September 27, 2026
• Rev. Dr. Rob Fuquay
St. Luke’s UMC
September 27, 2026
Holy Rhythms
“Sukkot: Feast of Booths”
Leviticus 23: 33-34; 40-43
We conclude today a series called Holy Rhythms based on the Jewish High Holy Days. Five days after Yom Kippur the festival of Sukkot begins which completes the season. Sukkot means “booths” or tabernacles, temporary dwellings. The singular form of the word is Sukkah. This festival lasts for 7 days. It is also known as the Feast of Ingathering, a harvest celebration, so it corresponds to Thanksgiving.
This is the festival that is rich in symbolism and ritual such as the one we heard in our reading this morning. “On the first day you shall take the fruit of majestic trees, branches of palm trees, boughs of leafy trees, and willows of the brook, and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God for seven days. One of them is the collection of the four elements.” (Leviticus 23:40) The fruit that is referenced is known as the Etrog, a citrus that is similar to a lemon. Along with the palm frond, and myrtle and willow branches, these are to be waved or shaken in all four directions and above you and below you, and I’ll explain in a few minutes why this is done.
My friend, Brett Krichiver, senior rabbi at Indianapolis Hebrew Congregation, sums up the meaning of the High Holy Days this way. At Rosh Hashanah, it is the new year, so you put your whole self in. Then at Yom Kippur, it is a day of fasting and self-denial, so you take your whole self out. Then at Sukkot you put your whole self in and shake the four kinds. So you put your whole self in, you put your whole self out, you put in your whole self and you…
He was curious if Christians might laugh at that better than Jews. I’ll get back to him…
Now, if I were summing up this series on Holy Rhythms, it would be this way. Two words for each week. Rosh Hashanah - “Wake up,” The trumpet blast is a spiritual wake up call. Then Yom Kippur - “Take away” as we considered last week with the scapegoat that takes away our sin. And today, for Sukkot - “Keep going!” Because our journeys continue, and so I want to use some of the many symbols associated with Sukkot Festival to think about how they encourage us to keep going in our journey. You might want to write some of these down, think about how you can practice them for yourself and with your family, and consider the benefit of these for your journey.
The central emphasis of Sukkot is the building of a booth or sukkah as described in the Torah. “You shall live in booths for seven days; all who are native-born in Israel shall live in booths, so that your generations may know that I made the Israelites live in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 23:42-43)
It was a mitzvah, or a commandment, to keep this ritual and remember the time when the Israelites lived in temporary shelters in the wilderness under Moses, when they were journeying toward the Promised Land. Why was this important to have a ritual recalling this period in their history?
Because one day they would arrive in that promised place. They would settle down and live in permanent homes, and it would be important, once a year, to practice this rhythm and remember that life is still a journey. And so we practice this rhythm to remember that just as God watched the Israelites in the wilderness, God is watching over us today. So this week, Jews all over the world will build their sukkahs in their yards and at their congregations. In fact, Rabbi Brett invited us into their sukkah at Indianapolis Hebrew Congregation this week. They will have live music outside this Tuesday at 7pm and you can enjoy inside their sukkah. And we are invited to Shabbat services Friday at 6:15 and afterward to join people for a time of fellowship in the sukkah.
First, I want us to think about The Booth: and The Value of an Uncomfortable Ritual. When you think about it, most rituals we have are comforting. Special meals. Music. Candles. But sukkot means you have to build a booth outside. Everyday you take your meals in the sukkah. So you have to carry everything outside. It could rain and so you’ll get wet. It could get windy and blow away your structure. Keeping Sukkot is not convenient.
And that’s the reason you do it. Because there is much about the journey of life that is not convenient. There are times in life that are downright hard and challenging. Sukkot is a reminder of the way God watched over our ancestors in the wilderness, and therefore is watching over us.
Rabbi Hal Shevitz, senior rabbi at Beth El-Zedek Congregation wrote in his recent newsletter, “Experiencing life in the sukkah is ultimately about facing the fragility of our lives. There are things we cannot predict or know. By building and living in a Sukkah, we expose ourselves to the elements physically while opening ourselves up to the fears that we must confront…To live in a temporary home with laughter and song, calls for a stability that does not come from physical security but from an inner trust.” (Besamim newsletter Sept. 20, 2026)
This holy rhythm reminds us that the journey of life is full of inconveniences, but when you see your life as a journey, you realize that such times are just stopping places not staying places.
I had a Lay Leader in a church one time who was infected with perpetual happiness. He was just always positive and had this thing he regularly said, “It will be wonderful to see how the Lord works through this.” When I would go to talk to him about challenges in the church that were getting me down, he would listen, and then say, “It’ll be wonderful to see how the Lord works through all this.”
And I would think, “Oh come on! That’s not what I need. I need someone who will climb down in the ditch with me and agree how awful things are!”
Then his wife found out she was ill, and I got the call one morning that she died. I drove to their house and sat with the family. After I prayed with them, he walked with me to my car. I got to the door and turned around toward him. With tears running down his face he said, “ It’s gonna be wonderful to see how the Lord works through all this.” And I realized that was no trite, superficial thing. That was who he was. He understood that life is a journey, and he was a journeyman of faith. He wasn’t denying the challenge. He just knew this was a stopping place, not a staying place.
