Grace in Harvest: a sermon preached at Croydon Minster

This is the text of a sermon given at Croydon Minster. It was preached during the Parish Eucharist on Sunday 7 October, 2018. The readings were Joel 2.21-27 and Matthew 6.25-33.

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Harvest festival is one of the big markers of the seasons and rhythms of the year.

Even in pluralist, secularizing times the harvest thanksgiving remains on the landscape along with Mothering Sunday, Christmas and Easter, and is celebrated as much in Croydon as Chipstead, where there are actual farms and farmers.

Driving down the Brighton Road you’re not likely to be held up by a combine harvester. You will be held up by a bin lorry taking away the detritus of our consumption.

Here we are in a place that seems rather remote from the production of food and the actual work of harvest. But we all buy and consume the fruit of the land, and not just from this particular land, but from all around the world.

A wander along Surrey Street market brings that close to home, as do the African, Asian and East European shops as much as Tesco, Aldi or Waitrose.

All the world, and its foodstuffs and drink, is here in Croydon: we see, taste and enjoy the fruits of all year round, global harvesting.

Harvest festival, then, is a time

to give thanks for what we enjoy;

a time to be penitent about the way our buying and consumption has an adverse impact on the environment

and a time to be mindful of and act for those who go hungry and thirsty in our world, and on our doorstep – literally the doorstep of this church - who do not enjoy the fruits of any harvest.

Into all that, what our scriptures for harvest festival prompt us to consider another world: a world of abundance and not scarcity; of gratitude and not grudging; of generosity not tightfistedness. It is a world and way of life sketched out by Jesus and it comes down to a single word: ‘grace’.

‘Grace’ is about giving a gift that is not in the slightest bit earned, worked for or merited. At school we get ‘merit points’ and ‘commendations’ if we do something extra. But God doesn’t work like that; God doesn’t even give out merit points, because God’s grace is a gift for all who choose to receive it.

Grace is what St Paul describes in his second letter to the Corinthians, the farmer tends the ground, plants the seed and then just waits. Fertilisers notwithstanding, any growth is not the farmer’s work. The grain lies in the ground and awaits God given sunshine and rain. Living and growing is God’s gift to us.

The poet T.S. Eliot put it like this, ‘Take no thought of the harvest, but only of the proper sowing’.

We can prepare the ground, be it for the grain to grow or the seed of God’s word, but only God will give the growth as we tend and nurture what he grows for us.

Harvest thanksgiving today is not about measuring, counting and earning, but about knowing all our life to be a sheer gift of God, a result only of grace.

I did nothing, you did nothing, to merit being born, and yet we were, and God gives us breath and life, and thank God others have tended and nurtured us in our lives.

This is at the heart of Christian generosity; the awareness that everything is generously given in the first place.

We give not to receive;

we give not to buy the outcome we want;

we give mindful of all we have received, because our money is a sign, a token, of all that we are given; a token of grace.

The Eucharist reminds us of this truth; the Eucharist is a weekly feast of grace and celebration of the gift of God.

The earth, and everything in it, is God’s. Anything we present before him and offer is already his: grain for bread; grapes for wine; money for the work of the church in ministry and pastoral care; toiletries, bags of pasta, marrows for food banks.

‘Indeed’ says Jesus, ‘your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these other things – food, drink and clothing - will be given to you as well.’ (Matthew 6.33)

© Andrew Bishop, 2018.