We all love Harvest Festivals, don’t we?
Just look around us at
this beautifully decorated church, filled with harvest bounty - how can we fail
to feel thankful? The decorators have every right to be proud of their skilful
arrangements. 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; we all
enjoy the familiar harvest hymns; and we all enjoy seeing so many cheerful
people, filled with a sense of accomplishment, now that the year’s work has
been crowned with success.
Let’s take a moment to
reflect on the sheer breadth and variety of our harvest:
o
We have
the staples: we have wheat for bread, barley for beer, oats for porridge, rape-seed
for oil, silage for cattle, and hay for horses.
o
But there
is so much more than staples for us to enjoy, isn’t there! There’s milk and butter,
cheese and yogurt, fruit and nuts, blackberries and mushrooms, plums and
apples, potatoes and turnips, pumpkins and marrows, cabbage and lettuce, peas
and beans, meat and leather. My wife Marty has harvested delicious vegetables
and beautiful flowers this year. My plum crop was so heavy that the branches
broke on the tree, and I’ve harvested over 40 jars of honey and a good crop of
filberts.
o
Let’s not
forget the animals too – we have this year’s foals and calves, lambs and chicks,
ducklings, and goslings to delight us. And we must not forget the fruit of our
own bodies, the children born this year.
Thanks be to God for giving us so much to
rejoice over!
In today’s
1st reading (Joel 2:21-27) Joel expresses this feeling in beautiful poetry.
‘Do not fear, O soil; be glad
and rejoice, for the LORD has done great things!
Do not fear, you animals of the
field, for the pastures of the wilderness are green;
the tree bears its fruit, the
fig tree and vine give their full yield.
O children of Zion, be glad and
rejoice in the LORD your God…
The threshing-floors shall be
full of grain, the vats shall overflow with wine and oil.’
Don’t you just love it, that Joel calls not just human kind, but all
living creation to be glad and rejoice, even the very soil on which fertility
depends.
Joel is writing at a time when Judean
farmers have been suffering hardship - successive plagues of locusts have
ravaged the land. In these words he gives them hope for their future. They ‘shall eat in
plenty and be satisfied’, he tells them, because God says:
‘I will repay you for the years that the swarming locust
has eaten,
the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter, my great army,
which I sent against you…
You shall know that I am in the midst of Israel,
and that I, the LORD, am your God and there is no other.
And my people shall never again be put to shame.’
The harvest has been bountiful this year.
Cereal yields have been good and cows have produced more milk than ever,
according to figures I’ve seen from Teagasc. But market conditions are making many
farmers very anxious, so a farming neighbour tells me. Dairy farmers struggle to
survive with milk prices below the cost of production. Arable farmers are also
worried about prices.
And it’s not just farmers who are anxious.
Despite the economic recovery there are still very many here in Ireland trapped
in unemployment, negative equity, at risk of losing their homes, or actually
homeless. And then there are those other anxious, frightened people we see on
the news in foreign countries far away, refugees from persecution, war and
intolerable poverty.
We would all love to believe Joel’s words
of hope: that the Lord our God promises us that he is with us, and that times
will get better. But do we?
How
do you feel when somebody says, ‘Don’t worry! Everything will be fine!’
I don’t know about you, but my first reaction
is to scream inside, ‘It’s easy for you to say! This is my life. It isn’t
happening to you. It’s happening to me.’
Worry is such a large part of all our lives.
We worry about everything: our jobs, our children; our personal relationships. We
worry whether we have enough money to pay the bills. In this wealthy country,
while some go hungry others worry whether their food is healthy or fattening,
and while some have no warm winter coat others worry about fashion. And we
worry about our health, our aches and pains, and about dying.
In today’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel
(Matthew 6:25-33) – part of the Sermon on the Mount – Jesus tells us, ‘Do not worry about your life’. I wonder
what the crowds who heard him thought - I feel sure many reacted just like me: ‘It’s alright
for you, Jesus – you don’t have my responsibilities, you can afford to be
idealistic’.
But in our heart of hearts I think we all
really know that Jesus is right. We know that worrying cannot add a single hour
to our life. We know that there really is more to life than material things,
more than food and drink and clothing, more than all that stuff that we are
greedy for, but which clutters up our lives.
In fact if we stop to think about it we
will realise that it is precisely our society’s lifestyle of over-consumption which
causes so many of the world’s problems that make us so anxious. And that
anxiety, that constant worry, is unhealthy not just for our bodies and our
minds, but for our deepest being, our soul.
We need
to live more simply.
If we don’t we are lost - as individuals,
as a society and as a species. Our over-consumption is destroying God’s Earth
and making the poor poorer. We need to learn to trust that God, our Father in
heaven, who knows what we need, will faithfully give us enough, so that we can
stop grasping for more.
‘Consider the lilies of the field’, says Jesus, ‘how they grow;
they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was
not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field…
will he not much more clothe you – you of little faith?’
Jesus is not saying we should not work, he is
telling us we must get our priorities right. ‘Strive
first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness’, he says. What
does this mean? God’s righteousness is
found in his unconditional love for all his creation, including all human
beings. To be righteous ourselves we must imitate God’s love. Jesus has told to
love God, and love our neighbour as ourselves. This surely is what it means to ‘strive first for the kingdom of God’.
We must strive – that is, work hard - to show
our love by replacing consumption with self-sacrifice, greed with generosity,
wastefulness with a spirit of sharing. This is about not simply giving things
up, but giving things away. It is a way of loving which moves away from what I
want, to what God’s world needs – at the same time liberating us from all that
makes us anxious.
God knows what we need and God works in and
through us to provide it for one another. If we join together to show our love
for one another like this, God will give each and every one of us enough - though
maybe less than our foolish desires. If we live simply, so that others may
simply live, we really can believe Joel’s words of hope!
We’ve
all been horrified by recent images of refugees in the media.
We’ve seen pictures of people fleeing for
their lives to seek sanctuary and build new lives, far from home. Today these
refugees are like ‘the birds of the air’ that
Jesus talks about. ‘They neither sow nor reap nor gather into
barns’, because they cannot – they have lost everything.
How will our heavenly Father feed them?
Through us, of course, through you and me, and through the generosity of our spirit.
So as we give thanks to God and rejoice in
the Harvest, I urge you to reflect on how together we can best help these
brothers and sisters, our neighbours. And I ask you to give generously to the
collection we will shortly take up for the Bishops’ Appeal in response to the
refugee crisis.
