Tag: harvest festival

Harvest Festival: A Harvest of Restoration, Joel 2:21-32

Joel 2:21-32

Many years ago, listeners to Radio 4’s Sunday morning service choked on their corn flakes when the minister leading a harvest festival announced: “And now, the children will bring up their gifts.”

I am glad I never witnessed that!

At harvest festival, there are certain themes that we regularly celebrate – not least the goodness of God in creation but also God’s concern for justice, because not everyone receives what they need from the harvest of the land. These are important themes to consider, even if harvest festival as we know it was merely the invention of a Victorian clergyman in the Cornish village of Morwenstow in 1843. In case you ever need to know it for a quiz, his name was Robert Hawker.

But our reading from Joel prompts another harvest theme, and that is restoration.

The context of Joel’s prophecy is that a locust swarm has invaded the Holy Land, devastating all the crops, and leaving the people facing starvation. Joel says that this is a warning from God to call the people back to him in repentance, although it’s hard to be sure what particular sins have been committed. Part of their returning to the Lord includes fasting – which they may already have been doing involuntarily due to the food shortages.

But now it appears God has heard their cry for mercy. Crops are growing again and he has driven out the locusts. In this context we hear the wonderful words of restoration in our reading. The people truly have reason to give thanks for having crops to harvest again.

Moreover, Joel tells the people that God’s restoration project is bigger and better than they ever asked or imagined. What does it include?

Firstly and most obviously, restoration of the land:

We hear that once again there will be pasture for the wild animals, autumn and spring rains, threshing-floors filled with grains, and vats overflowing with new wine and oil, and that these are reasons for rejoicing, not fear (verses 21-24).

We are used to supporting charities that help with disaster relief – whether it’s earthquakes, floods, droughts, or war. But in the popular mind we are often only thinking about helping those who are in trouble there and then. Yet many of these organisations will want to be in the affected areas for the long haul. Providing temporary accommodation, food, and medical help is only the beginning for them. They know there is a rebuilding job to be done. It’s not for nothing that ‘All We Can’ used to be called the ‘Methodist Relief and Development Fund’.

So, for example, if I visit the ‘Stories’ section of Tearfund’s website, then yes, I will find one account of emergency relief in South Sudan following floods. Homes, infrastructure, and farming land have all been destroyed, and relief workers are trying to bring in temporary shelters, food supplies, and clean water.

But I will also find the story of a small church in Bangladesh that is transforming its village. Many of the people come from lower castes. One consequence of this is they are often not well educated. Only menial jobs are available. But the outcomes from this church of just 33 members studying the Bible have been listed by their pastor:

‘We have seen financial development along with spiritual development.

‘We don’t only do church-based work, we also do various other things outside of the church. For example, we plant trees on behalf of the church. We also do awareness work about hygiene – not only in our congregation, but we also discuss these things in our community. We teach health awareness about toilet issues, such as having to wear sandals, what to do before going to the toilet, and having to use soap after coming back from the toilet.’

Their communication with the government has led to 24 new homes being built. With a water supply that contains toxic levels of arsenic and iron, they have built a water pump. They soon plan to campaign against child marriage.

All this is because they believe in a God who restores the land. God wants to make his creation new. If a small church of poor, uneducated people can make such a difference in their village, what can we do? By all means let us give our harvest gifts, but can we not be more ambitious than that?

Secondly, we have restoration of the people:

In verses 25-27 we hear that God will repay the people for the years the locusts have eaten. They will eat again and praise God. Twice he says, ‘never again will my people be shamed.’

There is a human toll to disasters: not just things like hunger, but also shame. Given that Israel had suffered the plague of locusts due to some unspecified sin, there will have been shame at the wrongdoing. The Gospel says that in Jesus God restores us from the shame of our sins. Those burdens we have carried are ones we can lay down at the foot of the Cross and find them burned up by the holy love of God. The blood of Jesus deals with them – for in the Old Testament blood symbolises life and Jesus replaces our shame with his life.

But shame is not limited to the guilty. Tragically, it is also felt by those who have been sinned against. If you have been following the news story about the monstrous abuse perpetrated by the late Mohamed al-Fayed, the former owner of Harrod’s this week, and if you have heard the stories of women coming forward to say they were raped by him, then time and time again you will have heard those women say that one of the reasons they said nothing for years was their sense of shame. Abusers control their victims by seeking to transfer shame onto them.

