‘So I draw a veil over Mr Ramesh who once, on the feast of St Simon and St Jude (Choral Evensong at six, daily services at the customary hour), put make-up on his eyes and bells on his ankles, and naked except for his little belt danced in the back room of the shop with a tambourine’.
Alan Bennett’s Bed Among the Lentils tells the story of Susan, a Yorkshire vicar’s wife who, caught between her husband’s appallingly glib piety and his parishioners’ fervent self-righteousness, turns quietly to drink. She disgraces herself over lunch with the Bishop, collapses while arranging flowers in the chancel, and only finds redemption, rather unpredictably, in the arms of the young Asian shopkeeper, Mr Ramesh, whose sad wonder at her perpetual inebriation steers her towards sobriety.
Why Alan Bennett chooses today’s feast as the date of a particularly memorable encounter between the vicar’s wife and the obliging shopkeeper is unclear. Bennett well remembers the eccentricities of his Anglican upbringing, of course, and it may be that Simon and Jude are simply names he recalls from some far-off Sunday evening spent flicking through the Prayer Book during a dull sermon. Or it may be that he relishes the sonorous resonance of the double celebration’s title, and the delicious contrast that is inexorably drawn between the solemnity of its Choral Evensong and the unlikely liaison that is taking place simultaneously in the upstairs storeroom of a little shop behind the Leeds Infirmary.
However I am enough of a fan of his to suspect that something else is at work. Alan Bennett has a sublime gift for taking the ordinary and making of it something extraordinary: the trams of his boyhood, his father’s butcher’s shop, the hellfire and damnation of his Sunday School, the genteel pretensions of his aunties. In the looking glass of his writing these become the narratives of our own lives and in his words we see ourselves as this remorseless observer of humanity sees us. As we shall see, he could not have chosen a more appropriate feast than today’s. Perhaps it’s a coincidence. Well, perhaps.
It is customary that the Collect for a Saint’s Day should at least name the saint who it honours. It is customary for the lectionary readings for a Saint’s Day to present some edifying glimpse of the said saint’s life and work. Yet cast your eyes over the Collect for today; scan the readings set, and you will find no trace at all of Simon and Jude. There are paeans to saintly virtues, and exhortations to us to imitate them, but the guests of honour are, as it were, absent from their own party.
This may have something to do with the uncertainty of those guests’ identity. They are honoured as Apostles, and both are probably both among the Twelve. Matthew and Mark list Simon ‘the Cananean’ and Luke ‘Simon the Zealot’, which tells us something about Simon’s Israelite nationalism. Jude is listed by Luke as the son of James. Matthew and Mark do not list him: they both name Thaddaeus, or Lebbaeus, instead. Our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters, never fond of untidiness, honour a conglomeration of the two: St Jude Thaddaeus, a compromise of which Anglicans ought to be proud.
What seems beyond controversy is that both Simon and Jude had namesakes among their fellow apostles who were destined for greater fame - or greater infamy - than were they. Simon the Zealot, of course, was to languish in the shadow cast by Simon the Rock; Judas son of James in that cast by Judas Iscariot. The result is that today we honour third-tier apostles, bargain basement apostles, apostles of whom we know nothing but their names. In fact the Church’s nervousness about Judas Iscariot’s sin was such that it robbed the other Judas of even that small dignity, shortening his name and labelling him Jude for all eternity. It is little wonder that the poor man has ended up appearing in the columns of the Daily Telegraph as the patron saint of lost causes.
So why are we here? We have so little to go on, such tiny biographical detail, such tangled historical roots. Does celebrating unknown saints really matter? Ought we not be proclaiming the Gospel instead?
The reason that the saints survived in the Church of England through the rigours of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is that the Reformers saw in them useful role models for the instruction of the faithful. According to this standard, Simon and Jude are less than fit for purpose. We can point to no feats of endurance, no words of wise counsel, no selfless example that might shape our lives of faith. Yet if we honour only those who are of use to us; if we respect only those who give to us; if we celebrate only those who add value to our existence, then we do not see humanity as God sees it. We celebrate Simon and Jude because they are Simon and Jude, our distant and unseen forebears in faith. We need no other reason than that. Perhaps our celebrating them will affect our view of countless others around us, whose names we know, whose names we do not know, yet with whom we share this planet, this city, and this building, who appear to give us nothing.
