Joint Benefice Harvest Thanksgiving Service
Bratton Clovelly, 30/9/2012
Genesis 1, Psalm 8, and the following verses from Leviticus 25, 26, 31, Numbers 35, Exodus 20, Deuteronomy 5
The Lord commands, ‘The land shall keep a Sabbath to the Lord; every seventh day and every seventh year shall be a Sabbath for the Lord; you will neither sow your fields nor prune your vineyard. If you obey my laws and keep my commandments, then I will reward you with rains in their season, and the land shall yield her produce and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit. And I will give peace in the land. If you remember that the land is sacred and you do not pollute nor defile the land on which you dwell, if you allow your beasts to rest and respect them and your servants, then you will prosper.’
‘Remember that the land is sacred’ - The idea that we walk on sacred ground is as counter-cultural today as the idea that every seventh day should be a Sabbath. Counter-cultural because the prevailing culture in which we live, driven by the unrelenting demands of capital, regards the land and time itself as resources to be mined, exploited, to exhaustion.
But when we look within, many of us are uneasy about this utilitarian view of land and time and life. Many of us feel deep within, a spirit in which life and time and land are special, are sacred. Perhaps that’s what brings you here today, for our harvest services and celebrations are special spaces in our year where we can voice our agreement that this land through which we move, this land on which we tread, is special to us, is sacred.
There are many reasons why we feel this way. This land is sacred to us because it is wonderful and beautiful in our eyes; it is sacred to us because events have taken place on it which have deeply affected our lives. The land is sacred to us because on it we have built special places in which to worship and offer thanksgiving; the land is sacred to us because in this soil we have buried our dead.
On high ground all around us our ancestors lie. At Patchcott Cross to the north of here and high on Sourton Tors, and in many other nearby places, are barrows 5,000 years old, reminders of a time when we relied on the protection of the ancestors and revered the high places where we laid them, ensuring that they would keep a watchful eye on us. More recent generations have laid our loved ones close to us, in churchyards, keeping them at the heart of our life of faith and eternal hope, and in wild flower meadows or woodlands today people return their departed back to nature - valuing the earth and their footprint on it. The land is sacred to us because in all these different ways we have buried our dead here.
The land also contains the mass graves of medieval plagues and the animal burial grounds of the recent Foot and Mouth crisis. And it carries other memories - better ones - of generations of farming in the one place; of significant journeys made often or perhaps just one special time. The land is sacred to us because events have taken place on it which have deeply affected our lives: we hold dear the places where we first met our loved one, where we enjoyed our schooling or learned our trade. We hold dear the places which are most beautiful to us, which constantly rewaken in us a sense of the sublime - the high moors, the rivers, the forests, the sea shores.
And because the land is sacred to us we have built special places in which to worship and offer thanksgiving. The English countryside is full of churches built ‘to command respect and awe and draw the eye to the heavens’, as one writer puts it [1]. And a theologian, Martyn Percy, says that to the English people,
... the [parish] church itself is a sacrament - stone, glass and other materials, not to mention people - ordinary profane materials that God nevertheless blesses, imbues with his grace, beauty and holiness, and allows to be an outward sign that points to a spiritual and inward grace. The local church, just like the bread and the wine, can be God’s chosen broken material that reveals just something of his love for all. [2]
Our Methodist chapels and Quaker Meeting Houses mean the same to us - as do our synagogues, mosques and temples also - they are signs of the sacred in our land, we build them and maintain them and come together in them at times like this to affirm that which is very deep within us, our sense of the sacredness of land and time and life.
At the heart of the sense of the sacred character of the land is that it is not ours by right, it is a gift to us. At Harvest time we give voice to this in our songs, and our scriptures phrase what we feel in our hearts is the deeper story of our land:
And God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. And God saw that it was good. (Genesis 1)
We remember that the land is sacred when we sense that it is given to us - by One who created it with care and generosity and joy. And when we take it as a gift, it fills us with a spirit which desires to treat the land with care and generosity and joy.
Our Harvest gatherings speak of something which endures - in the annual renewal of seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night; in the land which is special to us, a landscape full of memory and history and spirit - what holds these things together and endures is the One who gives them to us and whose care and generosity and joy we celebrate and share.
Notes
[1] Sue Clifford and Angela King, England in Particular, Churches, p.89
[2] Martyn Percy, Shaping the Church: the Promise of Implicit Theology, p.63
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