Harvest Festival
Mark 10:13-16
I don't ever remember ever giving thanks for a new baby in a harvest thanksgiving service before - but doesn't it just make sense? For just under a month Pinky and Nobby, from Bulawayo in Zimbabwe, who are worshipping with us in St Andrew's, have been getting used to their wonderful new son, Tyris, and to their new status as parents. They approached me and asked whether we could give thanks to God for him - and I was delighted to agree. A fortnight seemed about the right length of time to arrange everything properly. And then it dawned on me that we were celebrating Harvest today and I thought: it's worth us looking into this a little further.
For at harvest we are doing two things: thanking God for all the good things God has given us, and gratefully offering back to God what we have been given. Traditionally in country areas at harvest a sheaf of corn would be brought into church to symbolise all the food that had grown in the fields that year. Symbolically we have placed a loaf of bread on our communion table this morning, to say the same thing.
For some years now, especially in cities like ours, people have recognised that not everyone who comes to church works in farming - though I understand the timing of our eleven o'clock service was originally set so that farmers could do the milking and still get to church! So as well as the produce of our allotments, we have brought tins and packets of food. Why imperishable food that won't go rotten quickly? Because we have had in mind those who would receive it: hungry people who could use a tin of soup much more readily than a harvest marrow. And now we have particular people in mind who come to church for breakfast on a Friday morning, so instead of tins of soup we have tins of baked beans, and instead of ears of corn there are cornflakes!
It makes sense to give God thanks for all we have been given. Gardeners know that, however hard they work, not everything about a good harvest is within their control; it's always a partnership between human and divine.
It's not quite so easy to see why we're offering back to God what is God's. Anyone with a universe at their disposal doesn't really need what we can offer. But there is something deeply meaningful about giving back what we value to God in gratitude. We see that impulse at work in the parents who brought their children to Jesus so that he could bless them. Jesus' friends might think these parents were just timewasters, but they were wrong. They knew that whatever is offered back to God in gratitude is blessed.
But how can we give back to God what God has given us? To start with, through prayer, as Nobby and Pinky are doing today with Tyris, and as we all can do with the gifts of food or money that each of us brings. But then the harder part comes: for what we have been given by God is never only our own, to do with as we choose. Pinky and Nobby will soon be promising to dedicate their lives as parents to God. Those of you who are parents, as well as all of us who are our parents' children, know in the long run this means that children grow up into adults who must make their own decisions, live their own lives, face their own joys which parents cannot always share and their own sorrows which parents cannot always remove.
Similarly, when we spread a breakfast table in welcome on a Friday morning, or when we send money to Commitment for Life projects in Zimbabwe or elsewhere, we lose control over what is ours. But in that very loss of control, as we give it back to God, we can be blessed beyond our expectations. Those of you who are parents will know how your children have enriched your lives in ways you never expected. Those of us who have worked in situations where we seem to be the givers will know how we have been blessed by those who appear to be receiving from us. And where there is thanksgiving, all, givers and receivers alike, are held within God's love and care. So let us pray.
Yours, Lord, is the greatness, the power, the glory, the splendour, and the majesty; for everything in heaven and on earth is yours. All things come from you, and of your own do we give you. Amen!
R&S 62 was written by Sarah Rhodes, whose husband was a Sheffield businessman, for the Sheffield Whitsun Festival in 1870. The tune Sommerlied (Summer Song) comes from the 19th century German composer Hermann von Müller.
R&S 89 was written by Fred Kaan while he was minister at Pilgrim Church, Plymouth and first published in 1968. As well as harvest fruitfulness it reminds us of the scarcity brought on by natural disaster and human folly. The tune Harvest was written for this hymn in New Church Praise of 1971.
R&S 53, another traditional harvest hymn by W.C. Dix, written in 1863 for St Raphael's Church in Bristol where he had been brought up, offers back to God in gratitude those blessings we have received. The tune Golden Sheaves was written by Sir Arthur Sullivan of Gilbert and Sullivan fame.
We live in interesting times, don't we? Banks are collapsing right, left and centre; stock markets all over the world are plummeting; city councils - maybe even our own? - and charities who put their trust in Icelandic banks find themselves in danger of losing their reserves. I wrote this on Saturday night, as usual: who can tell what will have happened by this morning?
It all seems a far cry from us here in St Andrew's, celebrating the gift of Tyris to Pinky and Nobbi, enjoying our harvest thanksgiving with hymns and readings from centuries ago. Are we in danger of coming to church in order to switch off from our strange and terrible world, to remember a simpler and more innocent time when sheaves of corn announced a happy harvest?