Perhaps it will also transform our view of what we need to know about one another. We would all want to resist the notion that life in the West in 2007 is cheap, yet I wonder whether our resistance would withstand much examination. The voracious appetite for scandal is such that popular culture parades the lives of its celebrities in stomach-churning detail; the voracious appetite for gratification is such that poor women from Eastern Europe are trafficked in huge numbers to fill London’s brothels; the voracious appetite for global power is such that the blood spilt in its pursuit is fast losing its power to shock us. We constantly presume to know one another, to possess one another, to buy and sell one another. Perhaps our celebrating two names will recall us to the sanctity and the mystery of life; perhaps it will recall us to the holy ground upon which we tread when we approach another human being.
And lastly, perhaps it will also reawaken us to the extraordinary vision of the God served by Simon and Jude, the alchemical God whose touch turns the basest material into the purest gold. It is this God who chooses Simon Zealotes as well as Simon Peter; who chooses Judas of Lost Causes alongside Paul of many Epistles; it is this God who chooses us today; this God, whose choice knows no limits and whose imagination knows no bounds.
‘That’s the thing nobody ever says about God’ says Susan, vicar’s wife and reformed alcoholic ‘…he has no taste at all.’ She means it critically, and after her experience of his church, few would blame her. But in God’s tastelessness is our, and the world’s, salvation.
Amen.
Sunday 28 October 2007,
Isaiah 28: 14-16;
John 15: 17-end.
Monday 29 October 2007
Sunday 21 October 2007
The Twentieth Sunday after Trinity
Direct references to organized sport are few and far between in the Bible. On the morning after the trauma of England’s defeat it is difficult for the preacher who wishes to mark the occasion appropriately to derive either inspiration or authority from the pages of Holy Scripture. Or so you might think. As you know, I enjoy a challenge.
The exhausted players and the commiserating supporters might in fact find painful echoes of their recent experience in not one but two passages from this morning’s readings. That from the Old Testament features one of the most famous wrestling matches in history: Jacob’s epic struggle by the Jabbok. This clash of the titans might serve as a metaphor for yesterday’s heroic efforts, but it’s the story’s ending, which has the victor limping past Penuel rubbing his dislocated hip that will bring a rueful smile to the face of rugby fans everywhere.
The Gospel, on the other hand, seems at first a much less promising seam for us to quarry, concentrating as it does upon a dry legal dispute, many miles away from the Stade de France. Pay attention to the language, though, and the kaleidoscope of interpretation shifts. When the unjust judge utters his frustrated cry ‘because this widow bothers me, I will vindicate her’ he actually uses the language of the boxing ring rather than the language of the law-court. Translated strictly the judge exclaims ‘because this widow keeps blacking my eye, I will vindicate her’. I’ll wager there were a few black eyes on the Eurostar last night.
Perhaps I have just established that with a little ingenuity Scripture can be made to say whatever its reader would like it to say. Yet Paul insists to Timothy that it is all inspired by God and therefore profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction and for training. What are we to make of his stricture, when a text is so obviously open to exploitation and abuse?
I don’t believe it will do simply to abandon the stricture, and with it the texts to which Paul applies it. As catholic Christians we revere the written word of God, the Bible, as we revere the living Word of God, Jesus Christ. The twin foci of the liturgy are the proclamation of the Gospel from among you and the sharing of the sacrament among you. In the Eucharist we expect to meet the living Word in broken bread and wine outpoured, but we expect to do so only after we have met him in the written word, broken and shared just as the Eucharistic bread will be broken and shared.
Scripture cannot be set aside and replaced by our habits and convictions. But if we are to read it well then we need to recall that its reading is primarily a communal activity. It is not something that we do alone. The writings that we regard as holy were created in an era when literacy was limited. Paul’s letters were written to be read aloud when Christians gathered to worship in Corinth, or Rome, or Thessaly. The Gospels were anthologies, collections of sayings and stories of Jesus that were remembered and retold when Christians met. None of them were originally designed for private study, for an individual to pore over in the hope that God’s meaning might thereby be revealed to him or her. And although one of the great achievements of the various Reformations was to make Scripture accessible for exactly that kind of study we need always to be cautious when engaging in it, using a commentary, or notes, or the fellowship of a reading group: anything that links our individual reading into the corporate reading of the Church.
