Sermon by the Rev. Bryan Owen

It’s good to be with you again as we once again enter what Keats called the ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’. Autumn means Harvest Festival and ‘ears of corn around the font’ (Betjeman).

Do you remember John Betjeman’s poem ‘The Diary of a Church Mouse’ where the mouse says:

I climb the eagle's brazen head

To burrow through a loaf of bread.

I scramble up the pulpit stair

And gnaw the marrows hanging there….

These are the traditional signs of Harvest celebration in church although I haven’t seen a marrow in a long time!

And have you thought that just as there’s some deep urge inside swallows to make them fly south to Africa, and just as there is a deep urge inside starlings that makes them want to fly in great murmurations across the sky, so there is something deep inside each one of us that wants to celebrate the harvest even though most of us are now far removed from tilling the fields and tending the flocks. We want to be thankful and so we continue to celebrate Harvest Festival.

Harvest in human history

Throughout human history harvests have been celebrated with great ceremonies of thanksgiving and prayer. It is a common human experience that stretches way back into ancient human history.

Before the rise of the great religions, ancient peoples believed that their crops and flocks contained spirits - spirits which caused the wheat or the barley or the lambs to grow and which also caused them to die. I remember when I was teaching in Papua New Guinea the villagers would tell me of the spirits in the trees and the stones and in the animals they hunted. These spirits had to be defeated or appeased if the tribe was to have a successful harvest.

In the northern hemisphere the autumn harvest had to take an agricultural society safely through a cold winter. It was so crucial for their survival that whatever power provided that bounty it deserved praise and sacrifice. So cultures the world over - Greeks, Romans, Hebrews, Chinese, Egyptians have all given thanks in one way or another for a good harvest. They differed in their celebrations and in their gods but they all set aside a date to reflect on life's blessings.

In ancient Phoenicia, the Feast of Harvest marked the end of the grape harvest. The Canaanites ate, drank, and made merry. Celebrants would carry palm leaves, and olive, myrtle and willow branches bound together and hanging with fruit while animal sacrifices were performed at the temples.

In ancient Egypt the celebration of the spring-time harvest festival was dedicated to Min, their god of vegetation and fertility. Because of their climate their harvest was in the spring and the festival featured a parade in which the Pharaoh took part after which a great feast was held.

In ancient Rome the harvest festival was dedicated to Ceres, the goddess of corn (from which the word cereal comes). The first fruits of the harvest were made to Ceres and, again, there was music, and there were parades, games and sports. In the Roman world pigs were sacrificed for the great thanksgiving feast.

Hebrew harvest festival

All these harvest rituals were familiar to the Hebrew tribes and to the early Christians and the same elements of thanksgiving and celebration and prayers for the next planting can be found in the Old Testament.

Remember that with Moses the Hebrew tribes had spent many years wandering around in the wilderness with their herds of sheep and goats. When they finally entered the land of Canaan they saw it as a land flowing with milk and honey, a land of promise, a land where they could settle down and become farmers.

In the Book of Deuteronomy, we discover the Hebrew tribes grew wheat and barley, vines, figs and pomegranates, olive trees and honey. Canaan was a land ‘without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing’ (Deut 8:7-9). When we go into a supermarket we, too, find everything we need and we, too, lack nothing.

In our Old Testament lesson this morning, also from Deuteronomy, we are reminded that we shouldn’t take the bounty of the land for granted, but rather that we should offer the first fruits of the land to God and then rejoice not only with our own family but also with the foreigners and strangers who live among us (Deut 26:10-11). There was no hating of foreigners at that time – every traveller and settler was included in.

The Hebrew tribes also knew about the failure of the harvest – they suffered swarms of locusts which still occur in parts of Africa today. They suffered from drought and pestilence. And they often found their harvests overgrown with weeds – as in the story of the wheat and the tares.

For the Hebrew tribes, just as with us, harvest thanksgiving was a time of reflection, a time of action and a time for celebration.

And our Gospel today invites us to reflect on what it is that truly feeds us, on what truly makes us strong and healthy. Jesus takes us beyond the Old Testament and beyond the traditional thanksgiving for the food that feeds our bodies. He invites us to work for that food, that bread, that does not perish, that food which doesn’t rely on a good harvest, that food which never lets us down.

Jesus recognises that life is unpredictable for ordinary people. Good harvests can be followed by bad ones. Traditional gods and spirits can be capricious and let you down from one year to the next.

