Sermons
30th Sept 2007 - Harvest Festival
In my mind Harvest thanksgiving has two complimentary sets of imagery associated with it; one Biblical and one popular, and both in one way or another agricultural. The popular set of themes is all turnips and marrows, corn dollies and (in the city) tins and packets. We give thanks to God for the great gifts of the created order and wonder if perhaps we ought to be sharing those gifts around a bit better. On the positive side we bring to mind bucolic scenes of farmers gathering in the harvest, and in singing ‘We plough the field and scatter’ we all have that sense of being part of a once largely agricultural society, and we may be invaded by thoughts of moving to the country. On the negative side, we remember that humans seem to be wreaking havoc on the limited resources available to them, that the creation is being subjected to abuse, and also remember that being a farmer is a jolly hard job these days even in the West. Nevertheless there is a warm autumnal glow to the popular and agricultural set of images for Harvest thanksgiving. And this side of harvest imagery is exemplified in the words of our first hymn ‘All the world is God’s own field, fruit unto his praise to yield’ with its cheery theological counterpart ‘All be safely gathered in free from sorrow, free from sin’. All will be gathered, all will be freed from sorrow and sin.
By contrast the Biblical set of images about harvest, which run through the Old Testament particularly in the prophetic books, and which are put in characteristically dramatic and violent form by the writer of the Apocalypse, is all about God’s judgement on the world, about a harvest that will separate the wheat from the chaff, a harvest in which the sharp sickle of the Lord will mow down his people; the tares will be cast into the fire and the grapes be crushed in the winepress of the wrath of God. In fact so distasteful is this last image that it is now removed from the second reading for today. Our first hymn has the bad news as well as the good news in its much less jolly stanza ‘Give his angels charge at last, in the fire the tares to cast’.
These two sets of images are not very easy to combine. So which set of images are we to have in our minds today? The vengeance of the angry God seeking out the time-wasters and malcontents in order to harvest them and burn them up with his fury, or the extension of the harmless pastoral idyll as an allegory of the nature of God?
One difficulty with harvest imagery working analogically for God’s dealing with us is that we are a bit more complex in design than wheat and tares. The Christian notion of God’s judgement (often expressed n terms of harvest in the Bible) assumes that being human includes, normally, the possibility of being responsive to God and being able to act as a moral agent. Indeed, the idea of God’s vengeance wouldn’t work at all unless as humans we were aware of the emotions connected with guilt and shame. Repentance only works through acknowledgement of wrong-doing. And it is because of this that Christian notions of judgement are firmly connected with the idea of redemption. Judgement both this world and at the end of all things is to do with a presentation of oneself before the full truth, it is about coming to see things in their proper relation about bringing ourselves before God seeking purification. [In mediaeval theology this quite proper desire to be ‘enlightened’ by exposure to the truth was distorted into such theological obscenities as the assumption that unbaptised babies would go to purgatory for their sins.]
Christian theories of judgement should be about joy, not about guilt, they should paint a picture of responding in joy to a God of abundance, a profligate creator in whom we should find contentment, not anxiety. And not only are we to avoid spending our lives worrying what God is likely to want to do with us when he gets his hands on us, (and of course he already has his hands on us) but neither are we to fill our lives with anxiety about our day-to-day needs; the words of Jesus as recorded by the community of St Matthew:
Jesus said to his disciples: ‘Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?
Jesus’ words are a reflection on the primacy of God and he also calls for, and in his life models, an absolute trust and faith in God, and for us this must be not so much because of whatever blessings may come our way, food, clothing, long-life, health, but because we learn about God’s providential care for the world by letting go of our anxiety for these things, indeed if our whole activity and dominating purpose is rooted in survival and prosperity we will end up the most impoverished of all people. Our Father in heaven knows we have need of food and clothing but if we allow these things to dominate our lives they can become fetishes and idols standing between us and God.
By contrast our lives will become rich indeed if our activity and purpose are focused on seeking God’s will and allowing the needs of establishing God’s kingdom to seep into our actions. Jesus does not advocate inactivity and disengagement from the world but he shows that unless our activity is rooted in a trust of God’s activity we will be perpetually anxious and perpetually unsatisfied.
So perhaps the two sets of imagery about the harvest are not as mutually exclusive as they might have appeared. If to experience God’s judgement is to know him as fully as he knows us, to brought into that greater light where our actions are seen against the great backdrop of the story of the divinely created order, then perhaps we can approach that judgement, that enlightening judgement which will purify us of all sin and sorrow, perhaps we can approach that with joy and hope.
I went to visit a friend a few weeks ago, a friend who is very poorly but full of life. He told me about an experience he had had when he was a young man, thirty or more years ago. He had been in a terrible car crash and had been rushed unconscious to hospital. Given little chance of survival he was operated on but had a heart attack on the operating table. It took about two minutes to restart his heart. During that time he had a classic ‘Near Death Experience’, he was aware of traveling at unimaginable speed, aware also of a sense of arrival, of the presence of others, but above all he remembered being aware of two things, an incredible light, brighter than anything you could picture but not dazzling, and aware of a deep sense of being at home, of being loved, of being fully known. And in common with many others who have had these experiences he felt an utter sense of wretched pain on realizing that he would have to leave that place and come back. If we want an image or paradigm for the Christian understanding of judgement, there it is, ‘All be safely gathered in, free from sorrow, free from sin’.
A prayer of John Donne:
Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening
into the house and gate of heaven,
to enter into that gate and dwell in that house,
where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light;
no noise nor silence, but one equal music;
no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession;
no ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity;
in the habitations of your glory and dominion, world without end.