Secondly, it is to be read as a whole. There is a huge danger in doing what I did when I began: in other words, of hiving off little bits here and there and inflating their importance. This is proof-texting. It means our approaching the Bible with a fixed idea and looking for something that will back the idea up. That may be an honest and proper use for the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, but in relation to Scripture it is neither honest not proper, however benign our intentions. In the parable we’ve heard this morning Jesus apparently speaks approvingly of an unjust judge, and even draws a parallel between him and God. I suppose it could be turned into a story that is supportive of corrupt and venal officers of the law. It has to be read alongside the overwhelming testimony of the Bible to God’s identification with the causes of justice and truth.
And thirdly it is to be read – and then read again, and again, and again. ‘When the Son of Man comes’ asks Jesus ‘will he find faith on earth?’ Yet the image of faith that today’s readings creates is very distinct. There is the faith of Jacob, who clings to God throughout the livelong night, Jacob who will not let God go so convinced is he that his unknown assailant is the one who has authority to bless him. There is the faith of Paul, who urges young Timothy to be unfailing in his patience and to teach and preach with urgency both in and out of season. And there is the faith of the widow, who returns to the judge day in, day out, clamouring for her rights and refusing to fall silent when they are denied her.
Faith, in other words, does not look neat and tidy. If it were meant to be so then perhaps God would not have sent us his Son at all; perhaps he would have sent us a tract containing a few lines of neat instruction, rather a young man to whom the startling language and unimaginable stories, the mystery and the glory of the holy book around which we gather bear witness.
Faith is a journey, an unfolding relationship. Faith can be hard work. Perhaps the God in whom we have faith knows us rather better than we do ourselves.
Sunday 21 October 2007,
Genesis 32: 22-31;
2 Timothy 3: 14-4:5;
Luke 18: 1-8
The exhausted players and the commiserating supporters might in fact find painful echoes of their recent experience in not one but two passages from this morning’s readings. That from the Old Testament features one of the most famous wrestling matches in history: Jacob’s epic struggle by the Jabbok. This clash of the titans might serve as a metaphor for yesterday’s heroic efforts, but it’s the story’s ending, which has the victor limping past Penuel rubbing his dislocated hip that will bring a rueful smile to the face of rugby fans everywhere.
The Gospel, on the other hand, seems at first a much less promising seam for us to quarry, concentrating as it does upon a dry legal dispute, many miles away from the Stade de France. Pay attention to the language, though, and the kaleidoscope of interpretation shifts. When the unjust judge utters his frustrated cry ‘because this widow bothers me, I will vindicate her’ he actually uses the language of the boxing ring rather than the language of the law-court. Translated strictly the judge exclaims ‘because this widow keeps blacking my eye, I will vindicate her’. I’ll wager there were a few black eyes on the Eurostar last night.
Perhaps I have just established that with a little ingenuity Scripture can be made to say whatever its reader would like it to say. Yet Paul insists to Timothy that it is all inspired by God and therefore profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction and for training. What are we to make of his stricture, when a text is so obviously open to exploitation and abuse?
I don’t believe it will do simply to abandon the stricture, and with it the texts to which Paul applies it. As catholic Christians we revere the written word of God, the Bible, as we revere the living Word of God, Jesus Christ. The twin foci of the liturgy are the proclamation of the Gospel from among you and the sharing of the sacrament among you. In the Eucharist we expect to meet the living Word in broken bread and wine outpoured, but we expect to do so only after we have met him in the written word, broken and shared just as the Eucharistic bread will be broken and shared.
Scripture cannot be set aside and replaced by our habits and convictions. But if we are to read it well then we need to recall that its reading is primarily a communal activity. It is not something that we do alone. The writings that we regard as holy were created in an era when literacy was limited. Paul’s letters were written to be read aloud when Christians gathered to worship in Corinth, or Rome, or Thessaly. The Gospels were anthologies, collections of sayings and stories of Jesus that were remembered and retold when Christians met. None of them were originally designed for private study, for an individual to pore over in the hope that God’s meaning might thereby be revealed to him or her. And although one of the great achievements of the various Reformations was to make Scripture accessible for exactly that kind of study we need always to be cautious when engaging in it, using a commentary, or notes, or the fellowship of a reading group: anything that links our individual reading into the corporate reading of the Church.
