A Harvest Sermon

 

Readings: Psalm 67; Joel 2.21-27; Matthew 6.25-33

 

Harvest Festival each year gives us the chance to say thank you to God as the great giver of life, and to praise him for his gifts. The harvest we bring in from our fields and gardens, and even from our supermarket shelves, is something for which we should always be thankful. In our first reading, from the prophet Joel in the Old Testament, we’re reminded that we’re richly blessed by God. “You shall eat in plenty and be satisfied and praise the name of the Lord your God,” says the prophet. “You shall know that I am in the midst of Israel and that I, the Lord, am your God and there is no other.” God is with those who honour his name; God is with those who seek to do his will, who fix their hearts on him.

And in our Gospel reading Jesus talks about the need for those who follow him to turn away from petty anxieties and worries. He tells us, “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear.”

Earlier in that chapter, verse  24, Jesus has already told his listeners that no one can serve two masters. “You can’t serve both God and Mammon,” he tells them; Mammon is money and earthly possessions, and it’s also earthly popularity and status. If what we’re mostly thinking about is how much we can earn, and if our hearts are full of greed, then the imperative of faith - “Love the Lord your God, and your neighbour as yourself” - goes begging.

Those words about not loving both God and Mammon are a comment on how life is for us human beings. Because we have free will, we can choose where our loyalties lie. I believe God made us; you don’t have to. The Bible instructs us that loyalty to God should be our choice, and that those who give to God what he asks of us - loyalty, praise, kindness and care for our neighbour - will receive his blessing. We don’t have to follow that instruction. But if our first love is for earthly possessions, then that will get in the way of our loving God. We may not want it to or mean it to, but it will. That’s just how life is. No-one can serve two masters.

The current aim of our government is wealth creation, they tell us. We need a growth rate of at least 2½% in order to get the economy going as it should, and pay for the services we need. I’m not an economist, so I’ll not comment on either figures or theory, other than to say that we live on a planet of finite resources, so we can’t all go on growing for ever. And that the flip side of a focus on creating wealth is that not everyone gets it. For many it may mean opportunity being reduced, or wiped away altogether.

Just at the moment there’s some very real anxiety and fear around, people worried about how to meet daily needs; and not only in our urban areas, though maybe it’s more noticeable there, but even in small rural communities. We’re told by our Lord not to be anxious, or, more strictly, not to be distracted by cares. But we also have to live with the fact that standards of living aren’t guaranteed.

Though in some ways anxiety can be a good thing. It reminds us we can’t deal with all that life throws at us just on our own. We need help, and we need to be help. Jesus said, “Whenever two or three gather together in my name, there am I in your midst.” Our experience of Church, week by week anyway, is very often of being just two or three gathered together. We can be anxious about that, too. We may want to be help, but what can we do, small as we are?

But small can be beautiful. Jesus spoke to huge crowds, but he began his Church with a dozen disciples and a few friends. The Kingdom of God that Jesus spoke of happens if just one person looks to her neighbour and not only to herself, and whenever anyone acts with a kindness that says to the other person, “You’re important too.” So, for me, every harvest festival is a celebration not only of God’s goodness in giving us the fruits of the earth in their season, but also of human kindness. 

Yesterday I was talking to the children in school about friends, and asking them what the most important things were about having friends and being friends. A hand went up right in the front row, class 1, tiny tots. Class 1 children often don’t answer the question you’ve asked, and instead tell you about their cat, or what they had for breakfast, or where they like to go on holiday. But I thought I’d better ask, anyway. And this little lass just said, “Sharing.” What a simple and brilliant answer! Harvest celebrates God’s good gifts - and the human graft and effort that turns those gifts into a harvest safely gathered in; but it also reminds to share them.

“Look at the birds of the air,” said Jesus: “they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.” And it’s when we remember God as creator, as the author of all things, as the Lord of the Harvest - who gives us what we need to grow and thrive - that we’re inspired and led to use that harvest well, to use it kindly, to share.

