Austwick Harvest Festival
23 September 2018
The devil met a food supplier, hungry for profits, and said to him, ‘Why don’t you substitute horsemeat for beef?’ And the supplier said, ‘That sounds like a profitable idea, I’ll give it a try’.
Then the devil showed a retail executive all the world’s kingdoms, saying, ‘I will give you all this power and glory, if you do things my way, exploiting the land and the poor to maximise your profits.’ And the executive said, ‘Show me the contract, I’ll get our lawyers to approve it straightaway’.
Then in a supermarket, the devil said to the customers, ‘If you wholeheartedly consume food full of additives, fat, sugar, and calories, fear nothing, for the angels of God will protect you from cancer, heart disease, obesity and tooth decay.’ And they said, ‘I believe you, here’s my loyalty card’.
The temptations of Jesus in the wilderness we still succumb to today: manipulating nature for our own gain, thus troubling our delicate relationship with the earth; ceaselessly pursuing power and authority, wealth and status, troubling our delicate relationship with others; and believing that however heedless our lifestyle we will flourish, troubling our delicate relationship with God.
But if we think the earth, that others, and that we ourselves belong to God - who has given us life all its beauty and wonder, to look after it and celebrate it - then we will treat the earth, ourselves and others with reverence.
A gathering of young Christians and Jews got together to look at the scriptures to see how they addressed the ecological issues of today. As a result they rewrote the Ten Commandments, beginning:
I am the Lord your God who have created heavens and earth. Know that you are my partner in creation; therefore, take care of the air, water, earth, plants and animals, as if they were your brothers and sisters. [2]
It’s astonishing to think of ourselves as partners with God in the work of tending creation, and to think of ourselves as being blood-relatives to all the other creatures as well as to all other human beings. Astonishing: and humbling too.
But God’s own words, from scripture, go even further than that, even deeper, when Jesus says, ‘I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine-grower, and you … you are the branches.’
Our relationship with God is organic. Our connection with Christ is physical. He can be seen at work in the world through the life of nature; but he has created us so that he can also be seen at work in the world through us, that we are the means through which he bears fruit on earth and in all its relationships. You might like to spend some time contemplating that thought. You may like to spend a lifetime contemplating that thought…
For the work we do - on our farms, with our hands, in our homes, at our workstations, is nothing less than us, taking part in God’s endless work of creation. The work of daily life; the work of being alongside others. If this is God’s world we’re in, then our faithful daily activity is us, working out our God-given ‘vocation’.
Harvest-time invites us to rejoice in that ‘old and honourable idea (of vocation)… that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted.’ [3]
Harvest worship invites us to see the world as belonging to God… and ourselves as being deeply embedded in all the goodness that implies.
Notes
[1] This Harvest Festival sermon is based in part on a talk given at Liverpool Bluecoat School in 2002 and in part on The temptations of Jesus and the horsemeat scandal, first preached in Devon in 2013.
[2] Ten Commandments reference by Barbara Wood, in Geoffrey Duncan (ed), Dare to Dream: Prayer and Worship Anthology from Around the World.
[3] Wendell Berry at Brainyquote.
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