Secondly, it is to be read as a whole. There is a huge danger in doing what I did when I began: in other words, of hiving off little bits here and there and inflating their importance. This is proof-texting. It means our approaching the Bible with a fixed idea and looking for something that will back the idea up. That may be an honest and proper use for the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, but in relation to Scripture it is neither honest not proper, however benign our intentions. In the parable we’ve heard this morning Jesus apparently speaks approvingly of an unjust judge, and even draws a parallel between him and God. I suppose it could be turned into a story that is supportive of corrupt and venal officers of the law. It has to be read alongside the overwhelming testimony of the Bible to God’s identification with the causes of justice and truth.
And thirdly it is to be read – and then read again, and again, and again. ‘When the Son of Man comes’ asks Jesus ‘will he find faith on earth?’ Yet the image of faith that today’s readings creates is very distinct. There is the faith of Jacob, who clings to God throughout the livelong night, Jacob who will not let God go so convinced is he that his unknown assailant is the one who has authority to bless him. There is the faith of Paul, who urges young Timothy to be unfailing in his patience and to teach and preach with urgency both in and out of season. And there is the faith of the widow, who returns to the judge day in, day out, clamouring for her rights and refusing to fall silent when they are denied her.
Faith, in other words, does not look neat and tidy. If it were meant to be so then perhaps God would not have sent us his Son at all; perhaps he would have sent us a tract containing a few lines of neat instruction, rather a young man to whom the startling language and unimaginable stories, the mystery and the glory of the holy book around which we gather bear witness.
Faith is a journey, an unfolding relationship. Faith can be hard work. Perhaps the God in whom we have faith knows us rather better than we do ourselves.
Sunday 21 October 2007,
Genesis 32: 22-31;
2 Timothy 3: 14-4:5;
Luke 18: 1-8
Monday 15 October 2007
Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity
‘Muslims and Christians together make up well over half of the world’s population. Without peace and justice between these two religious communities, there can be no meaningful peace in the world. The future of the world depends on peace between Muslims and Christians’.
That assertion, as startling as it is sonorous, heads a letter issued this week to the leaders of the Christian churches by representatives of global Islam. It seeks common ground between the writings that our two traditions call holy, and identifies a basis for peace and understanding between Christian and Muslim.
The letter’s authors find that basis in the shared conviction that God is one and that humankind is called to love him, citing both the New Testament and the Qu’ran in support. Jesus Christ teaches that the Shema, the ancient prayer of Israel, is the greatest of the Commandments: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is One. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ And the first Shahadah of Islam is comparable: ‘there is no God but God’. The Qu’ran teaches ‘devote yourself to God with a complete devotion’. The similarity is plain.
Love of neighbour constitutes a second foundation stone of this basis. The letter rehearses Jesus Christ’s commandment ‘you shall love your neighbour as yourself’ alongside that of the prophet Muhammad: ‘none of you has faith until you love for your neighbour what you love for yourself’.
So, in the light of what the letter’s authors term the ‘Two Commandments of love’, Muslims invite Christians to come together, to come to a common word.
I suspect that what I have disclosed of the letter’s contents will come as little surprise to you. Perhaps you are already aware of the agreement of the faiths as to these essentials; perhaps you think such agreement bland and unspecific; perhaps you are unconvinced of its cash value. Or perhaps you are even of the opinion that the opening statement, with which I began and which is the essential rationale for the letter, can be criticized. It perhaps overstates the potential for damage of conflict that is properly inter-religious rather than economic or geopolitical. It perhaps plays unwittingly into the hands of those who seek to caricature our present status as that of combatants in a war on terror. It almost certainly miscalculates wildly the numbers of those who can be called Christians in any real sense.
I am no scholar of Islam, but it seems to me that three features of the letter merit our particular attention. The first is the collective authorship. It is the work of one hundred and thirty-eight Muslim scholars and academics, whose diversity must call us to listen. They come from north Africa, eastern Europe, north America, Asia and, crucially, from the Gulf and Middle Eastern states, and so the letter appears genuinely comprehensive in its origins.
Secondly, the letter is clear in its bold suggestion that the prophet Muhammad did not bring anything fundamentally or essentially new to God’s revelation. It instead surmises that in calling the faithful to love the one God the prophet of Islam restated and alluded to the Hebrew Bible’s commandment to love the one God.
