This is a favourite time of the year for me, and this year we’ve had the sort of summer that produces a good harvest, so there is much to give thanks for. We live in a beautiful place here, and indeed we live in a world that is full of marvellous things. I’ve chosen as a first reading one of my favourite psalms, a hymn of praise that speaks very vividly of the variety of forms of life with which we share our planet, and the way in which the Lord provides and cares for all of them. I’m a keen naturalist, plant collector and bird watcher, and within the natural world I find our creator God glorified and glorified again. Christians, and indeed members of the other great faiths of our world, more and more today are coming to understand that we are given the responsibility of stewards within this world of living wonder and variety. Just as God placed Adam and Eve in a garden to tend it, so we too have the task under God of looking after all that he has made.
So for me that’s a significant dimension of my thinking at harvest festival. We use the earth to provide for ourselves as gardeners and farmers, and also as miners, manufacturers, fishermen and hunters. But we’re also stewards of creation - so who are we as stewards protecting the earth from? Just ourselves, I suppose - after all, we’re the ones (at our greedy worst) who are the damagers and the exploiters and the despoilers of creation.
And it may even be that the Bible gives us encouragement to do this, to see the earth entirely in terms of resource for us to use. For right at the beginning of our Bibles, in the first chapter of Genesis, God tells his people that they must “fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion” - dominion over everything: fish in the sea, birds of the air and all the rest of it.
So where does that leave us? Well, there is surely a huge difference between using the earth’s resources and using up the earth’s resources. We’re given dominion over all other forms of life, but the model for that dominion is provided by our Lord himself, and we see that his dominion is a dominion of love and care. In Jesus, who says to his friends “I am among you as one who serves” he shows us the way of sacrifice and service. For the disciples of Jesus the measure of greatness is never how high and grand a throne we sit on, but how ready we are to serve one another.
I’ve been privileged over the years to travel quite widely in the world, to places where people seem to have very little, and to places where arguably people have far too much; to places where development is urgently needed, and to places that suffer from over-development; and certainly to some places where the harvest is poor and sparse.
So I’ve been made very aware of the challenge of sharing, of making space for one another within our human economy. I’ve been in Palestine, seeing how political tensions intervene, so that some of the harvest can’t be gathered because of the borders that can no longer be crossed. In Tanzania I’ve seen lakeside communities where potentially there could be a rich fishery, only the resources to develop it aren’t there, so instead people just scrape a living, with goats and bony cattle on the shore and dug out canoes on the lake. In Peru I’ve been in shanty towns where people have migrated to the city hoping for streets paved with gold, and finding instead mostly dust. Many have been driven from their family lands by poverty and by terror gangs. I visited smallholdings established by the Rural Landless movement in Brazil, to hear stories of violence and murder done by agents of the big landowners against those who were trying to settle the land in a peaceful way.
And in all of these places I found church communities working hard and courageously to make things better for people in need, and taking seriously that call of our Lord to serve. They were empowering people who had been helpless, and speaking out for people whose voices had till then gone unheard. All these communities would I’m sure take to heart the verse from my second reading, in which Jesus says, “Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
I don’t know who it was who said “tread as lightly as we can upon this world, for it’s the only one we have,” but those are wise words. Someone else has said: “Live simply, that others may simply live.” In his story, Jesus quite brutally exposes the shallow desires of the man who hoarded all his crops in his brand new storehouses and barns. “What good is all the wealth to you?” the man is told - it’ll all be left behind when you go.
My wife and I have not long got back from New York, where perhaps more than anywhere else on this planet you are brought face to face with human power and conspicuous consumption, in the immense buildings that rise up so high. We ascended one of them - not the Empire State but the Rockefeller Tower, not quite so tall but 67 floors up as we looked out over the city.
As we surveyed the city skyline, wealth and power was laid out in front of us, expressed many times over in steel and glass and stone. But looking north from the Top of the Rock, as the viewing floors of the Rockefeller Tower are known, you see not only skyscrapers but also the vast expanse of green at the heart of Manhattan that is Central Park. We fell a bit in love with New York, for all its demonstration of the power of mammon, but we fell very much in love with Central Park, and for me that green oasis was a timely reminder of the truth that “Man cannot live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”
In Central Park birds flit through the trees, squirrels forage about on the grass, turtles sun themselves on rocks around the lake, and people eat ice creams and go jogging, sometimes both at the same time. And here space is made and kept for the natural world and for the wild things, as well as for the refreshment and re-formation that we humans need if we’re to be healthy and strong in body and in spirit. And this should surely be true of the way in which we use the earth wherever we are within it. Sometimes that means creating nature reserves and game parks and the like, not just as a resource for us or for the tourist trade, but also because the creatures with which we share this planet deserve their own space in which to survive and thrive.
But we also need simply to recognise that as human beings we’re a part of, rather than apart from, the natural order of our planet. And as such we are diminished ourselves if we abuse or destroy the beauty of the wild places, whether that’s the hedgerows and woodlands that make our own countryside so lovely, or the rain forests and savannahs and wetlands and coral reefs of other lands.
What makes Psalm 104 so inspirational to me is the way in which it tells me that our lives are linked in to the lives of other living things, of wild donkeys and rock badgers and storks, and shows me how God provides for us all. The other day I was listening on the radio to Bishop James Jones, the former Bishop of Liverpool; one thing he said that I felt struck home was this: for Christians, to abuse God’s creation should be understood not only as something foolish and wrong, but also as an act of blasphemy. When we do as we like with the planet we deny God’s sovereignty, we say to him “You don’t really matter, we can do as we please.”
Another Psalm begins with these words: “The fool says in his heart ‘There is no God’". God gives us the freedom to act as though he were not there, but we're fools if we take that route. Jesus made it very clear that the rich man with his storehouses and barns was going nowhere. Why have faith in stuff that will rust and rot and moulder away? Instead, lay up for yourselves treasure in heaven.
So for me, harvest thanksgiving must always be a time of commitment and recommitment, when we think of blessings received and also of our call to be blessing for others. Anything less isn’t a real thanksgiving - thanksgiving for harvest isn’t expressed in what we do this evening, in our hymns and our prayers and our gifts on this one day, but in the generous and faithful living of our whole life and in the way we use all that God gives us.
That’s why at their Harvest Thanksgiving, the people of Israel brought the first fruits of harvest to lay before the Lord. It was their sign and acknowledgement that the whole of the crop was rightfully his, that the whole harvest should and would be used in ways that were faithful and just. May that be true for us too, and, indeed, may we ourselves be a good harvest to the Lord - through lives that will bear fruit, through lives that will reflect the love and care and compassion that the God we praise has for all he has made, and for all that by its being brings glory to his name.
Amen.
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