Harvest Festival 2024
Harvest Sunday 2024
St Bene’t’s Church, Cambridge
The Rev’d Devin McLachlan
I sometimes wonder how they choose the readings for feast days.Here we are, celebrating Harvest,giving thanks for the many hands that labour in the fields,“They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns” the vicar declares,and across the land, farmers and workers cross their arms and think loudly:“Well maybe the birds don’t, but I did and it was bloody hard work all summer long.”
After all the work of sowing, tending, weeding, worrying, harvesting and gathering, to come to church and hear:You didn’t need to do all that work. You could have sat around in your sweatpants watching Netflix,and God would have given all this to you anyway.
Somehow, that doesn’t sound right, does it?
It isn’t right, because Jesus didn’t stop there —tempting as it is, well-intentioned and generous, that’s a dangerous path to go down, stopping at ‘don’t worry’ and resting in a false gospel of positive attitudes for prosperity.
When Jesus invites us to consider the lilies of the field and the birds of the air,he isn’t saying: ‘don’t worry,sit back and relax.’I believe here in the midst of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is saying: ‘You’re worried about the wrong things!You’re worried about what the harvest is going to mean toyou.You need to be worried about what the harvest means to your neighbour.’
As we gather today to celebrate the good things of God’s green earth,Jesus calls to set us free from anxiety so that we are free to worry about justice:
“But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness,
and all these things will be given to you as well.”
Be free from anxiety, so that we might be free to strive for righteousness.
Righteousness, dikaiosynê.Somehow, at least to me, righteousness sounds… pompous. And righteousness, when it is pursued alone, is pompous.But dikaiosynê is not pursued alone. In the Septuagint — the Greek translation of the Old Testament, from which Paul and the Gospel writers seem most to quote — dikaiosynê translates the Hebrew word sedaqah: God’s covenant fidelity. God is righteous, in that God is faithful to God’s promises to God’s people.
God’s righteousness may be inherent and eternal, but it is seen and understood in relationship, in God’s fidelity to us. Just as God set forth the earth in its abundance, God calls God’s people into covenant, into a just relationship. As NT Wright reminds us, in Jewish theology “the creator God is the covenant God, and vice versa”[1]
Covenant and Creation,Justice and Harvest, are inseparable in our scriptures. And neither Harvest nor Justice are work that can be pursued alone. There is no agriculture without the culture of community,and no Harvest Sunday in a city without many hands between the sowing of the field, and the food on our shelves.
In ancient Israel, that righteous harvest was pursued by the whole nationin an impossibly faith-filled leap of Jubilee.Every 50th year, every debt was cancelled,
land returned and redistributed,and fields left fallow. Nothing was sown — restoring health to the soil, restoring wildness to nature, and reminding a community to restore their relationships,to be again the whole of God’s people.
But there were no crops to harvest in a Jubilee year. A Jubilee Harvest was, like the feeding of the five thousand,a year of abundance that was only possible if everyone shared, if each one remembered to care for the poorest and the most marginal.No “positive attitude” or creedal purity was going to get you through Jubilee.Your generosity and the generosity of neighbours makes jubilee possible,a stone-soup of God’s justice.
So this Harvest Sunday,celebrating God’s abundance,we give thanks for the great green earth that God has entrusted to us,And we remember the greater harvest, the Kingdom of God and its Justice, that we must seek first,as individuals, as a parish, as Christians.In doing that, all else follows.In failing that, all else fails as well.
The work of scientists and ecologists,the labour of farmers and foresters,teaches us about the profound and nurturing Love which God has planted in Creation,and invites us to take part in the redemptive work of Christ the King of Creation, knowing that God intends one day to redeem nature should motivate Christians to view and act differently towards the environment. Christians should be involved as much as possible in the process of redeeming nature here and now on earth as an expression of our own redemption and salvation and the “living out” of our faith.
None of this is easy work —the temptation will always be to backslideinto short-term profiteering and exploitation,letting the poorest of the poor suffer when crops fail and water becomes undrinkable.We will be forced to make hard choices,between our own comfort and the good of the world, and we, individually and as a body politic, may sometimes fail to make the just choice.
But as Christians, as followers of Christ the King of All Creation,it is our duty to care for creation,to re-orient our lives to the purpose of Godto the Jubilee dream that God has for all humanity.Faith calls us to give up trust in our material wealth and our individual fields,and to trust in the harvest that God has readied for the whole world.Faith calls us to be a community of women and womenwho live a Jubilee life, feeding the hungry, sheltering the refugee,living as peacemakers and prophets.
Faith is the harvest we gather in for our family —for what do we want to pass along to our children,our students, our nieces and nephews?An insatiable desire for more, better, and bigger
Or do we want to share with them a faith in the God who loves them,and a deep desire to bring this world closer to the kingdom of God?
It is our blessing to see that the hungry are fed and the homeless sheltered,our blessing to seek out the King of Creation in the world that he has made, to revel in the song of the lark and the flair of the flowers in the fieldto sacrifice easy comfort so that the gifts God has given us in forest and seaare treated with care and gratitude,Our blessing to be free from anxiety, that we might by God’s grace be set free to strive for God’s Kingdom.
[1]N.T. Wright, Paul p.24