20th October 2024

Harvest Festival 2024 – 20/10/24 - Martin Mowat

Readings: Deuteronomy 26.1-11 & Exodus 10:12–19 

When I was young, my family lived on a farm in rural Shropshire, and we attended a large, Anglican church.  Harvest Festival was always quite a big deal and the church was decorated with flowers, sheaves of wheat, fruit and vegetables of every kind.

Of course, as farmers we knew all about ploughing fields and scattering good seed, and we understood that harvests could vary enormously from one year to the next.  So we also knew, all too well, how to be thankful for the better ones.

But part of the message of Harvest Festival is surely that we should be thankful for EVERY harvest, regardless of its size, recognising that all of the gifts we have come ultimately from God, and taking time to say “Thank You”.  

Our reading from Deuteronomy, which is one of the oldest books in the Bible, recalls the time when the Jewish people were first settling in the land that God had promised would be “flowing with milk and honey”.

In that reading God told the people of Israel that when the land produced its rich harvest, they were to take the first fruits – importantly not the leftovers or the windfalls, but the choice “first fruits” – and they were to put them in a basket and present them before God, remembering the hardship that they had experienced in Egypt. And then, listen to this, they were to “rejoice in all the good things the Lord their God has given them and their households.”

There’s something very interesting here.  God isn’t just telling us to be thankful, grateful, “reconnaissant” as the French say so beautifully. No! He’s telling us much more than that. He says ‘rejoice’. Rejoice in all the good things we have been given rather than just taking them for granted, as we do all too easily, or even worse, being jealous of those who appear to have more than we do.

If we truly, deeply, recognise that all we have is a gift from God and if we are truly, deeply, thankful for that, not just at Harvest Festival, but at all times, I think that we would actually genuinely rejoice. It’s a question of attitude.  And that, in turn, I think, would change our relationship with the material world.

So how do we express joyful gratitude? Let’s just think about that for a moment. If we had continued our reading one more verse, God said. “When you have finished setting aside a tenth of all your produce in the third year, the year of the tithe, you shall give it to the Levite, the alien, the fatherless and the widow.”

A tenth!  Yes, unsettling though it might be, both Old and New Testaments advocate tithing, and I was tempted to talk about that this morning. But that will have to wait for another day, because on Tuesday morning Lectio 365 struck me as being particularly pertinent.  Actually, it’s been particularly powerful all this week, and Tuesday’s was headed “Learning to walk in his ways.”  

It hit me when Sarah Yardley prayed “Jesus, will you break my heart with your love for an aching, wounded world? Show me how to work towards justice and proclaim your beauty until the day that every sorrowful story ends in joy.” 

The reading that day was the one that Trevor just read to us today, the strange, strange account of when Moses stretched out his hand in judgement over Egypt and a swarm of locusts completely devoured the crops of an entire nation.  

In fact, according to Exodus, it was “such a dense swarm of locusts as had never been seen before, nor ever will be again. They … ate all the plants in the land and all the fruit of the trees that the hail had left. Not a green thing remained, neither tree nor plant of the field, through all the land of Egypt.”  

“In 2020”, Sarah Yardley went on to say, “a severe locust swarm consumed crops over 200 square miles in western India. A locust swarm can eat as much food in a day as about 35,000 people, and this invasion sparked a national emergency.” Can you imagine that happening in France?

The one in Deuteronomy was designed to bring Pharaoh to his knees, which it did, but it was the Egyptians who suffered most.  Aren’t we seeing that today in places like South Sudan, Burkina Faso, and Mali? Approximately 83,000 people in those three countries alone are currently experiencing famine conditions. All over the globe conflict alarmingly on the rise and remains the primary cause of hunger around the world. Ukraine, Sudan, Libya, Palestine, … the list goes on and on.

This Harvest Festival we going to pray for those who are hungry in the world today, for 14 million children battling active malnutrition, for 1000 children who die, each day, due to hunger or hygiene issues.

We’re asking God to show us, as Christians, how to carry new life to a literally hungry world, in both word and action.

In the Exodus story, a moment of repentance changed the face of that whole story. Pharaoh prayed a very simple prayer: “Forgive my sin.”

So Moses, the man of God, pleaded with the Lord for the justice that he always delights to show - for the restoring, life-changing, earth-shaking, destiny-renewing power of the God who is greater than darkness, famine, locusts, and destruction. Everything changed when Pharaoh pleaded for God’s forgiveness. 

In a similar way, the prophet Joel was called by God to deliver a message of warning and repentance to the southern kingdom of Judah after the nation was divided. In that message the Lord said, “I will give you back what you lost to the swarming locusts, the hopping locusts, the stripping locusts, and the cutting locusts… Once again you will have all the food you want, and you will praise the Lord your God, who does these miracles for you. Never again will my people be disgraced. 

Although the world actually produces enough food to feed all of its 8 billion people, 733 million of them (1 in 11) go hungry every day. Hunger rates in Africa are especially high, with 1 out of 5 people going hungry each day. 2.8 billion people around the world cannot afford a healthy diet, that’s 35% of the global population. 

Another part of the message of Harvest Festival is surely that we, who are part of the10% of the richest people in the world, need to share what we have.

But there’s another thing, and it’s equally shocking. Of that same 8 billion people, it is estimated that 3.4 billion of them live in what we call “unreached people groups”, meaning that they have little or no access to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  They don’t just need food, they need good news, and I believe with all my heart that the church’s job is not ONLY to feed them, but ALSO to send them missionaries. 

You may remember hearing Sue Grant, a few weeks ago, telling us about their work in Rwanda, taking teams of people who simply want to share their love for Jesus with others. In doing that they installed single solar panels on houses made of mud bricks; which for the first time brought light into homes, allowing children to see to do their homework in the evenings, allowing adults to gather in the evening to study the Bible, and allowing a choir to meet to rehearse.  Another group took resources to help teachers in nursery schools who had no more than blackboard and chalk. A third group ran a ‘teach the teachers’ Christian marriage course which is now running in multiple places throughout Rwanda. Doing those things gave them the opportunity to share the gospel message.

In a very small way we helped that mission to Rwanda by our giving.  Toilets were built, feeding programmes for children were established, fruit trees were planted. This, Sue said, is a real-life example of loving God and loving your neighbour, the most important commandments.  This is the harvest message.  

Let’s pray.  Father, we repent of our wrong, selfish attitude to our use of the world’s bountiful resources.

Holy Spirit, on a personal level, show us what it means to choose the way of life and justice, even in the places where our hopes and expectations have been consumed by locusts, and to trust the promise of your restoring hope.

And on a broader level, show us what it means to participate in YOUR mission to this hungry, thirsty, needy, overcrowded, divided, manipulated, control focused, and spiritually deprived world. Amen