Another practice of Sukkot that keeps us going in our journey is Who We Invite into our Booth? There is a tradition of welcoming an ancestor of faith each day of sukkot, so seven ancestors of faith: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, and King David. Who Else?. Then along with them, many people set up tables and put items of remembrance of their own personal faith ancestors: parents, family, friends, others who were faith influences; people who shaped their lives.
This reminds them of their history and their spiritual DNA and how these people are with them, encouraging them to keep going.
In 2001 two Emory University professors started research on what enabled children who suffered trauma to keep going and live healthy, productive lives. What was the difference between children who did and others for whom the trauma caused long, emotional struggle. They found the difference was knowing your family history. They said, “When children learn family stories it creates a shared history, strengthens emotional bonds and helps them make sense of their experiences when something senseless happens.” They found this to be true as they followed children affected by 911 and even more recently in the aftermath of the pandemic. (https://news.emory.edu/stories/2020/04/how-family-stories-help-children-weather-hard-times)
They even developed a DYK Scale, a Did-You-Know Scale families can use with children to help them learn their story. It’s just 20 questions and you can find it on this site:
QR Code https://news.emory.edu/stories/2020/04/how-family-stories-help-children-weather-hard-times
Questions include ones like:
Do you know how your parents met?
Do you know where your grandparents grew up?
Do you know any challenges that happened to someone in your family.
It’s a great family rhythm to practice. The Jews have been practicing it for a long time. It is something that helps people when they face a hard time to know that giving up is not an option. My people don’t give up.
Another practice of Sukkot that keeps us going: Embracing God’s Presence. That’s the point of the 4 Species, or 4 Kinds, the etrog, palm frond, myrtle and willow branches. You shake them in all directions as a way of embracing the presence of God all around you. You are surrounded by God’s presence. “Where can I go from your spirit?” said the psalmist. “Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.”
There is no getting away from God. But better yet, “If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me, and night wraps itself around me,’ even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.” (Psalm 139: 7-8,11-12) There is no condition in which we can find ourselves where God is not willing and able to meet us.
Sarah Edwards was the wife of the 17th century Great Wakening pastor, Jonathan Edwards. His famous sermon was titled, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” https://www.reviveourhearts.com/blog/sarah-edwards-leaving-legacy-godliness/?srsltid=AU7gw4WOl1p4P9NB6jyVQltZW3rYhcjKutbk6oYcpeFDrdh8j9xQRkBd His wife’s experience of God, however, was very different. When she went through a difficult period of feeling separated from God, she had a mystical experience one night when she felt enveloped in God’s presence. She wrote in her journal, "all night I continued in a constant, clear, and lively sense of the heavenly sweetness of Christ's excellent and transcendent love, of his nearness to me, and of my dearness to him."
A ritual that reminds us of God’s presence can lead us to experience God’s nearness to us and our dearness to him.
One last Sukkot practice that keeps us going: Joy. As we heard earlier, this is a Torah commandment. “Rejoice during your festival, you and your sons and your daughters, your male and female slaves, as well as the Levites, the strangers, the orphans, and the widows resident in your towns.” (Deuteronomy 16:14) Not everyone in that list would have a reason for joy. Foreigners, orphans, widows. But joy is not the result our conditions. It is the condition we bring to our results.
Life can be hard. And it is harder for some than others. But joy is impartial. We choose joy. We look for reasons, and sometime anything, that is a cause for joy. We claim joy, and eventually joy claims us. I say that not because I have always lived it, but I’ve seen it. People who have suffered tremendously worse than I ever have, and yet who exhibit joy much more than I do. And they teach me that joy is not something that can be taken from us. We have to give it away. So no matter what, we can always choose joy.
Let me close with this: In 2020, Manachem Rosensaft wrote about his mother on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps where she had been a prisoner. As difficult as it was to survive Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, her experience was compounded even further by having to live in a Displaced Persons Camp after liberation. Because of British policies at the time, liberated Jews couldn’t migrate to Palestine. And because of what he called “draconian immigration policies in the US, Canada, and other countries,” they couldn’t go there either.
So his mother and the people chose to face this period with hope. An uplifting experience was that first Sukkot in the camp. He said they chose to look at the camp as a big Sukkot, booth. It was not a permanent dwelling. Eventually they would go on. So they celebrated sukkot. For the first time in years they started openly celebrating their Jewishness. They spoke Yiddish to each other. They practiced their rituals. They sang their songs of faith.
“It wasn’t that the survivors, including my own parents, were rejoicing — their physical and emotional wounds were far too open, far too raw for that. But perhaps they were able to contemplate a future in which rejoicing and happiness might be possible. By Sukkot of that year, marriages were taking place in the DP camps, and the survivors had begun creating new families against the backdrop of murdered parents, spouses, siblings and children…let us remember that Sukkot…and the far more devastating conditions that forced the survivors of the Holocaust to face the future largely on their own, but also on their own terms.”
You don’t always express joy because you feel it. You express joy because you believe you will feel again one day.
Closing…