A sermon for harvest evensong - October 6th 2019

New Testament Reading

John 6.25-35

When they found him on the other side of the lake, they said to him, ‘Rabbi, when did you come here?’ ²⁶Jesus answered them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. ²⁷Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.’ ²⁸Then they said to him, ‘What must we do to perform the works of God?’ ²⁹Jesus answered them, ‘This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.’ ³⁰So they said to him, ‘What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing? ³¹Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, “He gave them bread from heaven to eat.” ’ ³²Then Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. ³³For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.’ ³⁴They said to him, ‘Sir, give us this bread always.’

³⁵ Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.

 

COLLECT

Eternal God,

you crown the year with your goodness

and you give us the fruits of the earth

in their season:

grant that we may use them to your glory,

for the relief of those in need

and for our own well being;

through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Amen.

A sermon for Harvest Festival Evensong.

Sunday 6^th October 2019

(With hindsight, I would have flagged this sermon as harvest - past, present and future, then referred to this at intervals...)

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart
   be acceptable to you,
   O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen.

To me the word Harvest evokes all sort of idyllic images, fields of gold shimmering and swaying under a low afternoon sun, of combine harvesters trundling up and down fields on warm, slow days and tractors hauling huge trailer loads of straw down country lanes. Then of services like this, of celebrating the turning of the seasons in a country church surrounded by all good gifts around us.

It’s good for us to pause and to give thanks to God for the blessings of crops and of produce safely gathered in, but I always felt there was more to the season that this, so did I a bit of research, shedding some light on our history and the story of our faith.

So, first of all, where does the word, "Harvest," come from? Well, it’s from an Old English word, “hærf-est,” meaning "autumn" (the season), "harvest-time", or "August".

This festival has deep roots and back in Celtic and Mediaeval times, there used to be three harvest festivals and we have remnants of them all today.

The first was celebrated at the beginning of August, with a festival called Lammas, which is derived from the old English word for, ‘loaf mass,’ when loaves made by farmers from the first grains of the harvest would be blessed and consecrated in church, then split into four pieces to be placed in four corners of the barn, to protect the garnered grain.

The fear of losing a crop just before harvest was very real and The Durham Rites of 970 AD contain prayers said before the harvest was brought in requesting protection in the name of an Archangel Panchiel[1], for example;

Holy Lord, Father omnipotent, eternal God, send forth your Holy Spirit with the Archangel Panchiel that he may defend our crops from worms, from winged things, from demons, from lightning bolts, from all temptations of the devil, by the invocation of your holy name, Jesus Christ, who reigns with the Father and who lives with the Holy Spirit, forever and ever. Amen.

The second festival is on the closest Sunday to the Harvest or Full moon to the autumn equinox. For millennia, it had been observed that day and night were in perfect balance and before the industrial revolution, it became a good time to celebrate and give thanks for the harvest. Fortunately, the rules these days are a bit more relaxed on when we celebrate!

The third and final harvest festival was Samhain, marking the end of the Harvest season. Traditionally on October 31^st and November 1^st, halfway between the autumn and winter solstices.

Over time Samhaim merged with All Souls and All Saints day and then Halloween. Christians have always seen this time as liminal, when the veil between the living and dead was thin and the lives of the dead could be celebrated.

Despite all that history, the Harvest festival we know today, only dates to 1843 when a thanksgiving service for the harvest was held in Morenstow in Cornwall by the Reverend Robert Hawker.

So where does that leave us? In an era when we hardly notice whether crops have failed or not, when we pollute our planet with carbon rich toxins, with plastics which only disintegrate but never decompose, when we pursue personal wealth over the natural wealth we see around us, in each other, in the birds of the air, the fish of the sea and creatures all around us. 

The wealth of our crops, our soils, the fields, the woods and trees. Yet, because this wealth yields no personal profit, it’s a lower priority.

To the community Jesus spoke to in John’s Gospel, bread symbolised wealth. It meant you would live, that you would be able to work, that God had provided.

Jesus, however, wasn’t interested in this. Faith meant you would be provided for, in this life and the next. 

Jesus himself is the bread, the bread of life, and in him, we will never want for anything, and I use the present tense because Jesus says, “For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.’ Jesus as our bread of life is still working out that deep down purpose. 

This is an amazing promise, and there are echoes here of the Lammas bread, blessed to protect the harvest, as Jesus was blessed by his father in heaven.

There are also Eucharistic overtones, of communion bread, symbolising Jesus as the bread if life and interestingly, this passage is the closest we come to a communion narrative in John’s Gospel.

The challenge is learning to trust that Jesus is our bread our life, our spiritual harvest home, and we aren’t the first to learn about trusting Jesus.

Just before this passage in John’s Gospel, at the beginning of chapter 6, Jesus had fed 5000 people in the wilderness, which in Johns Gospel falls at the time of Passover, where he broke bread, gave thanks and distributed it to thousands, then he walked on water to escape the crowds, they followed him and then recalls for the crowd how God provided manna for the Israelites as they searched for the promised land.

