Times and Wonders

Pastor’s Epistle—August 2023

You shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest from the land that the Lord your God is giving to you, and you shall put it in a basket … You shall set it down before the Lord your God and bow down before the Lord your God. Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you and to your house.

—Deuteronomy 26:2, 10-11

One man considers one day more sacred than another; another man considers every day alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. He who regards one day as special, does so to the Lord.

—Romans 14:5-6

I find that life is better with holidays. Wouldn’t you agree?

St Paul wrote to the Christians at Rome that holy days are a matter of adiaphora; that is, of something neither commanded nor forbidden. We can take them or leave them. Yet I find that special seasons and celebrations add a certain spice to life, as well as a yearly pattern of festival and fasting, of darkness and light, which brings a magic and a mysticism into our hearth and our home.

Blame my mother. She was the one when I was growing up who cooked and baked and decorated for all the holidays: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Independence Day, the sacred and the secular alike. It made my childhood wondrous; my adulthood too, now that I have children of my own. And it certainly does improve one’s mood to ever have something to which one looks forward.

As I’ve aged, my love for the holidays has only deepened. I still prepare for the big festivities a little too early and a little too long, but now I also champion the little guys, the unsung holidays, half-forgotten by all but the liturgical calendar and the Old Farmer’s Almanac. Chief among these stands a commemoration found in literature from Shakespeare through Tolkien, yet now underwhelmingly overlooked: Lammas Day.

Lammas derives from “Loaf-Mass,” a festival of firstfruits originating in Great Britain. On 1 August, a loaf of bread would be baked from the very beginnings of the wheat crop. This then would be brought to worship for a special blessing and taken back home to be eaten. (Some might be set aside for the Eucharist, but Lammas bread is not Communion.) The bounties of nature, gathered together, blessed within the sacred community, and subsequently taken into our households for family consumption, made tangible the grace connecting hearthstone, Creation, and Church.

That’s what a blessing is, after all. It’s a prayer of thanksgiving, intercession, and protection. It’s a way of revealing everyday things for what they truly are: the gifts of God.

I have hosted many Lammas blessings over the years. It’s wonderful to fill a sanctuary with the sumptuous scent of fresh-baked bread. Once, several years back, as I drove to a Lammas Vespers service, I passed beside a combine that had just begun to harvest the wheat field across from our house. One could hardly ask for better timing than that.

Lammas is one of eight holidays which together have come to be known as the “Wheel of the Year.” They consist of four Quarter Days, roughly corresponding to solstices and equinoxes—Christmas, Annunciation, Johnsmas, and Michaelmas—as well as four Cross-Quarter Days to mark the times between: All Hallows, Candlemas, May Day, and Lammas. I realize that some of those sound awfully old-timey, but for me that’s half the fun. Each of them comes with foods, traditions, themes, and celebrations all their own. Each of them reveals the sacredness of the seasons, the holiness of every day.

For bookkeeping purposes, Quarter Days were those times on the medieval calendar when servants were hired, school terms begun, and taxes paid. Perhaps I’d be cheerier about paying my own taxes if they still fell on a holiday. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

The world is full of holy days, both ancient and ever new. Whether we observe any or all of them is a matter of adiaphora, of individual discernment and taste. Yet I see them each as blessings. They do not necessarily make one day holier than another, but they reveal to me the sacredness of each and every day, of the sun and moon and stars, of the fruits of the earth and the turn of the seasons—all of them gifts of God, all wonders to behold.

So have a lovely Lammas, my friends, should you choose to try it out. Perhaps you already observe. If nothing else, you might be moved to bake or buy a fresh and local bread. Savor it. Enjoy it. Thank God for it. And in all candor, should you be able to recognize already every day as holy, as it is, without the aid of special traditions or times—well then my friend, may God bless and keep you, for you are a better man than I.

The harvest has begun. The curtain rises on summer’s third and final act. We bask in the heat, even as our shadows lengthen. And we smile to see the wondrous wheel turn.

In Jesus. Amen.