Thank you once again for inviting me to come and join you for Harvest Festival. Harvest Festival has always a favourite time of the year for me, ever since I was very little. Back then I think it would have been the best attended service of the entire year in our village church; maybe less so now, but still always a lovely time. And because everyone held their harvest service (and supper) on a different day you got to go to all of them if you planned well, unlike, say, Christmas when everyone’s service was at more or less the same time.
So thank you; I’m glad to be here. And I’ve brought this with me tonight. It’s an arpillera, which I was lucky enough to be given a few years ago when I was visiting Peru in South America. An arpillera is a sort of picture made from patchwork scraps of material, and they’re traditionally made by Peruvian ladies - a sort of traditional folk art. Many arpilleras depict bible stories, or else, like this one, scenes from village life. So here you can see a colourful market place, with the houses of the village behind, then beyond them the distant mountains, the high Andes which are so important to the life of Peru, because that’s where all their water comes from. It’s a very busy scene, with a full harvest of fruit, including oranges, grapefruit, lemons, limes, apples, squashes and melons; and there are green vegetables, and baskets and attractive woolly hats.
My Peruvian arpillera can be a reminder both of abundance and God’s provision, the myriad different fruits of the earth; and also of the international dimension of our modern harvest, which we can quickly see on a stroll round the aisles in Tesco, or even by looking through the cupboards in our own kitchens. We give thanks tonight not just for the harvest of our own land, but for the harvest of many lands.
But another thing about this arpillera. It’s traditional folk art, as I’ve said - rural art, but in fact this arpillera was made not in some small village but in the dust and smog of metropolitan Lima. The ladies who made it did maybe once live in a village and work on the land, but they’ve now done what so many in our world are doing, they’ve migrated to the city, perhaps because the land is no longer as good as it was, perhaps because they were enticed by rumours of streets paved with gold.
Our world is increasingly an urban world. In fact over the past few years a significant milestone has been passed, in that since the turn of the century, and for the first time in history or pre-history, most of the world’s population now lives in towns and cities. In the UK and in the more developed parts of the world, the trend is to move out of the cities and into the countryside, though it has to be said that many of those who do so continue to live lives that are relentlessly urban, and to complain that in the countryside there’s mud all over the roads, a shortage of street lighting and far too many people driving tractors. But in most of the world, the human flow is resolutely in the other direction, into the rapidly growing cities. Sixty years ago about 500,000 people lived in Lima. When I visited that figure had risen to some eight million.
So in that case my arpillera could express a yearning for the simple village life its urban creator had lost. And maybe our traditional harvest festivals do the same. I was told not long ago that harvest festivals are on the decline in the country-side, but in the cities more and more people come to them each year. I don’t know if statistics bear that out, but if they do it might be about people in our changing and complex world longing for the simplicity of bygone days.
But we can’t go back there, and I doubt we’d really want to. Harvests vary; some years they’re good, some years not so good. But in past times a bad year for harvest wouldn’t just be disappointing, it would be disastrous. People would have starved. We’re still at the whim of the weather, but it’s not like it was centuries ago. Technology, mechanisation and internationalisation have seen to that.
In past times the thanks of the people for a good harvest safely gathered in would have been truly heartfelt, literally a matter of life and death. But not today - so is harvest festival now just a charming and gently fading tradition? I think to celebrate harvest is every bit as important as it ever was, maybe more so. It reminds us of our interdependence; that we depend on the harvest of others, and they depend on ours. We gather to celebrate not just our own harvest, but the world’s – and not just the harvest of farms and plantations, but also of factory and mine and quarry, and of the sea.
And it reminds us that for all our sophistication and technology, the opening words of the 24th Psalm remain true: ‘the earth is the Lord’s, and all the fullness thereof.’ The people of ancient Israel knew that. They had been led by Moses to a land promised to them; and so the land they farmed was not only their land but also the Lord’s. And at harvest they expressed their thanks to God, and committed themselves each year to use well what he had set into their care.
We’ve heard the story Jesus told of the rich fool, who hoarded up his crops and filled his storehouses and barns and dreamed of a future of self-indulgent luxury. He forgot the Lord’s claim to the land and its produce. He’d cut God out of the picture, and he’d cut his neighbour out as well.
But he was to discover that no-one escapes the march of time, no-one escapes the reality of their own mortality. The fruit of our labour is also our sacred trust from God, to be used in ways that please him. And at harvest we honour God in our concern for our neighbour, in our care for the land, and our readiness to work in ways that honour him as our Creator.
That’s why the ancient Israelites brought the first fruits of their harvest to lay before the altar of the Lord. That very first portion of what that earth had given was rightfully the Lord’s possession - but so was all the rest of it, and all of it, they promised God, would be used with care and shared with compassion, so that everyone could share in the rejoicing of harvest. As each gift was presented, the one who had brought it would remind himself that without God he himself was nothing, just a wanderer in the desert. God had made them a nation, God had given them the land they worked.
Like the ancient Israelites the people who made my arpillera have served their time as wanderers in the desert. It was a surprise to me on arriving in Lima to find that this sprawling bustling city is in fact a desert town, in which rain almost never falls. The shanty towns I visited were built on dusty hillsides where there wasn’t a blade of grass. One I visited was called El Trebol, “the Clover Leaf”, but there wasn’t a leaf to be seen. Interestingly, there were ducks, though. Why? Because the local churches had developed a project to help these new arrivals get a foothold on the ladder and make their own way in the city, by training them in how to look after Muscovy ducks (which happily need only a bit of water to splash about in, since they certainly weren’t going to find any ponds). They would learn how to look after them, feed them, sell the eggs . . . and then they would be given a hatching of ducklings to start them off.
It was a good news story, and after I got back I spent time raising money to support the project from churches and schools I visited. Then about eighteen months later, I received from Peru some pictures of the next stage in the project. For ducks don’t only produce eggs from the rear ends. They can also be a good source of manure, and the brown dust of El Trebol was getting greened over. The pictures showed a band of smiling ladies, some of whom perhaps had helped make my arpillera, standing in a brand new garden made out of the dust of the shanty town.
In small ways, something similar is happening in lots of places around our urban world. People are being given back a harvest of their own. With help from local churches, charities and co-operatives, local people are finding space and resources and inventive new ways to grow what they need to feed their families, and hopefully to have a bit left over to take to market. To me the greening of that desert scene on the edge of Lima was a profound and lovely image of what God’s kingdom is really all about. New hope for the very poor, and a garden for those who live in the desert.
So may God the great Giver bless us and ours this harvest festival; and may a harvest blessing be shared widely in our world through our own fruitfulness in God’s service, and in our own striving for God’s kingdom. Amen.
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