The crowd trusted him, it’s why they followed him around the lake, wanting more of this bread of heaven and trusting that Jesus could provide and that the Israelites had learned to trust, because God provided manna. Through faith we too can trust.

So, if Harvest is becoming less significant to us, and through faith, we have eternal life with Jesus, the bread of life, do we still need to celebrate harvest?

It is, of course, good to give thanks for all the gifts we receive, the produce, goods and services, friends and loved one who support us, but I think we can also learn something from our ancestors.

They understood the seasons, the weather and the land they shared. They knew they had to respect the land, or they would suffer a failed crop which could lead to starving that winter.

In some ways we are fortunate not to be so closely aligned with the seasons, our dependence is no longer a daily battle of life and death, for which we give thanks, but we still live in a time of fear.

Scientists have repeatedly warned us about the threat to our planet from global warming, but this can seem abstract and far away. A quick search, and I found lots of information about climate change, sea level changes, air temperature rises, weather patterns changing, extreme weather, deforestation, record temperatures in all sorts of places and melting glaciers.

So, instead of giving thanks for the harvest and God’s good provision, perhaps we need to take a different approach. One of prophesy, lament and repentance.

So: Prophesy, I’ve already mentioned the warnings from our scientists and now our children.

Our remarkable children who are genuinely fearful for the way the planet is changing and are leading the charge for changes to be made so vocally, but then, their very future is at stake.

Lament, for ourselves, for our home, for the way we have abused the planet and the state the planet is in.

This is an interesting idea, because in Genesis chapter 1, verse 28, humankind was given dominion over the earth, to rule and subdue, surely that means we have license to do what we please?

Well, in Genesis 2, verse 15, Adam was asked to work, nurture and watch over the land, all in the spirit of the Garden of Eden, of perfection and in union with God.

I’m not sure that when Genesis was written or Jesus was alive, there was any inkling that the human race, in it’s free will, would learn to burn coal, fossil fuels and split the atom, and one could say that God would know, but once we ate of the tree of knowledge and left the Garden of Eden, we had free will and perhaps haven’t used that freedom as wisely as we could have.

We have used the earth in any way we desired, and we made a mess, and for that we must lament.

What can we do, is anything we do going to make a difference? And why does it matter? The first step is repentance, to no longer deny the truth and instead to accept that the harm which has been done is real.

This matters, at every level, from each of us to global leaders, we all need to find out as much as we can about the science involved and then perhaps accept that wrong has been done and to seek restoration.

Of course, this needs to be at a government and international level to really make a difference, which is why our votes are so important, and while this may sound a bit political, one of the marks of mission issued by the church of England and the Anglican Communion, is, “To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation, and sustain and renew the life of the earth.”

Of course, lament and repentance don’t speak of joy and wonder, and our world is a wonderful place, so I’ll finish with a few words written by a local lad, Laurie Lee, written at harvest time;

The sloping fields and crested beechwoods were bathed in a rich sunlight more radiant than the airs of Greece: apples and pears dropped like gifts into my hands, and the clear stone cottages shone like temples upon their hills and hollows.

For two days I walked through the honey-coloured valleys. As a boy, living in Slad village, harvest festival had always seemed to me to be the crown of the year, an occasion of richness and thanksgiving when one felt closer to the mystery and benevolence of the earth than at any other time.

So on this glittering, chrysanthemum-scented morning, I went eagerly in to the church, seeking the ancient magic I remembered. Meanwhile, the grassy combes and wooded crests of the Stroud valleys do not change, nor their rioting flowers, placid silences, nor the purple distances seen from their hills.

And in spite of all the power and richness of modern life, it is here I most wish to be, where the landscape offers its endless festivals to the eye and to the spirit, perpetual harvests.

May God bless us all this harvest tide. Amen.

At the end

The Lord be with you
and also with you.

Let us bless the Lord
thanks be to God.
 

May the souls of the faithful departed
in the mercy and love of Christ
rest in peace
and rise in glory. Amen.

---

[1] At this point I disappeared down a rabbit hole of research, trying to find out who the archangel Panchiel was, it seems that Panchiel is an Irish or Celtic spelling of Paniel, which means the face of God, also spelt Peniel, which is the name given to the place where Jacob wrestled with God or an Angel. Penuel, is also one of four celestial beings who guard the throne of God and is also the Angel of exorcism’s, which is probably the reason for his use in this prayer, to cast out things which might blight a crop. Like I say, a rabbit hole…

Anyway, Panchiel is an Irish spelling of Paniel, a slightly unorthodox archangelic name meaning face of God (see Peniel, the place where Jacob wrestled with God in Genesis 32:30). Source: https://litteramepandat.wordpress.com/2014/08/08/background-to-aldreds-cat/