And when harvests failed the people of ancient times always believed it was the fault of the gods or spirits who for reasons best known to themselves were punishing communities for sins they had committed during the year. That’s why the Canaanites and the Phoenicians and even the Jews made sacrifices on their altars.

In a world of uncertainty and capriciousness Jesus teaches us God can be relied on not necessarily to give us a plentiful harvest but to strengthen us when it’s a bad one. The life of faith can give us an inner stability, a still centre, with which to cope with situations outside our control. So when we gather round the Table in a few minutes’ time, the bread we shall receive and the wine we shall drink are symbols of that which is always true - God is the same Yesterday and Today and Forever.

But we are also called to action. Today, we know today that failed harvests are either climate-related or they are caused by human behaviour.

Climate: The failure of the rains in places like Ethiopia or Kenya, or too much rain such as we have had in Britain or North America, can ruin crops. In the last 50 years cereal crop production has actually fallen by around 10% in North America, Europe and Australia because of increasing weather extremes.

Oxfam tell us that in places like Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Niger children suffer increased wasting and stunted growth after a flood or a drought. In the nurses’ college in Bangladesh where I have worked in recent years all the new students, year after year, were malnourished and it took three months of proper feeding for them to achieve normal weights so they could maintain their energy and concentration to do their studies properly.

A hundred years ago we in Britain faced the same problem! In 1889 there were over 50,000 pupils in London alone attending school ‘in want of food’. Large numbers of men were rejected from serving in the forces during the Boer War because they were ‘malnourished’. In 1904 so many children were turning up to school hungry they were unable to focus on their education as lack of food made them lethargic and unwell. The great reforming government of Glasgow Prime Minister Henry Campbell Bannerman consequently introduced school dinners of blessed memory!

You will understand, therefore, that in countries where people are malnourished the farmers have less energy to do the manual work that planting and harvesting entails – and so there is a continual downward spiral deeper into poverty.

Human activity: But harvest failure is also caused most directly by human activity. There are no harvests in Syria right now. There are no markets in Aleppo. Farming in Iraq is not safe or secure. In places such as Vietnam and Cambodia vast swathes of countryside cannot be farmed because of the bombs and mines that still litter the country after the Vietnam War of the 1960s. The same is true in many parts of Africa – you might remember Princess Diana highlighting that particular issue in Angola.

In the 1930s Stalin engineered a famine in the Ukraine that deliberately starved to death over 6 million peasants in order to eliminate the small land-owning class called kulaks. And in the 1950s the Soviet leader Khrushchev ordered mass farming in Central Asia which resulted in the land becoming the windswept desert it still is today.

Only this week a peace agreement has been signed in Bolivia between the government and Farc rebel movement. That conflict has lasted 52 years and again vast areas of the country cannot be farmed because of that civil war.

The rural exodus: But we are aware of another consequence of harvest failure. It’s called the rural exodus when people move from the countryside to the towns searching for food and work.

For the past hundred years or more the cities of the world have been growing at the expense of the villages and farmers in rural areas. We are seeing this human migration on an international and inter-continental scale today as people escape from poverty, lack of food and clean water, and civil conflict. We are living with the political and social consequences of that migration – and it is set to get worse. Human migration on a massive scale has the potential to become one of western society’s greatest de-stabilisers in the foreseeable future.

Mr Trump in America wants to build a great wall to keep them out. In the UK we are relying on the Channel and leaving the European Union to do the same.

There is plenty for us to do. We are called to action whether it be with Christian Aid or Oxfam or with any of the other charities and non-governmental organisations that seek to alleviate suffering and ameliorate the worst effects of climate change. There is always something for us to do.

But there is also celebration. These days Harvest celebrations are muted affairs compared with what goes on overseas. We won’t be dancing in the streets but in our act of worship this morning we are indeed celebrating the harvest – we thank those who pick tea leaves in south Asia, those who produce coffee in South America, those who grow sugar beet in East Anglia, those who grow wheat and barley and oatmeal in fields large and small. We remember those who fish in dangerous waters, and those who tend flocks on the hillsides. For all who put food on our tables we want to give thanks.

Conclusion

But above all our faith is strengthened by the knowledge that the God whom Jesus revealed is the One who never changes. He is with us wherever we go and in whatever circumstance we find ourselves in hunger or in plenty. And we shall know that for ourselves when, by Grace, God blesses us in a piece of bread and a sip of wine and a moment of sacred silence. Amen.