And here the Gospel is again by definition Good News for the shamed. Jesus is as much in the business of healing the broken as he is of forgiving sinners. We know that from the Gospels, don’t we?

Many years ago, I read a book called ‘The Locust Years’. It is the story of a woman called Jacqui Williams who went travelling in the United States but became caught up in the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church – the cult popularly known as the Moonies. They took over her life, reducing her to an existence of little more than selling flowers, sweets, and trinkets on the street to support the cult’s income. When she had to return to the UK to renew her visa, she thankfully found faith in Jesus and her new-found Christian faith was her liberation. The book is called ‘The Locust Years’ after this very passage in Joel with God’s promise to restore the years the locusts have eaten – in her case, her time with the Moonies.

The Christian Church is about the business of seeing people restored in Christ. And if we’re not about that, we barely deserve the name ‘church.’ What used to be called ‘the harvest of souls’ is the restoration of people through the love of God in Christ. It’s why John Wesley said we had no business except the saving of souls.

Thirdly and finally, we have the restoration of all things:

Here we’re moving to the famous verses at the end of the reading (28-32) about God pouring out his Spirit on all flesh – sons and daughters, old, young, and servants alike. And I hope you’re thinking, ‘I hear that every year on Pentecost Sunday, because Peter quotes it in his sermon.’

It’s set in the middle of language about ‘the great and dreadful day of the LORD’ and contains references to the sun being turned to darkness and the moon to blood. The nature of this language is clearly not literal. After references to the sun going dark and the moon turning to blood, do not expect someone like Carol Kirkwood or Elizabeth Rizzini or Tomasz Schafernaker to pop up and add, ‘These will be followed by sunny intervals and scattered showers.’

So we’re in ‘end times’ language here, but that doesn’t mean a short countdown to the Second Coming. We have been in the end times since the Resurrection, and that’s one reason this language occurs at Pentecost. God’s kingdom has come and is coming, but it’s overlapping with the old order of things.

Therefore, God’s goal of ‘making all things new’ with a new creation that includes new heavens, a new earth, and a new Jerusalem that we read about in Revelation 21 doesn’t just all pop up at the end of history as we know it. That stuff begins now. Salvation and deliverance in every form have begun.

Hence, even now God wants to bring restoration in every way. And we the church are his agents of transformation. You name it, God wants to do it. The restoring of relationships with him. The restoring of relationships between people. The restoring of our broken relationship with creation. The restoring of the body. The restoring of a just and peaceful society. All these (and probably more!) are the many and varied harvests of restoration which God desires.

Naturally, not all of these things will come in all their fulness before Jesus appears to wrap things up. Don’t we all have the agonised experience of unanswered prayer? But let’s go for as much as we can get. Let’s not give up in despair, because some things have gone wrong. Let’s set out on this wonderful ministry of restoration that we have been given as the people of God. With the help of the Holy Spirit who is poured out on us, as these verses from Joel say, let’s confront the brokenness of this old order with the ministry of restoration that Jesus began and entrusted to us.

Who knows how much of a harvest we might see?

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Harvest: May The Peoples Praise You (Psalm 67)

Psalm 67

One thing it’s not worth asking me when you arrive at church on a Sunday is, “Did you hear the morning service on Radio 4?” because I never listen to it.

But I do love the story of the harvest festival they broadcast many years ago, where the presenter rather unfortunately explained, “During the next hymn the children are going to bring up their gifts.”

I wouldn’t have liked to have cleared up that mess!

Actually, let me amend my words. Anyone can have a ‘harvest festival’, but Christians can have a ‘harvest thanksgiving.’ The world around us can celebrate harvest by having a festival, but as Christians we have Someone to thank for the harvest.

So I rather like referring to ‘harvest thanksgiving’ rather than ‘harvest festival.’ Although I don’t always remember.

Psalm 67 is full of thanksgiving. The people are exhorted to praise, gladness, and joy in response to God’s blessing in so many ways.

I see three areas in this Psalm for praise and thanksgiving, and all are relevant to a Christian celebration of harvest.

Firstly, thanksgiving for the harvest of salvation:

1 May God be gracious to us and bless us
    and make his face shine on us—
2 so that your ways may be known on earth,
    your salvation among all nations.