And it doesn’t take a big church, or a lot of people, or even a youthful age-range, to start that ball rolling. Two or three gathered together can do it, for when we work for the values of the Kingdom, when we’re loving God and loving our neighbour as ourselves, then it’s not just us, for God is with us too.

A small church I know was mentioned to me as “punching above its weight”, in terms of the pastoral work it offered. I mentioned that comment to its Rector when I happened to meet him. He shook his head. “No,” he said, “we’re just travelling with Jesus where he’s told us to go.”

At our Harvest Festival, let’s thank God for the land, for those who farm it, and for all the myriad people whose hard work keeps us fed and housed and comfy. And let’s thank God for his love, shown to the world in Jesus Christ. And then may that thankfulness lead us to individual and collective acts of love and service that bring relief and help and love to where we are, and help make our world a bright place. Finally, know that God will bless us all as we journey together, and as we journey with him.

A Sermon on the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity (4th September - evening)

Readings: Deuteronomy 30.15-end, and Luke 14:25-33

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some words from tonight’s first reading, from the Book of Deuteronomy in the Old Testament: “Today I offer you the choice of life and good, or death and evil.”  The setting for these stark words is Moses preparing the people of Israel to cross over into the Promised Land to which the Lord has led them. And now, says Moses, “You must love the Lord your God and walk in his ways, keep his commandments, decrees and laws.”  And if they do, God will bless them.

But there’s no room for a half-hearted response. The challenge Moses lays before them is this: If you’re not fully up for life in this new land, then you should stay this side of the river. God has brought you to this land, and if you’re going to cross the river to claim it, then with all your heart you must be committed to serve him and to keep his commands.

I was reading the other day on the sports pages about a star player who’d been dropped for the Saturday game. But he’s our best player, fans were saying. Not surprisingly, the coach was challenged as to why he’d dropped him. “I’ve the highest regard for his skills,” the coach insisted, “but his head’s not in the right place, his heart’s not in it - he’s not in the right place to play and I shan’t play him till he is. Just now, he can’t give me the commitment I need. It isn’t how good he is, it’s whether he can play his part in a team game.”

Ability isn’t enough, unless there’s also commitment. You need to be on-side, and part of the team. Moses said to the people that they must turn to the Lord with all their heart and soul and mind and strength. Let me connect that to the really hard thing Jesus said at the beginning of our second reading: “Unless you hate your father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, you can’t be my disciple.”  That really jars, doesn’t it? How can he ask us to hate our own kith and kin?  What sort of a Christian would hate their own nearest and dearest? Surely what God want from us is to be loving and caring and dutiful, as parents, as partners, as siblings? Doesn’t the commandment say, “Honour your father and mother”?

Yes, he does of course; and in fact what Jesus is saying - though in quite a tough way - is much the same thing as Moses: to do with commitment. What Jesus is saying is that nothing must come before our allegiance to God, not even our duty to those we love most in the world. Of course we should be caring and dutiful parents, children, siblings, friends - but these things follow from our duty to God, they don’t take precedence over it.

And while of course none of us should act badly, spitefully or without care to those who have a right to expect our love, not even the closest relationship, not even our love of our own life, should be allowed to stand in the way of the first call placed upon us if we’re disciples of Jesus, which is to love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength. As William Ruskin said many years ago: “He who gives God but second place in his life, gives him no place.”

So just as Moses told the people not to cross the river unless they were totally ready to serve the Lord in the land he was giving them, Jesus now says “Don’t come with me unless you’re totally ready to put what my Father asks of you before everything else." Religion can’t be just a hobby, because God asks us to offer him “ourselves, our souls and bodies” - in other words, to hold nothing back.

And while we may express this offering of ourselves in being in church and coming to God in prayer, Jesus tells us we must take up our cross to follow him. That’s about everything we do: our use of time, our allocation of money, our thought for others, our care for the world and for the environment, and the moral standards we set and keep to.