And, thirdly, it has little truck with those of any tradition who use or sponsor violence to achieve their ends. It states ‘…to those who relish conflict and destruction for their own sake or reckon that ultimately they stand to gain through them, we say that our very eternal souls are all also at stake if we fail to sincerely make every effort to make peace and come together in harmony’. It has little truck with Muslims who seek to make enemies of Christians and reminds its readers that in the words of the Qu’ran Christians and Jews are ‘people of the Scripture’, among whom ‘there is a staunch community who recite the revelations of God, falling prostrate before him. They believe in God and in the Last Day, and enjoin right conduct and forbid indecency, and vie with one another in good works. These are of the righteous’.
Those three features persuade me that in this letter we have more than a series of worn-out platitudes whose repetition will do little to change the face of God’s earth. In the diversity of authorship, in the acknowledgment of our common ancestry in the Abrahamic tradition, and in its rejection of violence it seems to me that we have received a peace-offering. It might serve as a new basis for the treatment of religious minorities, whether Christian or Muslim. It might lead to a re-casting of the fear and suspicion with which we have come to view one another.
For this morning, of course, we heard retold the story of a Syrian warrior, the forbear perhaps of those who bring bloodshed and division to the Middle East today. It is the story of an Arab who seeks healing at the hands of his Israelite enemy, who is asked to undress and bathe seven times in the waters of a foreign stream. It is the story of a man who, in his willingness to submit to a strange jurisdiction, and in his nakedness before something he does not understand, is made whole in body and brought to a knowledge of the truth.
Dare we follow him into those unknown waters, or will we remain in the security of a chariot parked safely on the river-bank? Amen.
Sunday 14 October 2007
2 Kings 5: 1-5, 7-15c;
2 Timothy 2: 8-15;
Luke 17: 11-19.
That assertion, as startling as it is sonorous, heads a letter issued this week to the leaders of the Christian churches by representatives of global Islam. It seeks common ground between the writings that our two traditions call holy, and identifies a basis for peace and understanding between Christian and Muslim.
The letter’s authors find that basis in the shared conviction that God is one and that humankind is called to love him, citing both the New Testament and the Qu’ran in support. Jesus Christ teaches that the Shema, the ancient prayer of Israel, is the greatest of the Commandments: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is One. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ And the first Shahadah of Islam is comparable: ‘there is no God but God’. The Qu’ran teaches ‘devote yourself to God with a complete devotion’. The similarity is plain.
Love of neighbour constitutes a second foundation stone of this basis. The letter rehearses Jesus Christ’s commandment ‘you shall love your neighbour as yourself’ alongside that of the prophet Muhammad: ‘none of you has faith until you love for your neighbour what you love for yourself’.
So, in the light of what the letter’s authors term the ‘Two Commandments of love’, Muslims invite Christians to come together, to come to a common word.
I suspect that what I have disclosed of the letter’s contents will come as little surprise to you. Perhaps you are already aware of the agreement of the faiths as to these essentials; perhaps you think such agreement bland and unspecific; perhaps you are unconvinced of its cash value. Or perhaps you are even of the opinion that the opening statement, with which I began and which is the essential rationale for the letter, can be criticized. It perhaps overstates the potential for damage of conflict that is properly inter-religious rather than economic or geopolitical. It perhaps plays unwittingly into the hands of those who seek to caricature our present status as that of combatants in a war on terror. It almost certainly miscalculates wildly the numbers of those who can be called Christians in any real sense.
I am no scholar of Islam, but it seems to me that three features of the letter merit our particular attention. The first is the collective authorship. It is the work of one hundred and thirty-eight Muslim scholars and academics, whose diversity must call us to listen. They come from north Africa, eastern Europe, north America, Asia and, crucially, from the Gulf and Middle Eastern states, and so the letter appears genuinely comprehensive in its origins.
Secondly, the letter is clear in its bold suggestion that the prophet Muhammad did not bring anything fundamentally or essentially new to God’s revelation. It instead surmises that in calling the faithful to love the one God the prophet of Islam restated and alluded to the Hebrew Bible’s commandment to love the one God.
And, thirdly, it has little truck with those of any tradition who use or sponsor violence to achieve their ends. It states ‘…to those who relish conflict and destruction for their own sake or reckon that ultimately they stand to gain through them, we say that our very eternal souls are all also at stake if we fail to sincerely make every effort to make peace and come together in harmony’. It has little truck with Muslims who seek to make enemies of Christians and reminds its readers that in the words of the Qu’ran Christians and Jews are ‘people of the Scripture’, among whom ‘there is a staunch community who recite the revelations of God, falling prostrate before him. They believe in God and in the Last Day, and enjoin right conduct and forbid indecency, and vie with one another in good works. These are of the righteous’.
