What I want to do this morning is to tell you a heartwarming and true story about what harvest is really about, and why it’s good that we come to church to celebrate it.
Imagine, look around you: instead of green hillsides and valleys, with trees and fields and hedges, imagine that the land all around is the same dusty brown colour; dusty brown because the ground itself is just dry dust. There are steep hills on either side, and they too are brown. Nothing is growing here. As you walk, the dust covers and stains your shoes, and it gets into your clothes, and it makes your eyes water.
I was there just about twelve years ago, in a place called El Trebol, which means The Clover Leaf. But there is no clover in sight: you could be in a desert; and in fact you are in a desert. No rain falls here, which is why nothing grows. I’ve been in one or two deserts in my time, and deserts are usually fairly empty places, but this one isn’t. Look around again: this desert scene is full of houses, lots of houses, houses that stretch along the valley, and march up the hillside.
As you look, you’ll see that many of these houses are in fact hardly more than tents. Even the better and more solid ones are more like rough sheds than houses, built mostly out of bits of hardboard, planks of wood, corrugated iron. The houses you see have been knocked together out of anything people could lay their hands on. You might find yourself thinking of allotment sheds, except that nothing grows here, and every shack has a family living in it. Some of them are just hanging onto the side of the hill. How did they manage to build there, you wonder. Why are all these people here? Why make a home in a place so arid and dry and desolate?
In the Old Testament there are many stories of people on the move; in Exodus you read of the people of Israel led through the desert by Moses, journeying from slavery in Egypt to find new land, a land promised to them by God, a land that would flow with milk and honey. They were in the desert for forty years, we’re told. They didn't want to be there, but back in Egypt they'd been slaves, overworked and treated badly by their Egyptian slave-masters, by Pharaoh the king of Egypt. So the desert was a better option, at least until they reached the land they’d been promised.
And when at last they did reach it, it was a wonderful place, with fertile soil in which they could grow all they wanted. But before they crossed the river to enter the land, Moses told the people that they must never forget what they used to be, that they had wandered in the desert, desperate for food and water, that they’d been slaves in Egypt. Most of all, they must never forget that it was God who’d brought them safely to the land they now held, so they must offer thanks and they must live thankfully.
Our harvest festivals, like the festivals of the people of the Old Testament, are a time to remember that, as one of the Psalms puts it, “The earth is the Lord’s, and all the fullness thereof; the round world and all that dwell therein.” So we thank God for all that’s good in our land and in our lives; and, I hope, we also remember that God wants us not only to say thank-you but to live thankfully, using well what he has given us, and being mindful of all with whom we share our world, especially those whose own harvest is much poorer than ours. Like the people whose story I started with, living in the desert.
You might imagine them to be living in some terribly remote place miles from anywhere. But in fact the people I visited were living on the edge of one of the world’s great cities, Lima, the capital city of Peru. I went there to visit people and projects supported by the mission agency for whom I then worked.
The people I met had trekked in from miles around to seek a new life in Lima. Why? Because back home they had no land, or they were terrorised by cruel landlords or bandits or rebels. Perhaps they’d imagined the streets of Lima would be paved with gold. But where they landed, in El Trebol, streets were paved only with dust. The reality of life for those recently arrived was very tough indeed. But the church was very much there among them. The church building I went to see was itself a shack, with walls made of hardboard, and a dirt floor - but it was a place of hope. Inside it, the people who came heard the stories of Moses and the people of Israel, and they prayed that God would help them too.
But how would God help them? God uses people to help people, and the church was running a project to help families in this shanty town to rear Muscovy ducks, and to sell duck eggs as a co-op. I was quite inspired to meet some of the families taking part, and a couple of the church leaders who were helping to teach them. But that was only the beginning of a harvest story that still continues.
So now, imagine that dusty scene again; El Trebol to look at was like an old-fashioned sepia photograph brought to life, in which everything is some shade or other of brown. But look again today, and you’ll see some patches of bright green: squares of rapidly growing crops protected by fences made out of blue plastic sheeting: gardens, new gardens, growing in the desert.
These gardens are a new project that hadn’t started when I was there. People from the church had spent time gathering families together who wanted to start co-operative allotment gardens where all kinds of things could grow. Lima isn’t far off the equator, and things really do grow there. The blue plastic shelter was vital though, to make sure the wind didn’t blow the thin soil away. More plastic was used to make scarers to see off any birds that might steal the seeds.
The duck rearing project contributed too. Ducks produce more than just eggs; and duck manure had helped stabilize and enrich the soil, making it more fertile and less likely to blow away. Now the folk from the church had all these things, or they could lay their hands on them anyway. All they needed on top of that was a bit of a start to make it happen.
In a very green and pleasant village in the English midlands, in prime growing country not far from Evesham, people at a little church were gathering to celebrate harvest festival. And they decided they’d like other people to have a share in the harvest for which they were thanking God. As it happens, Worcester diocese is linked with the Anglican Diocese of Peru, so the bit of money they decided to send went to Lima, where it was just the start the folk there needed to make this little miracle in the desert happen. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was enough, and well targeted. So today it’s helping those particular desert people to take a step or two towards the promised land they’ve been longing for.
God gives us a rich and beautiful world to share, but we can get depressed, or I can anyway, at all the bad news that comes our way, every bulletin is full of it. And the problems and sadnesses and inequalities of our world can seem so big, so intractable, so unchangeable that we end up believing that there’s nothing we can do. So my simple harvest thought for you today is that this little story about ducks and gardens proves that it’s not true that there’s nothing we can do. There is. And every small act of sharing moves us all a step or two closer to the promised land.
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