Religion on its own can even become a godless thing - perverted and misused by false prophets who use their power for their own ends. So we get cults and religious extremism - and even mainstream churches aren’t totally immune. There’ll always be - in every faith - those who set themselves up in God’s place, those who misappropriate the enthusiasm and desire of those who want to believe and to serve.

And I think that’s why Jesus spoke about taking up the cross. He warned his friends that others would claim his name, and would try to lead folk astray. So how do we test the truth of what we’re told and taught? The way of the cross is the test of truth. God’s love is cross shaped, God’s love offers peace and healing and understanding, forgiveness and compassion and justice. It is inclusive, it invites everyone in, and it’s sacrificial, it gives, it doesn’t take. And any word that leads us away from those things cannot be the true word of God, however plausibly it’s preached. In Philippians chapter 2 verse 6 the apostle Paul wrote that Jesus was by his very nature God, and yet he humbled himself, taking the form of a servant. There’s the test we should apply, whether we’re looking inwardly at our own selves, or reflecting on the teaching others give us. 

To “love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul, with all your mind and strength” is of course the first part of the Summary of the Law; and the second section naturally follows: “Love your neighbour as yourself.” You must love God before all else, Jesus tells us, but the true love for God will be cross-shaped, reaching up to God, and also reaching out, to be proved in our care for others, and in our readiness to live generous and giving lives. 

Here we are on the Lord’s Day, and once again that simple yet profound and crucial question is posed, as we look to the challenge of being Christian disciples through this new week of opportunity and challenge: Are we up for this, or not?  Will we cross the river, will we accept the cross? Moses said: “It’s your choice - life and good, or death and evil.” Our Servant King died on a cross to make us his people, and to open the way to a new Promised Land. So are we people of the cross, or are we not? And are we committed to him, does he have our full attention, and our complete allegiance? As the old hymn puts it, “Jesus speaks, and speaks to me - say, poor sinner, lov’st thou me?”

A Sermon on the 11th Sunday after Trinity (28th August 2022)

 Readings - Ecclesiasticus 10:12-28 and Luke 14:1, and 7-14

My newspaper last week warned that we should expect higher levels of crime this winter - especially crimes like burglary, car theft and shoplifting - because of the cost of living crisis. I guess they’re right. Some people will be driven to it by desperation; and there’ll be others who’ll see the present situation in terms of opportunity - a licence to steal, you might say.

Probably most of us have at some point been victims of crime. We were burgled in a previous parish - our house was broken into while we were asleep upstairs; and I’ve had things stolen from me in the street, too. And I know that crimes like this have a bigger impact on us than just the loss of money or valuables. It leaves us feeling vulnerable; if we’re burgled our home feels violated, no longer our own. We’re not only victims at the time it happens, we go on being victims for a while afterwards, even if we’ve not been physically harmed - which of course can happen as well.

No-one likes that sort of crime. But we might be a bit more relaxed about other ways of breaking the law, like exceeding the speed limit, or parking on a double yellow; we might even go so far as to excuse parking for free in a place where you’re supposed should have paid, even though I guess technically that really is a crime and not merely a misdemeanour. And what about those little workplace crimes like taking a few pens or paper clips home from the office? After all, there isn’t really a victim, is there, of that sort of crime?

If there is victimless crime, is there also victimless sin? Here are the seven deadly sins, so called: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. The first six of those do obvious damage, and you can see there are victims. People get damaged by the lust and greed and wrath of others. People get hurt by people’s envy or gluttony. People get let down or neglected where there’s sloth. But perhaps pride might feel a bit different.

You could imagine circumstances in which pride is something positive. A worker taking pride in their work, a gardener being proud of their vegetable plot or flower border? And even though maybe some folk do get a bit puffed up and proud in a way that’s annoying to those around them, there’s not much actual damage caused, surely?