Those three features persuade me that in this letter we have more than a series of worn-out platitudes whose repetition will do little to change the face of God’s earth. In the diversity of authorship, in the acknowledgment of our common ancestry in the Abrahamic tradition, and in its rejection of violence it seems to me that we have received a peace-offering. It might serve as a new basis for the treatment of religious minorities, whether Christian or Muslim. It might lead to a re-casting of the fear and suspicion with which we have come to view one another.
For this morning, of course, we heard retold the story of a Syrian warrior, the forbear perhaps of those who bring bloodshed and division to the Middle East today. It is the story of an Arab who seeks healing at the hands of his Israelite enemy, who is asked to undress and bathe seven times in the waters of a foreign stream. It is the story of a man who, in his willingness to submit to a strange jurisdiction, and in his nakedness before something he does not understand, is made whole in body and brought to a knowledge of the truth.
Dare we follow him into those unknown waters, or will we remain in the security of a chariot parked safely on the river-bank? Amen.
Sunday 14 October 2007
2 Kings 5: 1-5, 7-15c;
2 Timothy 2: 8-15;
Luke 17: 11-19.
Monday 8 October 2007
Harvest Thanksgiving, Sunday 7 October 2007
How deliciously ironic that something so inoffensive, so nostalgic, so quintessentially English as the parish Harvest Thanksgiving should provide irrefutable evidence that there’s something in historical materialism. Marx’s doctrine was first propounded to me over twenty years ago at an undergraduate party, by someone who had had too much to drink. ‘You see’ he declaimed ‘the worker may have a vocation to make a chair. But under capitalism he will only ever screw legs onto chairs on a production line’. Those words came back to haunt me this week as I watched schoolchildren (and their parents and grandparents) depositing dried pasta, muesli and disposable razor blades around the altar steps. All of them were undoubtedly alienated from the means of production, distribution and exchange – although, it has to be said, they evinced little sign of despair at their plight.
Harvest in London in 2007 is a rite in search of a meaning. Its origin is often traced to Robert Hawker, the splendidly eccentric Victorian vicar of a Cornish village. On one occasion Father Hawker dressed up as a mermaid (history records neither the occasion nor the excuse); on another he excommunicated his cat for catching mice on Sunday. A more lasting innovation was his Harvest Thanksgiving, instituted in 1843. Hawker and his contemporaries served a largely rural and agrarian community. There was a sporting chance that those who came to the chancel steps came bearing the crops that they had grown themselves. The Mosaic injunction to the Israelites to bring sheaves of the first fruits of the harvest to offer to God had a meaningful resonance, which changing patterns of residence, employment and consumption have stifled. Thanksgiving to the Creator for the harvest was a response to God from those whose lives and livelihoods were intimately bound up with the vagaries of the weather and the health of the soil.
Those bonds have disappeared, and so contemporary celebrations of Harvest have sought to invest it with contemporary relevance. There is nothing objectionable in that. Hawker himself established the Harvest Thanksgiving in a deliberate attempt to capitalize on the thoroughly secular (and I suspect rather bibulous) harvest home celebrations that occupied his farmer parishioners in the autumn. Over the years the Church has been skilled at appropriating existing celebrations and putting them to her (or rather, to God’s use). So in parishes around the country Harvest will be used as a season to ponder the environmental crisis with which many believe we are threatened. In others it will be used to draw attention to the inequities of global trade and to make the case for international exchange that is freer and fairer. And in others it will be used to comment upon the costs and risks of modern food mass-production: indeed, our school’s celebration on Friday included a re-telling of the story of the Enormous Turnip, no doubt a chilling allegorical warning against the menace of genetically-modified root vegetables.
