A Harvest of Joy

A Harvest of Joy

Sunday 6 October 2024

A sermon by Ross Meikle, Missioner For Young People

 

 

This week I did my first assembly with Bishop Wordsworth School next door. They are exploring the theme of Truth, and I was given the text from John’s Gospel of Pilate asking Jesus: ‘what is truth’ at his trial. As part of my assembly, I offered a spiritual truth that I cling to formed by my Christian faith that may be helpful for young people going through a time of great change – both personally and in terms of the world we all live in. It isn’t easy trying to communicate spiritual truths.

• Each one of us is created and loved by God – worthy of dignity, compassion, and kindness.

It sounds easy, it sounds trite. It’s not going to blow anybody’s mind. But as I reflected on our readings for Harvest… that list of three came to mind – one for each reading.

Dignity

In the letter to Timothy, we are encouraged to be thankful. But it was the instruction to pray for ‘kings and all who are in high positions’ that interested me. Some find it a difficult teaching – what about those leaders who are oppressive and cruel?

But what strikes me about this instruction is the pairing of it with the desire to lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity. I saw in this the divide between those with power and those without. We pray for those with power because they control the circumstances of those who do not. Kings may disrupt the lives of their people by waging war. Those with money and influence can affect the lives of the poor and oppressed by throwing their weight behind policies.

So people are robbed of dignity by those with power:

• Those who play games with our economy leave diligent workers turning to Foodbanks.
• Those who wage war over imaginary lines leave families displaced, identities lost, and children dead and nameless.
• Those who care more for profit than the future of our climate leave generations now with a chaotic and cheap inheritance.

Today, human dignity means little. Even within the church, the indignity that is afforded towards minority groups reveals how wrong we get it. October is Black History Month, and we must confess as Society, as Church and as Individuals the ways in which we have and continue to treat non-white people with disdain – and more widely to repent the breadcrumbs given to minorities, and the contempt and injustice that are afforded to victims of our own abuse and safeguarding failures.

Harvest is a time for us is to consider the ways in which the way we live together – at every level – so that all may be treated with dignity. As well as a time of thankfulness and generosity, Harvest is a time of repentance for our failure to treat everyone with dignity.

The spiritual lesson is to soften our hearts and see the ‘other’ as a ‘brother’.

This rather leads us on to:

Compassion

Literally: Shared pain.

This is in our Psalm as a group of people who know pain and poverty and loss of dignity, hope for restoration – as had happened once before. Harvest becomes a metaphor for the spiritual journey from despair to joy, from death to new life. That great Good News story which is the heart of all of our stories. But there must first be that shared pain, before there can be the shared joy.

For all sorts of reasons, our society is one that is very individualistic. So easily it becomes about my own hunger and my own pain. But we are one body. And if one of us is hungry, then all of us should feel it… and be moved by that. The stories of famine and violence and injustice around the world can lead to great acts of generosity… ‘when God touches the heart, he touches the pocket’ as it were.

But: as we celebrate Harvest today, I ask us all the question about our Spiritual Life:

• How do we nurture that compassion for a hungry world deeply and consistently?
• How do we become a local and global community who sow together in tears that we may harvest together in joy?
• Where does our soft-hearted compassion lead us?

These questions about our Spiritual Life brings us onto the third word:

Kindness

and our reading from the Gospel according to St Matthew. This text comes from the Sermon on the Mount, known to some as Jesus’ Spiritual Manifesto. In it, Jesus teaches the way of God which is subversive to the ways of the world: the meek inherit the earth, not the strong – the peacemakers are the children of God, not the warmongers. And in this section about worrying, we receive words of comfort about the way in which God sees us.

Birds do not toil for the food. Flowers do not toil for their petals. They are loved by God and they simply are. They find food. They grow. That is enough. They are enough. Yet we – who are of more value than them – work and grind and toil away, worried about what will come. And in a world of rapid climate change and crisis, I myself can wonder and worry about what kind of world I will be ministering to in the decades to come… asking myself what kind of world I might one day retire into – if retirement will even be a thing by then! You will have your own mind-consuming worries and anxieties.

Our text today comes straight off the back of his spiritual teaching on Money, and how we cannot worship both God and Money. That is important context – partly it may draw out a disparity between rich and poor in society. And indeed, there is real need in our lives and our world. Some of us will have known very real poverty. Some of us will come to know it. Pray that others will grow in compassion to sustain you.

But Jesus is giving us all a spiritual teaching: a commitment to the present moment and to find joy and gratitude in what we have – whether that be much or little. It is a spiritual lesson in Simplicity – and for some in Christian History it leads to giving away their earthly possessions or taking a vow of poverty.

Ultimately, though, it is a recognition that:

• Our value as a person comes solely from the love that God has for us – a love that is unchanging and abundant.
• Not in the quality of the food we eat or the clothes we wear… but solely in the love…
• And in that great spiritual revelation comes kindness for yourself…
• … and then the Compassion for those who do not know kindness…
• … and then the ministry of bringing Dignity to all those whose humanity is compromised by those with power.

And through those three: Dignity, Compassion, and Kindness – together and for all people – we discover New Life and the very kingdom of God, and we truly reap a Harvest of Joy.