So often in the New Testament, and especially in the parables of Jesus, harvest is used as a metaphor for God taking the initiative to offer his grace and love to the human race. If you recall a few of the parables, you will recognise the agricultural context of them. Seeds, plants growing, gathering in the crops, the harvest itself. And so on. Jesus took images from the harvest to talk about what the Psalmist here calls God’s ways and his salvation.

Sometimes we only celebrate the physical, material harvest (which is a good thing in itself) but Jesus and the Psalmist would have us also give thanks for lives made new by the grace of God and people learning to walk in his ways.

I rarely hear this in Methodism. Have we forgotten this? Or is it that in aging and declining churches we have experienced the joy of people finding new life in Christ and following him so rarely that we have forgotten how to do this?

Perhaps we look on with envy at some of the numerically big and growing churches when God would have us celebrate and give thanks for what he is doing there.

But when the occasions come along in our orbit, let us not forget to give thanks for God’s life-giving and renewing work.

In my last circuit, one of the churches used to host an Iranian church on a Sunday afternoon. Sadly, it folded when the pastor retired and they couldn’t find a successor. The members dispersed to other Iranian congregations and around the UK.

One Sunday morning, a familiar face from that congregation turned up at the usual morning service, and had a friend with him, whom he introduced to us afterwards. He and the friend had been flat-sharing, but now a refugee agency had transferred him to our area, where he was living in a flat above a pizza takeaway.

This man knew very little English, but he came every week and also joined in some midweek activities. He had had to flee from Iran as a political asylum seeker, having opposed the government. He had to leave his wife and young son back there. He didn’t know when escaping that his wife was pregnant with their second son.

We supported his application for asylum and one day he asked to be baptised. I met him, along with a church member who had learned the Farsi language of Iran. We asked him why he was seeking baptism. He explained that he was so bowled over by Jesus, by his incomparable teaching such as the Sermon on the Mount, and by the way he treated women, which was so different from what he saw in Islam.

Oh, and one other thing. That second child whom he had only ever seen on Skype on his mobile phone had gone down with a mystery illness that the doctors couldn’t cure. He had asked us to pray for his little boy one Sunday after worship. Unbeknown to us, the boy had been completely healed after those prayers and before there was any further intervention from the doctors.

Jesus wasn’t a theory to our friend anymore. He was real, and he wanted to follow him. I baptised him on Easter Day.

When things like this happen, we give thanks for the harvest of salvation. May God trust us with may more.

Secondly, thanksgiving for the harvest of justice:

3 May the peoples praise you, God;
    may all the peoples praise you.
4 May the nations be glad and sing for joy,
    for you rule the peoples with equity
    and guide the nations of the earth.
5 May the peoples praise you, God;
    may all the peoples praise you.

Maybe this is more familiar to us at harvest. We know that millions of people in our world do not have what they need due to injustices, and so we campaign for justice. It’s clear from this psalm that God loves justice. He rules the people with equity and guides the nations of the earth.

This is why organisations like the Trussell Trust food banks do not only bring short-term relief to people in crisis, they also campaign for government policies that will help the poorest in our society.

This is why All We Can describes itself as both a relief and a development movement. They promote self-help for people in poverty, including conquering illiteracy. They support another project that campaigns for human rights in rural areas, where people have been left in poverty thanks to the work of major mining companies.

Or take an organisation that is dear to my heart, Tear Fund. Yes, they partner with local churches and organisations to bring relief to people who suffer when there are major disasters, like floods and earthquakes, but they do so much more. They are campaigning hard for the development of an international treaty on plastic pollution. Why? To quote one short paragraph from their website:

We’re facing mountains of plastic pollution. 2 billion people have no safe way to dispose of rubbish, and it’s people in poverty who are suffering the worst impacts of this rubbish problem. They are forced to live and work among piles of waste, which is making them sick, releasing toxic fumes, flooding communities and causing up to a million deaths each year.

When our God promises to rule with equity and guide the nations of the earth, and when we know he is doing that as part of his plan to make all things new, then it is a Christian responsibility for us not only to relieve poverty but to campaign against the causes.

And when we see some victories, let us again give thanks.

Thirdly and finally, thanksgiving for the harvest of the fields:

6 The land yields its harvest;
    God, our God, blesses us.
7 May God bless us still,
    so that all the ends of the earth will fear him.

