Harvest Festival – Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity
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Readings:
The poet and writer Malcolm Guite, writing in Church Times last week, was reflecting on a radio interview he had heard recently. A farmer was asked whether he believed in climate change, and he replied that he did not just believe in it, but was living through it now. Those whose livelihood is dependent on the fruits of the earth being given in due season are much more aware of the changes we are witnessing than most of us. Malcolm Guite was touched by another farmer reporting that he had begun to cull some of his Highland cattle because he could not feed them, and he was organising a crowd fund to save the rest.
This year we have seen primroses out at Christmas and leaves and fruit falling dry and unripe in August – what Guite calls it ‘unseasonal loss.’ He quotes Titania in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream commenting on the misbehaviour of the seasons: ‘The seasons alter … The spring, the summer, the chiding autumn, angry winter, change their wonted liveries, and the mazed world, by their increase, knows not which is which.” A deep unsettling of the natural order. The priest Martin Israel thought that abnormalities such as earthquakes and violent storms could be a reflection of turbulence in the human world and in human behaviour. You might think that rather fanciful, but St. Paul, in Romans speaks of the whole creation groaning in travail. We do, indeed, await ‘new heavens and a new earth’ when God’s perfect plan for all creation will be realised.
Harvest, and autumn, is supposed to be ‘the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’, according to John Keats. In fact, for most of us it still is. Even if the distortion of the seasons varies the yield of crops and fruit in Britain, our supermarkets are still full of exotic produce unimaginable to our grandparents, and great choice. Growers and sellers are focussed on quality control, and I was struck by a television commercial one sees at the moment about ‘OddBox.co.uk’ – this is a website fighting food waste, and they have a mission to collect produce that would go to waste because it’s too big, too wonky, or that there is too much of it. Then they sell it online, somehow. It is estimated that 40% of all food grown in this country goes to waste. This is something that seems almost obscene when we consider the deprivations so many people in the world experience.
Of course, there is still a proper place for thanksgiving. It’s always been called ‘Harvest Thanksgiving.’ At the start of the service we heard ‘Look at the world’ – words and music by John Rutter. It is an anthem written some years back for the 70th anniversary of the Council for the Protection of Rural England. “Every good gift, all that we need and cherish / Comes from the Lord in token of his love. We are his hands – stewards of all his bounty; His is the earth and his the heavens above.”
So yes, thanksgiving. But he reminds us that we are stewards of God’s creation. A steward, in this context, is a person entrusted with management of another’s property. We are entrusted with the care of the earth’s resources. ‘All good gifts around us are sent from heaven above’ we cheerfully sing. The creation is not then ours to do with just as we will without reference to those who may come after, or without regard to the creator’s wishes. St Paul writes that stewards should be trustworthy. The reading from the prophet Amos today is a warning against complacency. He wrote in the eighth century before Jesus at a time of plenty and prosperity for some, but also of social injustice for others. The well-off took their prosperity to be a sign of God’s pleasure, but they had forgotten that prosperity brought responsibility as well. ‘Alas for those who feel at ease … and for those who feel secure, who lie on beds of ivory and lounge on their couches; who drink wine and anoint themselves, but are not grieved at the ruin of Joseph.’ By ‘ruin of Joseph’ I take to mean the spiritual state of the nation. One commentary says this passage gives a picture of indolence, luxury and insensitivity. Now, not many of us lie on beds of ivory. But we would do well to remember that complacency can so easily lead to arrogance. And if the Amos reading doesn’t quite drive the nail home, the gospel reading today certainly does. It hardly needs any sermon to explain it. It’s known as the story of Dives and Lazarus, ‘dives’ being a Latin word indicating riches or wealth. The second part of the story takes a provocative twist as Abraham confounds the rich man’s assumptions about human motivation. In torment Dives, the rich man, who has had every good thing in his life, pleads for his brothers – that they might be given a warning, so that they might amend their ways. But the answer comes that it isn’t good enough to say that they didn’t know – it was staring them in the face.
We live in a world of huge need, where the gap between those who have and those who have not seems as wide as ever. We often hear the phrase ‘compassion fatigue.’ May God save me from compassion fatigue. Not just about supporting good causes or donating to charities, but from compassion fatigue about the plight of other people, both across the world and on my own doorstep. May God save me from compassion fatigue about the state of the world and the creation – maybe one day it will not be good enough to day ‘we didn’t realise.’
A group called Christian Climate Action has just published not so much a report as a cry directed particularly at the Church of England. Entitled Stop Crucifying Creation it constitutes “a call to the Church to exemplify radical and transformative Christian living in the face of climate collapse”. Timed to mark its launch, this month it is holding a National Day of Prayer with a number of vigils taking place at cathedrals around the country. Acknowledgement of the combined climate and nature crisis is, then, the first step. Lament and confession follow, and we have already done both of those in this service through the hard-hitting confession that we made together. But, of course, lament and confession should themselves lead on to something else, because true repentance always means seeking to put right the wrongs we have done, the rights we have not done. And again, within our confession, we have already prayed for that: “Empower us to choose the road that leads to life. Guide us in the paths of righteousness”, we prayed.
A preacher in Scotland recently spoke about our abuse or misuse or exploitation of the earth’s resources as a religious offence against what is sacred, and urged the congregation, as they gave thanks for all the goodness they had received, to recover a sense of the earth as ‘holy ground.’ He quoted the Russian writer Dostoevsky, “Love all God’s creation, the whole of it and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light! Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things.” And the Scottish preacher suggested that we are to understand, for the first time, our place in the Earth’s story rather than its place in ours. I thought that was rather a novel thought – to consider our place in the Earth’s story rather than its place in ours.
The rich man in the story, Dives, learned the hard way that with privileges come with responsibilities, and we are answerable to God for the way we use the world and live our lives. Simon Davis says “For the disciple justice is about action, pressing for and doing what is right for all that God loves – for the benefit of all the world’s people and creatures, not just for people in the wealthy developed areas of the world. If we have a growing sense of having a heart for all creation it will affect all we are and all we do. And we shall make choices for the good of creation, so that generations to come can still enjoy creation as a home that is growing and developing in the freedom God has given it.”