There’s nothing wrong with any of those emphases. Each is a valid, indeed inescapable Christian concern. But perhaps we might remind ourselves why it is that on this of all Sundays we bring bars of soap and tubes of toothpaste into Church. Surely they are not the first fruits of our lives, the first fruits that we are asked to offer to God: surely those first fruits are more than bags of rice and tins of baked beans. How are we tending the acreage of our souls – what are we bringing to the altar and offering to God in prayer, in worship, and in the nurture of our faith? How are we ploughing the furrow of work and relationships that is set before us – what are we bringing to the altar and offering to God in changed behaviour, in new honesty, humility and transparency to one another? How are we disbursing the produce of our fields, the resources at our disposal – what are we bringing to the altar and offering to God in time spent with and for others, skills given to and for others, help given to and for others? In short, what harvest is God set to reap in you and in me?
Of course we today give God thanks for the harvest and for the goodness with which he crowns the year; of course we pledge ourselves to be good stewards of the earth and to safeguard the inheritance of our children; of course we affirm our longing to see hunger and thirst banished from this planet. But we recognize too that our bringing of gifts is at risk of becoming what therapists call displacement activity, a sop to tender conscience or a nod to quaint tradition. Our bringing of gifts is instead a tangible and sacramental symbol of the transformation that the Lord of the Harvest is bringing about in us, and of our consequent determination to transform the lives of others. Today our efforts will feed the hungry. But what will we do tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that? Let there be no end to our thanksgiving for the harvest. Amen.
Harvest in London in 2007 is a rite in search of a meaning. Its origin is often traced to Robert Hawker, the splendidly eccentric Victorian vicar of a Cornish village. On one occasion Father Hawker dressed up as a mermaid (history records neither the occasion nor the excuse); on another he excommunicated his cat for catching mice on Sunday. A more lasting innovation was his Harvest Thanksgiving, instituted in 1843. Hawker and his contemporaries served a largely rural and agrarian community. There was a sporting chance that those who came to the chancel steps came bearing the crops that they had grown themselves. The Mosaic injunction to the Israelites to bring sheaves of the first fruits of the harvest to offer to God had a meaningful resonance, which changing patterns of residence, employment and consumption have stifled. Thanksgiving to the Creator for the harvest was a response to God from those whose lives and livelihoods were intimately bound up with the vagaries of the weather and the health of the soil.
Those bonds have disappeared, and so contemporary celebrations of Harvest have sought to invest it with contemporary relevance. There is nothing objectionable in that. Hawker himself established the Harvest Thanksgiving in a deliberate attempt to capitalize on the thoroughly secular (and I suspect rather bibulous) harvest home celebrations that occupied his farmer parishioners in the autumn. Over the years the Church has been skilled at appropriating existing celebrations and putting them to her (or rather, to God’s use). So in parishes around the country Harvest will be used as a season to ponder the environmental crisis with which many believe we are threatened. In others it will be used to draw attention to the inequities of global trade and to make the case for international exchange that is freer and fairer. And in others it will be used to comment upon the costs and risks of modern food mass-production: indeed, our school’s celebration on Friday included a re-telling of the story of the Enormous Turnip, no doubt a chilling allegorical warning against the menace of genetically-modified root vegetables.
There’s nothing wrong with any of those emphases. Each is a valid, indeed inescapable Christian concern. But perhaps we might remind ourselves why it is that on this of all Sundays we bring bars of soap and tubes of toothpaste into Church. Surely they are not the first fruits of our lives, the first fruits that we are asked to offer to God: surely those first fruits are more than bags of rice and tins of baked beans. How are we tending the acreage of our souls – what are we bringing to the altar and offering to God in prayer, in worship, and in the nurture of our faith? How are we ploughing the furrow of work and relationships that is set before us – what are we bringing to the altar and offering to God in changed behaviour, in new honesty, humility and transparency to one another? How are we disbursing the produce of our fields, the resources at our disposal – what are we bringing to the altar and offering to God in time spent with and for others, skills given to and for others, help given to and for others? In short, what harvest is God set to reap in you and in me?
Of course we today give God thanks for the harvest and for the goodness with which he crowns the year; of course we pledge ourselves to be good stewards of the earth and to safeguard the inheritance of our children; of course we affirm our longing to see hunger and thirst banished from this planet. But we recognize too that our bringing of gifts is at risk of becoming what therapists call displacement activity, a sop to tender conscience or a nod to quaint tradition. Our bringing of gifts is instead a tangible and sacramental symbol of the transformation that the Lord of the Harvest is bringing about in us, and of our consequent determination to transform the lives of others. Today our efforts will feed the hungry. But what will we do tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that? Let there be no end to our thanksgiving for the harvest. Amen.
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