Dean and Canon Precentor

Preached on 21st October 2007
(Trinity 19)
by The Reverend Canon Dr David Kennedy

May the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts be now and always

acceptable in your sight, O Lord our strength and our redeemer.

I always listen to Thought for the Day each morning on Radio 4. One of my favourite regulars is the Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sachs. His latest broadcast was on 26 September, on the threshold of the Jewish festival of Sukkot, the feast of Tabernacles or Booths. He began by stating that on that day, the Jewish community would be putting the finishing touches to little huts with roofs of leaves in which they would be living for the next eight days. It is a vivid and remarkable commemoration of the 40 year period in which the Israelites wandered through the wilderness after escaping from Egypt before they finally entered the Promised Land. The Book of Leviticus therefore required all subsequent generations to keep the 8-day festival of Tabernacles by building temporary and vulnerable booths or shelters in which they would live, giving up the comforts and permanence of their homes for a pared down and, in certainly in our climate, draughty and even soggy existence.

In this morning's first lesson, we read how at the time of Nehemiah, Ezra the scribe read to the people the Book of the Law, and they restored the full observance of the festival of Tabernacles and in particular the injunction to live in shelters for the duration of the festival, an injunction which the text says had been ignored since the time of Joshua.

In fact, if you read the tradition carefully, Tabernacles was a kind of harvest festival. It originally celebrated the completion of the fruit, olive and grape harvests in the autumn, and so became a kind of general thanksgiving for God's bounty throughout the year. Because of this, it is the only Jewish feast that the Gentiles were commanded to observe.

But as the feast developed, it accumulated a number of themes. It was pre-eminently a festival of joy. Deuteronomy 16 says, ‘Be joyful in your feast'. And there is a well-known ancient saying of the Rabbis that ‘you do not know what joy is if you haven't been to Jerusalem at the Feast of Tabernacles.' From biblical days, as a sign of joy, people carried bundles of palm, myrtle, citron and willow branches in their hands which they waved in procession as Psalms were sung. Musical instruments and dancing accompanied the processions. As our reading today reminds us, ‘The joy of the Lord is your strength.'

Second, it was a great festival of the land. As I have said, it celebrated the land's fruitfulness, but also God's promise that he would bring his people into a land flowing with milk and honey. But the journey there was hard. 40 years in the wilderness, on the move, the hard lessons of obedience and disobedience; the hard lessons of trusting God when it seemed that it was all wishful thinking, that they had, as it were, been led up the garden path. So in the words of Dr Sachs, Tabernacles commemorates

.....the long journey with all its disappointments and defeats, setbacks and wrong turnings, the story not of miracles but of human endurance and the courage to keep going even when the promised land is not in sight. Freedom is a journey across the wilderness with no shortcuts. And that unspectacular story of human spirit is what Sukkot represents.

And to that we may add, therefore, a real sense of dependence upon God - yes, the autumn barns are full, but for a while the security of material comforts gives way for life in a shelter. It is time to remember what really matters in life - God and people, life itself, and not things.

And third, Tabernacles became a feast of promise. The prophecy of Isaiah 32 became important:

The Spirit will be poured out from on high,

and the desert will become a fertile field.

Justice will dwell in the desert and righteousness in the fertile field.

The fruit of righteousness will be peace.

My people will live in peaceful dwelling-places, in secure homes,

in undisturbed places of rest.

In other words, there is a harvest to come. We are not there yet. These promises of security and rest are still awaiting their ultimate fulfilment. And so a verse from Psalm118 was chanted:

Save us now, we pray;

O Lord, send us now prosperity.

‘Save us now' translates ‘Hosanna' - a double-sided word, both of joyful acclamation but also heartfelt petition. Hosanna in the sense of ‘save us' became a plea for the coming of Messiah. So when Jesus entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday - joyful hosannas and branches of palm and willow signalled the hope of Tabernacles: God's ultimate promises are being fulfilled now - we are being saved now, even if, paradoxically the hosannas would give way to ‘crucify him', as, to save us, he dies on a cross of wood.

In Jesus' day, in the Jerusalem Temple, Tabernacles was also a festival of light and water. The light came from 4 giant candelabra, brilliant in effect, standing in the Temple Courts, and probably recalling the pillar of fire of the Exodus wanderings and so the gifts of warmth and light. The second was the daily drawing of water from the pool of Siloam, carried in a golden flagon and poured around the altar, probably recalling the water from the rock of the wilderness wanderings, and giving dramatic representation to the verse from Isaiah 12 chanted in procession:

Therefore with joy shall you draw water from the wells of salvation,

And on that day, you shall say, Praise the Lord.

Ceremonies which in John's Gospel give the setting for two of the great sayings: ‘I am the light of the world'; ‘If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink; whoever believes in me, out of his innermost being will flow rivers of living water.' This, says, John, refers to the Spirit - Isaiah 32 begins to be fulfilled: ‘The Spirit will

Be poured out from on high.'

We don't have anything quite like Sukkot in the Christian tradition. Yes, it is customary to observe the autumnal Harvest Thanksgiving in Churches and Schools. Yes, in Lent, we seek to fast and at least spiritually to launch out into the wilderness for 40 days. But there is nothing so blatantly experiential as building in our back gardens a wooden hut with a roof of leaves and actually living in it for a week in September.

I wish we did. It would prise us out of our comfortable existence, and get us back in touch with our humanity, with what really matters in life. It would make us reflect on our dependence on God; we might see his world with fresh eyes, and eat our food with more thankful hearts. It would put our possessions into perspective. It might make us kinder and more aware of all the people in God's world whose only existence is a temporary shelter, because they have no home, or their homes have been taken away by human cruelty or by natural disaster, or by sheer poverty. ‘O Lord, save them, we pray'. And paradoxically, we might just re-discover the true nature of joy; after all Jesus travelled light, with nowhere to lay his head, and yet he exulted in all God's gifts, he was the perhaps the most joy-filled person who has ever walked this earth. For his joy was to do his Father's will; the joy of God was his strength.

For Rabbis Sachs, this year's Feast of Tabernacles was for him an opportunity to identify with the people of Burma in their 40 year long search to be free; he concluded with these moving words:

That is what the Sukkah [or shelter] symbolises: everything that's frail and vulnerable about us as we travel across the wilderness in search of liberty. Hope is the power of the powerless. The Israelites kept hope alive and hope kept them alive. There's nothing more fragile, yet it can outlive empires and defeat even the worst tyranny. May God be with the people of Burma in their journey of hope.