Not so, wrote the author of Ecclesiasticus, from which our first reading came. Pride is where all sin starts, he tells us; to persist in pride leads to depravity. And even if pride itself doesn’t look too damaging, it leads on to things that are, because pride is something that denies the sovereignty of God. In his book Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis takes the same line when he writes, “Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.” While Dante defined pride as “love of self, perverted to hatred and contempt for one's neighbour”.

So what begins with being a bit puffed up and tending to show off can become something altogether more serious - because it’s inward looking and selfish. Jesus saw in the Pharisees a sort of religion that could so easily build a sense of superiority to others. At the same time this way of thinking downgraded God into playing just a bit part at best. This sort of religious activity was all about me, and not really about God or my neighbour.

So it was easy for a Pharisee to start to think of himself (and it would be himself, I guess) as better than other folk. Pharisees were people who took enormous care never to put a foot wrong in the way they lived; they took their religion so seriously that all their time and effort went on making sure they never ever strayed outside what the Law of Moses required. So they knew themselves to be quite literally holier than thou. And while I don’t suppose all of them let that go to their heads, for some of them that’s clearly what happened. Jesus called them whited sepulchres - they looked good on the outside, but inside they were full of pride.

And Jesus, as ever, was very practical in the way he tackled the problem. He was at a dinner party, so he talked about dinner parties. Don’t grab the best seat, he told the folk there, who, it seems, were doing just that. You’ll look really foolish when the seat you’ve grabbed gets assigned to someone else and there’s nowhere for you to go except the very bottom of the table. But if you start down there instead, maybe your host will call you up higher. That’s good advice for a dinner party, but of course Jesus meant it also as good advice for a disciple. As God’s people let’s not be anything other than humble in his sight. We’re servants, not masters, we’re learners, not graduates, we’re sinners, not paragons of virtue.

And what about when you give a dinner party? Jesus had some sensible and practical advice to anyone thinking of sending out invitations: don’t choose a guest list to impress, made up of people who are sure to invite you back; no, instead invite those who need a hand up or a hand out. They’ll not be able to pay you back, but God will. And again, that’s not really advice for a party-planner so much as for a disciple. It’s about choosing to live in a way that looks outwards rather than inwards - a way that’s generous, and recalls what the great prophets of old had to say about God’s special favour towards the poor, the needy, and anyone who needs a helping hand. 

Pride persuades us to act in ways designed to impress our own peer group; that’s what’s important to the proud person - their own status and the admiration of those around them. But we’re called to be disciples, followers, people doing our best to be as like Jesus as we can be. And the genuine disciple, the true pilgrim, is the person who gives rather than takes, who shares rather than keeps, who is generous because we serve a generous God. Those who care for those for whom God cares, those who take the humble place, those who always ready to serve. And a generous Church is one that adds life, and gives hope, and welcomes and affirms.

A Sermon on the 10th Sunday after Trinity (21st August 2022)

Do the things God wants you to do, and act with kindness and generosity towards your neighbour in need, and, says the prophet Isaiah, “you will be like a well-watered garden.”

It’s nice when the sun shines, but too much of it may not be good news for the gardener, especially when like in my garden, and awful lot of what you’ve got is in pots. It doesn’t take long for things to dry out, so the late evening watering session is very important. Thankfully, we have several water butts, and we’ve so far avoided a hosepipe ban, but it’s quite an effort each day, and even so not everything on my patch managed to survive that spell of very hot weather.

It was of course really good for our weddings. We’ve had a lot of gloriously sunny wedding days this summer. But one or two have happened in the rain, with brides sheltering under the yew trees and people rushing for umbrellas. When it’s rainy I tend to remind my wedding couples that in the Bible rain is always a sign of God’s blessing. They don’t necessarily seem all that convinced when I say it - but it is in fact quite true.

