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October 01, 2006
Harvest Festival
The coming of the harvest festival really begins the Autumn I suppose. Of course, those in the Southern Hemisphere are just entering the Spring and their "Harvest" will not be until almost Eastertide, something that I used, in the days I lived South of the Equator, to find a bit strange when the Prayer Book always insisted that we celebrate it at this time of the year. Just shows how far we have removed ourselves from the cycle of agriculture really in our comfortable and mainly city based lives.
It is only really in the countryside - and particularly the countryside parishes - that Harvest Festival really has any significance these days. The city parishes still celebrate it, but the link between the soil, the seasons and the preparation of food that can be stored to tide the community over the winter has long gone. Everything we need to eat or drink now comes prepackaged, sanitised and completely detached from the reality of a life tied to season and land.
Harvestime used to be a period when everyone, men, women and children, were out in the fields toiling to bring in the harvest, even our school holiday periods are geared to this. Now, of course, most of this is mechanised - or immigrant labour is hired in at below the minimum wage - to gather in the bounty of the land. I do wonder sometimes how much longer we can sustain the balance we currently have between food production, water supply and popultaion growth. There is no secret of the fact that the most fertile lands for certain produce lies in the developed world and the less fertile in some of the most undeveloped. Yields of grain is one indicator which can be very telling - in the US, Canada, Europe and the Russias yields are usually two tons per acre or more - in Africa that would be the top end of the very best managed land. Cash crops produced in Africa and the Caribean now supply Europe with goods not growable here, but the primary criticism of this system is that it means that the farmer there has to import the basic foods they need instead of growing them themselves.
While there are arguments for and against both positions on that, it is worth remembering that our own farmers don't do that well in the cash stakes either. The producer is always the bottom end of the money/value chain and the supermarket always on the top. Interestingly a commentator on the radio yesterday remarked that todays food retailer "designs" the food they stock in that they carry out research to find the price the public will pay and then source their supplies according to price.
Well, we live in a material world, one where everything has a price and a label. Our managers and accountants at the helm of the nation can tell us the cost of everything - but they know nothing of value, only price. Sadly that goes for the vast majority of us as well, we focus entirely on the material and the luxuries - and forget the true value of perhaps taking another route or choosing another product.
Who knows, that might even start a green revolution! My sermon for today is in the extended post below, I hope it give you something to consider.
Harvest Festival
October 1 2006
“Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, drink and clothing?”
+ May I speak, and may you hear in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen
Well, life without food, drink and clothing would probably be short, desperately uncomfortable – and cold! So, is our Lord really saying we should ignore the needs of the body completely? I would suggest not; in fact he is reminding us that we need to get our perspectives and our focus right – he is reminding us that there is a huge difference between our basic needs and an obsessive pursuit of more than we actually need for our comfort and health.
It is one of the greatest weaknesses in modern society that we are no longer in touch with the reality of the means of production of the food we consume and the clothes we wear – or, indeed, with the energy we use with such profligacy. We go to the supermarket and are upset if vegetables are not there, or the particular brand of soap powder is not available. We give almost no thought to the materials that go into our clothes – or where they come from. The builders of this and other churches in our area could have told us that and more, since a poor harvest meant a hungry winter. One suit of clothes lasted as long as possible – and out of certain seasons the fare offered at most tables (if you had one) would have been fairly basic!
St Paul reminds his readers in the letter to Timothy that we should at all times in our public worship, give thanks for all the blessings our Lord provides. We need to be thankful for more than just the bountiful harvest we enjoy, but for the many other things that, particularly in the developed world, we tend to take for granted.
It is frequently one of my pet irritations that every time someone publishes a new survey of “people in poverty” in the UK or Europe, they use as measures the presence or absence of a range of toys, luxury goods and other non-essential items as a determining factor. Why do we use such ludicrous measurements as whether or not a household can afford to buy their children a Game Boy or designer label trainers – both of which appear in a report by a prominent think tank as markers – when in Thailand many live on the streets with no shelter or income at all. There and in other “Tiger Economies” people sell their children into the sex trade to support themselves and in Africa one meal a day is considered enough for vast sections of the population?
Has our idea of wealth and poverty become so material that we cannot see the true needs of ourselves and our fellow travellers on this, the third rock from the sun?
Our Gospel this morning reminds us that, in the midst of plenty, we are impoverishing ourselves if we do not strike a balance between the physical and spiritual. That is the message we need to restore in our society as a whole, for we live in a spiritually impoverished and materially rich society and age.
“I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions and thanksgivings be made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity.”
Again the key point in the letter to Timothy is in the fourth word Paul uses to describe the appropriate elements of our common worship. Thanksgiving is what we should begin and end our daily prayer cycle with, thanksgiving for life, thanksgiving for the bounty of our health, wealth, food, families and homes, but how many of us give thanks for faith? How many of us give thanks for our friends, our colleagues and those whom we may never meet – but who have provided the very things we eat drink and wear?
Harvest time serves as a reminder of our need to be thankful for the food on our tables and the clothes on our backs, but it should also be a reminder to us that we need to keep a balance in our lives between our real needs and the plenty we are fortunate to enjoy. It needs too to be a reminder to us that these things are not ours to be wasted or squandered, but that we need to be mindful of those who do not share our wealth and for those from whose labour we draw so much benefit.
Harvest time used to be the time when the housewife and the children got busy preserving, pickling, preparing food to be stored to see the family and the community through the barren season of the winter. A well stocked larder was essential to survival and the management of those stocks was a vital part of the cycle of life. We no longer have that need, so perhaps we can afford to take more literally the words of our Gospel to take no thought to our needs for food and drink – after all Mr Sainsbury, Mr Tesco and Mr Morrison to mention but a few, will surely have all that we need when we need it!
Unfortunately it seems that the freedom from the need to worry about the forward planning that our forebears had to take so seriously has not meant that we have focussed on the spiritual, rather the reverse, for now we focus on the luxuries we may or may not enjoy.
As we prepare to meet our Lord in this feast of the Eucharist, dare I suggest that we all consider very carefully our own balance between our spiritual life and our physical needs? Do we have it right? Are we using the freedom from the fear of famine, storm or poor crops to the best effect in our spiritual growth? I pray that we are – or will.
Amen
Posted by The Gray Monk at October 1, 2006 12:32 PM
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