Harvest Festival Sermon

Giving back and Giving out : First fruits and Talents

 

Based on MRDF harvest materials

 

Gangi’s Story

 

I want to tell you about a man from India called Gangi. He had a small piece of land, but it was dry and choked with thick, scrubby bushes. The equipment needed to clear and water the land was too expensive for him. So even though he was poor and hungry, the land sat there unused.

But through a local organisation, supported by the Methodist Relief and Development Fund, Gangi and his neighbours got training in low-cost farming techniques and learned how to work as a co-operative to make the most of what they did have. They also received some small start up loans.

 

Gangi and his neighbours pooled their land and loans – enabling them to create a sizeable, irrigated plot.

 

They used the enterprising and creative methods they had learned, such as:

·         making sure they pulled up all the weeds to conserve water for the banana plants and provide animal fodder they could sell

·         composting any bananas that split to make fertiliser

·         using the space between the trees to grow seedlings for sale.

 

This group squeezed every drop from the modest resources they had – and were able to grow their own fruit on their own land. Now they run a profitable banana plantation, producing fruit of the highest quality that sells for good prices.

When MRDF visited the plantation, Gangi said: ‘See the other [wasted] land over there? This land was like that before, look now! We are getting livelihoods from this land and food for our families. For this we are thankful to you.’

 

We have brought gifts that represent the fruits of the harvest of gardens and the work that many in this congregation have done in this past year. And we give these back to God in gratitude for all he has done -  to enrich our lives to enrich our harvests – and pray that they may help others who are needy – the lonely, the homeless , the ill.

* * *

Giving Thanks

The interesting thing about harvest is that people have become more and more keen on celebrating it the further they have got from being the ones who gather in the crops in the fields – yes even in this supposedly secular society.

The harvest festival is a festival which most people think goes back into the mists of time. We imagine joyful peasants accompanying horse drawn carts full of produce back into barns. We imagine the whole village coming together to celebrate that all has been safely gathered in. And a lot of us, quite probably, think back to harvests that we knew as a child and fondly imagine that it was ever thus so. I remember one Harvest in my father’s country parish with the church decked out to the rafters. Unfortunately one of us had left the vicarage door off the latch (those were the days!) and our dog Kiltie got into church and brought his contribution to the harvest with an unmentionable encounter with the large cabbage just below the pulpit for all to see!!

The ‘all is safely gathered in’ style of harvest festival is something that is quite modern  - it goes back little further than our Victorian forebears, originating in Cornwall. The hymns that people tend to think of as being traditional harvest hymns, some of which we sing today, have relatively modern dates to them. And you will find little mention of harvest festival in our older prayer books.

So harvest is something of an enigma in our Christian calendar. Yet we still celebrate it here today, and I think that it is right that we should. Let me give three short reasons why and then explore two of them in greater detail.

Firstly, it is good to be thankful.

Secondly, it is good to recognise the labours of others and the needs of others.

Thirdly, it helps us to be aware of the spirituality of the environment, and our place as human beings on this beautiful, but fragile. I hope this is a theme that will be touched on next week as we celebrate St Francis Day.

The Offering of first fruits is at heart of Israel’s religious life. Why?

·         The account is set in story of the exodus – remembering their deliverance – their freedom from oppression

·         Wilderness wandering when they had very little to live on – manna came – call to repentance when they were grumbling and rebellious

·         Despite all, God sticks with them and promises land and posterity so they receive

God’s blessing

 

That special relationship (even closer than w. US!) with our God is mutual – two way – it demands a response in faithful gratitude. So what better way than to give gifts. We give gifts when we want to celebrate – a birthday, an anniversary, a success. So the Jews gave gifts to God. But in doing so they remembered that they once had little to give (they were wandering Arameans) so they were encouraged to remember others.

Don’t just give to the family, to the folks around you, to the people like you and the people you like.