And now the most familiar of all harvest themes, the one we think about when we sing the hymns, even if more people live in an urban setting these days and are more detached from the means by which food is produced. We raise the song of harvest home, we plough the fields and scatter, or imagine ourselves doing so. We decorate our churches with food and grain.

It’s a good thing to give thanks for God’s material provision for us. It reminds us that Christianity is not just concerned with the soul and the spiritual. Ours is a faith in a Creator God. Ours is a faith in a God who raised his Son bodily from death. He cares about his creation and wants to restore it from its brokenness. So the next time someone tells you that Christians shouldn’t poke their noses into material and political things, tell them they have no right to celebrate harvest festival.

Harvest celebrates the God who in his fatherly goodness takes care of his children and is outraged when some humans deny that provision to others. He is the God who does not want us to need to worry about having the basic essentials of life, who has entrusted the human race with the stewardship of this planet, and when it is mismanaged, he calls on us to change our ways.

Food banks aren’t the only way we show this. The local parish church where we lived in the last circuit ran a ‘community fridge’, which took donations of food the supermarkets weren’t going to be able to sell because it was soon to go out of date. Anyone, regardless of their economic status, could come and help themselves, so that the food could be used for what it was made for, rather than wasted. Which is an interesting thought in this county, where there appears to be no specific provision for food recycling.

One of my churches took food from the local Tesco Express that they couldn’t sell and repurposed it at coffee mornings, including leaving some out free of charge on a table for anyone in need. Several widows on limited incomes attended those coffee mornings and benefited.

In a wasteful world, these are reasons for gratitude towards our loving heavenly Father.

Conclusion

So the harvest is wide and broad, encompassing salvation, justice and material provision. Therefore our thanksgiving and our consequent actions shall surely also be wide in their scope.

No wonder Saint Ambrose said,

“No duty is more urgent than that of returning thanks.”

Maybe it’s the poet and parson George Herbert who summed up our harvest response:

“Thou hast given me so much … Give me one thing more, a grateful heart.”

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Harvest Sermon: Reversing the Curse (Genesis 8:15-22)

A brief apology for omitting one technical step in my set-up before recording the video this week which led to the focus being on my bookshelves and not on my face. I didn’t have time to re-shoot. However, you may consider it an improvement!

Genesis 8:15-22

If I turned up this morning with all three volumes of The Lord Of The Rings, opened one of them at random, and read to you about the battle of Isengard, you might think it was interesting but how much sense would it make to you?

If you saw on the stage a scene from Romeo and Juliet where the two lovers are professing their devotion to each other but you knew nothing about the hostility between the Montagus and the Capulets, what meaning would you draw?

And if the first instalment you ever watched of Eastenders was Dirty Den serving divorce papers on his wife Angie in a Christmas Day episode one year, might you ask yourself, ‘Well, what led to that?’

These things don’t make much sense on their own, do they?

Yet that’s exactly how we often treat the Bible in church. It’s why I like to preach on a sequence of readings from the same book if I can. That’s why many of my sermons and videos in recent weeks have been from the Gospel according to Mark.

But on a special occasion like today we have to break the pattern and it means taking a passage out of nowhere. If only this week’s reading from Mark had been suitable!

Now you will recognise some of the context of Genesis 8 immediately. You will realise this is the end of the Flood, and that’s useful for understanding these verses, but we’ll need to set it in a wider story. This passage makes more sense in the context of what has already happened earlier in Genesis, and in the context of the great story that all the books of the Bible in their vast diversity combine to tell.

Putting it in that wider context, I’m calling this story of harvest and other good things one of ‘Reversing The Curse.’

The key reference here is not so much Genesis 6, where the story of the flood begins, although that is relevant. The big connection is with Genesis 3, where Adam and Eve fail to follow the terms and conditions on the apple and the tree of life. That poetic story of human sinfulness contains references to the damage that sin causes. It isn’t just that it fractures our relationship with God, it also damages our relationships with other human beings and so men dominate women (which only comes in the curse). Our connection with the wider creation also takes a hit. We see hard, physical toil at work as one sign of the curse, and we see the pain of childbirth as another. In the words of Bob Dylan, ‘Everything is broken.’

The flood in Genesis shows then that the problems in the Garden of Eden have escalated to the whole human race. This is the point where wickedness is in such a frenzy that God resorts to drastic measures.

