Sermon by the Very Rev. Andrew Swift

Harvest as a concept – Harvest Festivals going back to pagan times, giving thanks to the Gods for a successful Harvest. Jewish tradition of Succoth, festival of booths, also a first fruits festival. The idea that praying, or sacrificing, or basically getting on the right side of the deity who had been assigned weather and growth of things, was a good thing.

Lammas, the load mass, is a long standing early-August festival from pre-reformation times (still a Scottish quarter day, rents due, servants hired or dismissed and ministers’ stipends due) Modern Christian harvest festivals really only date back to the mid 1840, in Cornwall, when the pagan-ish harvest revels of the villages were wrapped into something much more acceptable: a recapturing of giving thanks to God for his grace!

The prayer book still has prayers to God for good weather and a good harvest – thanks God for the abundance that we receive. Is this just falling back into our pagan forebears’ ways? Asking that a deity who might arbitrarily blight us changes their mind?

The gospel, one of those set for today, seems slightly odd for harvest: the healing of 10 lepers. The account unfolds: 10 lepers approach Jesus, wishing this charismatic itinerant healer to make them clean. Which he duly does. They go to be pronounced clean, as the law dictates, but one of them, a gentile, returns to give thanks to Jesus. The sting in the tail, as ever, is that the non-Jew is the one who sees the divine in Jesus.

This is an account about thanksgiving. The leper, who is cleansed by the grace of God, returns to give thanks and worship his divine deliverer. People have sometimes wondered what happened to the other nine lepers? Did they become leprous again, because ‘their faith had NOT made them well?’ The gospel doesn’t tell us, but based on other miraculous accounts, I think we can assume not. They had been healed, and that was that: that is how Jesus worked. The one who came back, who saw past the immediate benefits that he had received, the cure that would allow him to re-enter his society: he had a deeper encounter with Jesus than the other nine. He encountered God fully, intellectually and emotionally.

The gospel account speaks to our harvest celebrations. We are not praying to the god in control of the weather or the germination of seeds. We are giving thanks for God’s grace, in what we receive (the harvest) and what we are able to give (how we are harvested). The tradition of bringing gifts, from a first fruits to God offering, has become a way of helping others, stocking foodbanks. The grace that we have received in our lives, the grace that we can reflect onwards to others in social action, in Christian witness – this is what we give thanks for.

So how can we give thanks for grace received, and how can we reflect that grace onwards? Up to you to decide. What gifts has God given you? Your very life? Family? The freedom to worship as you see fit, in a free country? Or the grit and resilience to survive situations that are unbearably dreadful, that can seem like tunnels with no light at their end?

The harvest we celebrate today has so many layers: from thanks for food, to God’s grace in times of bounty, to God’s grace in times of emptiness and pain. The nine lepers were healed and rejoiced. The tenth met the living God and was transformed again. Let us pray that the living God will, by grace, transform each of us into God’s harvest.

Amen.