We find it hard to think of rain as a blessing, because for us rain is mostly something that spoils things, that sends us home from our picnics in the park, stops us playing outside, and isn’t much fun. Though as a child I did always enjoy splashing in puddles, so it wasn’t all bad! But we did have to put up with Dad staring mournfully at the rain streaking down our windows and moaning about all the jobs he couldn’t do outside.

In the Holy Land, rain was always precious stuff; without it the crops failed and the people went hungry. This year, perhaps we’ve had just a taste of that. The grass has been turning to dust under our feet; fields had ceased to be a patchwork, because everything had turned the same dry colour. So last Monday morning found me just standing out on my lawn and letting it rain on me, and I can tell you it felt really good.

We read in scripture that “the rain falls on the just and on the unjust” and we interpret that in terms of bad things happening to good people as well as wrong ‘uns; but really it’s telling us that the good things and the blessings of life fall both on those who obviously deserve them and on a fair few who perhaps may not.

But whether or not we like rain, it’s worth remembering that one person’s blessing may not seem that way to another. Me as a child on holiday didn’t have the same attitude to sun and rain as the grown up me looking over the shrivelled and wilting plants on my vegetable patch. We’re rarely all praying the same prayers when it comes to the weather! And yet some of the things, rain included, we don’t always think of as blessings can be, even so.

Last week I did a house blessing; I blessed each room of a cottage that had been hugely changed in the course of its recent renovation. I don’t often get asked to do house blessings, and it’s always a privilege when I do. You may wonder what the point is of blessing inanimate objects, houses and their contents included - but as I went from room to room with appropriate prayers, I was in fact asking a blessing not on the house itself, but on the house as a lived in home, and on the people who’d be meeting and eating and living in it.

A few years ago I partnered with the local fire service chaplain in blessing the new fire engine that had arrived at the station in Severn Street; and again, we weren’t so much blessing the machine itself as the work it was there to support, and the people who’d be manning it in demanding and maybe dangerous situations - as well as the people for whom its arrival on the scene would be an urgent and much needed blessing.

So we asked God to bless the firefighters to be themselves a blessing to all who needed their help. Jesus blessed everyone he met, and his high call to all who offer themselves as his disciples is that we should be blessings ourselves.

We should be, harking back to my opening words, like the rain that restores and brings to life a well-watered garden. There’s a reading I sometimes hear at weddings - I can’t remember exactly how it goes, but it says something about the secret of a happy marriage being not choosing the right partner, but choosing to be the right partner. And in just the same way, my prayer for myself and for all who share my ministry isn’t that blessings might fall upon us just so we can feel good and be safe, but so we can ourselves be a blessing to others. As the prayer of St Francis begins, “Lord, make me a channel of your peace . . .”

And where religion gets in the way of blessing, then that religion is wrong, because it simply isn’t true to the heart and mind of God. How can we claim to worship the Lord when in fact what we do and how we live - and perhaps also the rules that govern our churches - deny his love? This of course was the situation Jesus faced as he healed the seriously arthritic woman he encountered on the Sabbath day within the weekly service.

I could feel some sympathy for the synagogue president, as Jesus sabotaged all his plans for an orderly act of worship. But Jesus tells him and the others: you’d let loose your ox or your donkey on the Sabbath, surely? (they would, of course) So how can we not release this child of Abraham from the bonds that are holding her? To say “God bless you” isn’t enough - we have to be a blessing.

And when, at the pearly gates or wherever, you and I some day are called to account for how we’ve been, on the long day’s journey we call a life (and yes, I know we’re saved by grace, not by works; by God’s love, not the tally of our own good deeds) - what will really matter? Not my word perfect Bible knowledge, nor my sweet singing, my regular attendance, or how well I kept the rules; what will matter is how closely I’ve walked with Jesus, and whether my heart has been in tune with the heart of my Lord. For we’re judged I’m sure mostly by whether God’s many blessings to us have become blessings we’ve shared, and blessings we’ve been, along the way.