But now, after the flood, God expresses his deepest desire, which is for salvation rather than judgment, and it’s a salvation that reverses all the curses of sin – the breaks with God, one another, work, family, and creation. And so we heard at the end of the reading,

21 The Lord smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: ‘Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done.

22 ‘As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest,
cold and heat,
summer and winter,
day and night
will never cease.’

Despite ‘every inclination of the human heart [being] evil from childhood’ God will seek to save people from sin. One day it won’t be Noah’s burnt offerings of clean animals and clean birds (verse 20), God will take sacrifice for sin into his own being in the Person of his Son.

The brokenness between human beings is something God longs to heal, too, and we get a fresh start in this story with Noah’s family. They are far from perfect, and soon even righteous Noah himself causes embarrassment for his sons by getting drunk.

And as God shows this preference for salvation, the other ruptured parts of existence are up for healing, even if they are not mentioned here. If work now brings toil and pain, then it is a Christian call to work to heal that. Right now in golf, the Ryder Cup is underway between the USA and Europe. Samuel Ryder, who donated the gold trophy, was a Christian entrepreneur, who pioneered paying sick pay to his employees, not wanting anyone to go penniless because they were too unwell to work.[1]

Other Christian business founders have done similar things down the years. You’ve probably heard the stories about George Cadbury and Joseph Rowntree, but you can add to that list people such as Sir William Hartley the jam-maker, William Colgate, Henry Heinz, Henry Crowell the co-founder of Quaker Oats, and in more recent years Anthony Rossi, the founder of the Tropicana drinks company. All said that their Christian values should imbue their businesses and make things good and honest for their employees and their customers.[2]

The response to the curse of pain in childbirth mentioned in Genesis 3 is found in many ways, as Christians get involved in medicine, in pregnancy crisis centres, and in adoption and fostering agencies.

But by now you’re probably thinking, ‘This is all very well but I came to a harvest festival! Where’s the harvest theme in all this?’ It’s there at the climax of the reading. Verse 22 again:

22 ‘As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest,
cold and heat,
summer and winter,
day and night
will never cease.’

Harvest is all of a piece with this. God with his desire for salvation is not content to look at a broken world where people do not have enough to eat, whether it is a crisis, ongoing unemployment, steeply rising energy bills, or the damage of climate change, especially in the developing world.

And that calls all of us to involvement. We cannot leave things as they are. We cannot tolerate unjust suffering and the treatment of human beings as just some kind of collateral damage in a wider political project.

Remember, God’s final word is not judgment but salvation. And salvation is not just a private spiritual knees-up between me and God, it is the remaking of the whole broken creation. So God lays it out that this means a good and steady source of food for all (seedtime and harvest), facilitated by a balanced climate (cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night).

Therefore, when we bring our harvest gifts today and we dedicate them to Woking Food Bank, we are not just saying that we are grateful we can enjoy our food. We are saying that, but we are saying much more.

As we have laid our gifts before the Lord this morning, I believe we are saying this: we will not rest while people do not have the harvests that we have. We will give. We will pray. We will campaign and we will act. And what we shout for in the larger world we will show in our smaller worlds, by our acts of hospitality.

Because the will of God is one where not only the rich can feast, but that all can be invited to the feast of the kingdom. Every time we come to Holy Communion we look backwards to the Cross where we are put right with God, forwards to the wedding feast of the Lamb, and to the present where the Holy Spirit enables us to become junior partners in the work of God.

And within all that, harvest festival is a pledge of allegiance to the kingdom of God. As the Holy Spirit helps us to co-operate with the will of God, we promise our own parts in the remaking of the world:

  • Our witness to the redeeming love of God in Christ that brings sinners into fellowship with him;
  • Our experience of reconciliation with one another which we put into practice to help heal other relationships;
  • Our efforts to return purpose and wholeness to the drudgery of work;
  • Our concern to be pro-life, not just from conception, but all the way to the grave;
  • Our campaigning and our lifestyle that seek to ensure all have a climate in which they can grow a healthy harvest.

For that is where the divine promise we read today of seedtime and harvest, summer and winter belongs in the great story of God – in a story in which our God is making all things new.

[1] https://licc.org.uk/resources/the-ryder-and-solheim-cups-golfing-for-gods-glory/

[2] https://issuu.com/salvationarmyuk/docs/wc_15_august_2020_web

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