It was a privilege to be asked to preach at the Harvest Thanksgiving in St Burchin's, Bourney by the Rector, Rev Canon Jane Galbraith. The readings were for Harvest Year C: Deuteronomy 26:1-11 and John 6:25-35.
It is a great pleasure for me to join you today
for your Harvest Festival in this beautiful church.
It is also a privilege
to be asked to speak to you, so I must begin by thanking Rev Jane for her
invitation.
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, the familiar harvest
hymns, and the cheerful people.
Today I’m going to
talk about two things: the earthly harvest, for which we are giving thanks
today - and also 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!
However, we must
acknowledge that many people feel they have little to be cheerful about. Arable
farmers have been struggling to harvest crops due to bad weather. Yields are down, and many, particularly in the
West, face making a loss on the year’s work. Other farmers too are struggling: milk
prices may be recovering, but only a little. And cattle prices have been hit by
recent currency movements. Many in the wider community do not feel the benefit
of economic recovery after years of austerity. Homelessness continues to rise in our cities. Our public services are in
crisis after years of under-investment. And people fear the consequences of our
neighbours’ vote for Brexit.
But it is surely right
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 so much more than staples for us to enjoy, isn’t there? There’s
milk and honey, butter and cheese, beef and pork, lamb and chicken. There are fruit
and nuts, blackberries and mushrooms, plums and apples, potatoes and turnips.
There are 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 – thank God for them! And 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 our 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 because of a poor harvest or recession, as our
forefathers so often did. With our God-given 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. And 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: ‘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, 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.’ ‘The bread
of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world’, he says. 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?
This teaching is difficult.
I find it so - but then so did many of those who heard his words, as John tells
us in the next few verses. One way to look at it, which I find helpful, is
this:
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. 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 name 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 is the faith to come to him. 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 to repent and be forgiven!
It is in this sense
that Jesus is the bread of life that nourishes us 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 be
unselfish and learn to know when we have enough. 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 our innate tendency is 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.
Selfish over-consumption
in the rich world not only pushes the poor into deeper poverty and violent
responses, 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. If we believe in him, if we come to him, we will never be hungry or
thirsty for good things.
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, praying together a Christian
Aid Harvest prayer:
The earth is fruitful
- may we be generous.
The earth is fragile
- may we be gentle.
The earth is fractured
- may we be just.
Creating God, harvest
in us joy and generosity
as we together share
in thanks and giving.
Amen