But give to people who were once like you, with little to give except their utter reliance on God. People you don’t know. People even that you don’t like.

What God has given us is to be offered back and shared with others. That’s at the heart of the harvest message.

·         We depend on God without whom we would starve spiritually

·         We depend on farmers and food producers without whom we would starve physically

·         We need to remember others as we respond in gratitude

 

Yes, changing patterns of agriculture and farming mean most of us are divorced from the rural life which once dominated this country, from the sort of lives our ancestors lived.

Yes, global warming and modern technology have changed our eating habits so we expect and enjoy strawberries and other fruit and veg. at every time of the year.

Perhaps we need to be more aware in this period leading up to climate change talks in Copenhagen, taking note of the important talks at the United Nations this week, of our carbon footprint and the impact of our eating habits and lifestyle on the parts of the rest of the world who don’t enjoy the things we take for granted – food, warmth, shelter, health and education.

God’s steadfast love, the psalm reminded us, endures from generation to generation. But what will be the legacy we leave for future generations?

So let us care for the needs of others less fortunate. Let us care for the earth that all others may enjoy its fruits. And let’s thank God as we sing our next hymn and ask God to ‘take the gratitude we give’.

* * *

 

 

Giving back and giving out

God expects us to be imaginative and enterprising with what he gives us. That’s part of what the parable of the talents is all about. He doesn’t give us all piles of silver and gold  (unless you’re fortunate enough to have a metal detector and strike lucky in a field with a treasure hoard in it!). But he does give us talents, abilities and opportunities he plants in us with the potential to bear much fruit and glorify him.

Sometimes we don’t think we have much talent, especially when people ask us to do things. But that’s never true. God has given us all something and we need to find out what that is and use these gifts. They may be the sort of simple practical help we can give others like we heard in the drama just now.

Harvest time is a wake up call for all of us to re-evaluate our gifts including how we spend our time and money and what we put at the disposal of the church. 

One of the ways in which we can all use our gifts is to make choices – how we behave, how we use the resources God has given us. Choices too of what we buy and what we choose to give away. So what can we do?

Selective buying:

1.        perhaps we can choose to buy locally. Just look at all the produce that’s around us that has been produced within 10 miles from here. And the auction of these vegetables and fruit afterwards will enable us to share these with each other and benefit others.

2.         We could choose also to buy from small producers at home and abroad  through organisations and supermarkets which bear the fair trade kitemark, , whether it’s food or clothing

3.        We could choose to buy ethically in a way which respects animal rights as well as the rights of fellow human beings. Products which say “no animal suffered to produce this”

Buying Food and clothes is an ethical issue, a moral issue, which should cause us to stop and think before we buy.

Selective giving:

It’s so easy to give to the immediate cause in  a casual haphazard way – the person who shakes a tin in our face in the market place – the charity pack that arrives on our doorstep.  Perhaps sometimes we need to be more selective

·         In how much we choose to give – maybe considering a Charities Aid Foundation account or a regular gift to the church or charity of our choice.

·         To which churches and charities to give support – maybe trying to balance between those calls for our support at home and overseas, and the different demands of young and old in education and health care and in spiritual welfare as well

Today we focus our giving on the relief and development arm of the Methodist Church – MRDF.  And so I end with the story of one such project which I hope will be supported through our gifts. It’s a healthcare project in rural communities in one of the poorest countries of Africa, Mali. Probably most of us have only heard of one place in the country and that is Timbuktu. Two in ten children die in the country before they are 5. Very few people currently have access to medical help or attention. This means that treatable diseases like malaria and dysentery become killers. With the training of local people in healthcare and the provision of basic medicines and malaria nets so much can be done. Our gifts and their talents can come together to make a difference to the lives of thousands of people in that country. There are details of this project and others on the table for you to see after the service.

So we ask God to accept our gratitude and our gifts. We pray that the Holy Spirit will enable us to use our talents to God’s praise and glory.