Yet considered carefully, our readings will not allow us to hide from present reality in rose-tinted biblical nostalgia. Listen to Isaiah. He thanks God on behalf of the poor for reducing ruthless nations to rubble, but all is not yet well in his world. Why would God need to promise a feast for all peoples, the wiping away of tears from every face and the removal of shame and disgrace, unless the people of Israel to whom this message of hope was addressed were themselves hungry, poor, weeping and ashamed? Again, why would David express so strongly his hope in God's shepherding care, unless he himself had known of the valley of the shadow of death? It was ever thus.
And the remnants of this recognition of how vulnerable we human beings are is still with us. The origins of our own harvest thanksgiving in Britain lie in the grateful realisation that enough seed had been sown, enough plants had sprouted, enough grain had been reaped to see us through another winter. Though most of us now have access to freezers and 24-hour supermarkets, the rising cost of food and fuel to cook it makes us mindful, even yet, of our urgent daily need for bread.
What then is the proper response to God's promise through Isaiah of food for all, of needs met, even of death overcome? By meeting here this morning, are we paying mere lip-service to God: ‘we have enough food, we're all right, so you can forget anyone else'? Or have we told ourselves comfortingly, ‘God's promises of good food for all, of death overcome, are unrealistic in our world today; they are clearly about the end of time, so we can forget about them here and now'? No: that's not the case. While the prophecy does indeed look forward to the last days, I see around me concrete signs - or rather, thank goodness, tin-canned and cardboard-wrapped signs - that here and now in St Andrew's we are mirroring God's care for others whose daily bread is not so secure as our own. Those who come to the Broomhall Breakfast know that some of our breakfasters cannot take food, and in particular nourishing food, for granted. Yet just as nourishing as the Friday fry-up itself is the safe space and the company this church offers to all who come, whatever their situation. I can honestly say - and others who come to the Breakfast will bear me out on this - that the Friday-morning community, like our Sunday coffee after church, is a nourishing experience, one that for me goes far beyond calories ingested.
And that's what those idiotic invitees who didn't make time for the wedding of their king's son failed to recognise. Choosing to stay within the limited circle of their own concerns - more than that, even suppressing those messengers bringing them news of the feast - they cut themselves off from the nourishing possibility of sharing the feast their lord has given, and thus of returning thanks. Even that mystery man who has chosen not to wear the wedding garment issued by custom to guests as part of the celebrations - imagine a bridesmaid turning up in jeans, and you'll get the picture - hasn't understood that the only thing required of him is the willingness to share with others his lord's generosity. And his refusal casts him into dark isolation.
The parable has traditionally been understood to condemn the failure of religious leaders in Jesus' day to recognise him as God's Messiah, the one whom God's prophets, the messengers, had foretold. The Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 72CE, not long before the writing of Matthew's Gospel, is seen by the Gospeller as a consequence of this failure. Yet such a destructive pattern of life, seeing others as only of interest when they can benefit us, is, unfortunately, all too familiar to us, too, in a financial context. One international manifestation of this problem, from the 1970s onwards, was the huge debts countries of the developing world were encouraged by Western banks to acquire, fuelled by oil money and frittered away on redundant projects or stashed away in their leaders' personal accounts. Though many of those debts have now, thank God, been forgiven, we are still facing the results of that socially irresponsible lending in the poor education and health systems of many developing countries, a problem which fair trading seeks to address. Yet at the time the banks would have argued that they were only trying to make money for their shareholders. A similar pattern of greedy mortgage lending to those in the US and Britain who self-evidently could not repay their debts has resulted in our current crisis, where trust between those who lend and those who borrow seems to have broken down completely.
So what will be our reaction to this crisis? Will we draw in our horns, sell our shares (if anyone can be found to buy them), cut down on our charitable giving, stop buying fairly traded goods because they are more expensive? Will we deny the possibility of table neighbours at the feast of life, whether they're people halfway across the world whom we will never meet, or people we do not wish to keep company with at home, because we cannot imagine relating to people so different from us? Or will we image the generosity of God our creator, recognising that there can be no thanks without giving? More, will we dare to find out that, when we sit down at God's feast, we can't always tell who it is who's giving and who is receiving, but that either way, God's love is our food that never runs out? How far will your thanksgiving go this harvest-tide?
