What a privilege it is for me to join you for
your Harvest Festival, to give thanks to God for all the good things he has
given to us all.
And I must thank
your Rector, Michael, for his invitation to address you this evening.
Like all of
us I’m sure, I’ve loved Harvest Festivals ever since I was a child! Let us just
look around us at this beautifully decorated church, filled with harvest
bounty. The decorators have every right to be proud of their skillful
arrangements, and those who have grown the produce have every right to be proud
that the best of it should be displayed here in God’s house! We all enjoy the
colours and the smells of the fruit and the vegetables and the flowers - when I came in I smelt the apples and was transported back to my childhood. And we love the
familiar harvest hymns, and all the cheerful people.
I’m going
to talk about two things today: the earthly harvest, for which we are giving
thanks today - and then a different, heavenly harvest. The two are deeply
interconnected.
So first, the earthly harvest.
Are you
feeling cheerful? I do hope so, because we have so much to give thanks for. And
cheerfulness is a Christian virtue!
After the
fodder crisis of the winter and late spring, my farming neighbours tell me the
good summer has cheered them up. The crowds at the Ploughing were happy ones. The
harvest has been easier than for several years. And a friend who grows cereals told
me, with a twinkle in his eye, that although prices have dropped back, yields
aren’t too bad, and he can’t complain – now for him that’s almost a shout of
joy!
Yet even
so, many of us remain anxious in this great recession we are living through.
After the turmoil in global financial markets, policies of austerity have
destroyed jobs and many are driven to emigrate. Worries bubble up: Is my job
safe? What about my savings and my pension? How can I stretch my income to pay
the rising bills for energy and other things?
But we
should try to look at the glass as half full, not half empty! Just reflect for
a moment on the breadth and variety of our harvest:
·
We
have the staples: we have wheat for bread, barley for beer, oats for porridge,
hay for horses and silage for cattle.
·
And
there’s much more than staples for us to enjoy, isn’t there? There’s milk and
honey, butter and cheese, fruit and nuts, blackberries and mushrooms, plums and
apples, potatoes and turnips, pumpkins and marrows, peas and beans, cabbage and
lettuce, and gardens full of flowers!
·
Many
of us work with animals, and there are this year’s foals, and calves and lambs
and chicks. But there’s also the fruit of our own bodies - our children and
grandchildren born this year, and older ones growing apace as mine are - thank
God for them too!
·
Above
all perhaps we should thank God for our health and strength, and also for our
intellects, our god-given cleverness. As every farmer knows, this bountiful
harvest does not appear from heaven as if by magic: it takes intelligent
planning and hard graft!
In this
rich corner of the world today, no one will starve in times of recession, as our
forefathers so often did. With our cleverness we have invented ways to store
food and to transport it, and economic and social systems to distribute it to
where it is needed. If we consume a little less, it will probably be good for
our health; and perhaps the whole planet will benefit. So let us be cheerful
and follow the good advice of Deuteronomy (26:1-11): ‘You shall set the first of the fruit of the
ground down before the Lord your God … Then you shall celebrate with all the
bounty that the Lord your God has given to you.’
Yet for all
our cleverness, the earthly harvest is perishable and uncertain. Why has God
not given us perpetually good harvests - and recession free economies? Perhaps
to remind us that we are not masters of the universe: God is. God’s laws don’t
change: Nature is as God has made it; and what we sow, we shall reap. We remain
as we have always been, totally dependent on God’s continuing fatherly
goodness.
In the passage from John’s Gospel that we’ve
just heard (John 6:25-35), Jesus asks us to look beyond the earthly harvest, to a different
heavenly harvest.
He tells
the crowd: ‘Do not work for the food that perishes, but
for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give
you.’ He tells them ‘the bread of God is that which comes down
from heaven and gives life to the world.’ And finally he makes
this great claim: ‘I am the bread of
life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whosoever believes in me
shall never be thirsty’.
What is
Jesus talking about? His teaching is difficult; at least I find it so. But then
so did many of Jesus’s disciples, according to John. One way to look at it,
which I find helpful, is this. I offer it to you:
·
Just
as God has made us clever, able to till and keep the world of which we are part,
so he has made us in his image to be moral beings, to be souls. Souls with the
capacity we call conscience to distinguish right from wrong, truth from lies,
love from hate - and to prefer good to evil, as he does, at least in the
abstract. If we use our conscience to make the right choices, we reap a
heavenly harvest of good, which nourishes us for eternal life. As the old saw
says, the good
we do lives after us.
·
But
we are not masters of our own souls, any more than we are masters of the
universe: our souls are as God made them, with free will, vulnerable to
temptation. So it’s hard to be good. We have to work at it, just as we do for
the earthly harvest. It is hard work resisting temptation, putting what is
right above our own desires. All too often we fail. We call that sin. And when we fail
and sin, the evil we do poisons our soul, and that evil too is eternal. A bad deed done
can never be undone!
·
What
a mess it is! How can we possibly be as good as God wants us to be? As good as
God has made us want to be in our best moments.
·
This
is where Jesus’s teaching speaks to me: he promises us all the help we need to
reap the heavenly harvest. All we require, all that is asked of us, is the faith to come to him. Then, as the
bread of life, he strengthens our souls. He helps us to resist temptation and
to do good. And when we fail, he sucks out the evil that poisons the soul – in
other words he redeems us. The only cure for a bad deed is forgiveness!
·
It
is in this sense, I suggest, that Jesus is the bread of life that endures for
eternal life.
What are the practical implications of this?
Consider greed for example:
Greed is
the cause of so many of the problems we face, I think, from global warming to
the global crash; old-fashioned, sinful human greed. Greed to consume more than
we need at the expense of our planet. Greed for profit at the expense of other
men and women.
To overcome
the problems we must be generous to others, not greedy for ourselves. We must
learn how to be unselfish. This wonderful planet – our God-given Garden of Eden
– would be enough and more than enough for all of us if only we could do so.
But we cannot do this by ourselves, because of
our innate tendency to be selfish and greedy. We can only do it through the
grace of Jesus Christ, the bread of life, who will help us transform our sinful
greedy natures into generous ones. He will help us to be as generous as God
wants us to be.
And think on this: human greed threatens our
future. I'll say it again: human greed threatens our future.
Selfish over-consumption in the rich world not only pushes the poor
into deeper poverty to which they may respond violently, but it drives the
climate change that is damaging our planet’s ecosystems on which all life
depends. Without Jesus’s help to transform our greed into generosity, we stand
to lose the earthly harvest too. The earthly harvest depends in a very real way
on the heavenly harvest.
So to sum up:
·
Let
us thank God our loving Father for this bountiful earthly harvest. God makes it
possible, and we work hard for it, so it is right for us to celebrate it and
enjoy it together.
·
But
let us work just as hard for the heavenly harvest of goodness, to nourish our
souls.
·
Let
us also thank God for the gift of his Son Jesus Christ. We need his help to
reap this heavenly harvest.
·
And
let us pray that Jesus will transform our selfish natures into the generous
natures on which both our earthly and heavenly harvest bounty depends.
If we
believe in him, if we come to him, we will never be hungry or thirsty for good
things.
