Sunday 4th October 2020
This Sunday we will give thanks in our churches and our “home- churches” for the harvests. We will give thanks for God’s wonderful provision of our needs and we will give thanks for all the people who supply us with our food and the things we need in order to live.
It’s good to celebrate the harvest. It reminds us to be thankful. It reminds us to notice things that we often take for granted. The extraordinary events of the past year have reminded us that we should not take so much for granted. Also, as we give thanks for the harvests we enjoy, we remember the fragility of our world and the many dangers that we face because of our over-exploitation of the world’s resources. Many voices tell us, persuasively, that we all need to think carefully about what, and how much, we consume and how it affects the world around us.
It has been very moving in recent weeks to see David Attenborough taking to Twitter and Instagram at the age of 94 to try to communicate with more people in his passionate concern about the destruction of wild-life habitat and the resulting extinction of animal species and about the dangers of global warming.
I understand that it was Socrates who posed the famous question: “Do you live to eat or eat to live?” He said that he ate to live. I sometimes think about that when I’m too interested in my dinner to get up and sort out some problem in the background which is going on with the children! I can’t deny sometimes being over-fixated on food and will heartily endorse the sentiments of the song from the musical “Oliver” : “Food glorious food!”
The rich man in Jesus’ story is perhaps an extreme example of someone who lived to eat in the worse sense. In a week in which supermarkets have put limits on the sale of toilet rolls again to stop hoarding, we hear a story about a hoarder. The man in the story has enough for himself and more but all that causes him to do, is to hoard for himself.
He doesn’t do the two things that we want to do at our harvest celebrations. He doesn’t give thanks to God. He doesn’t share what he has with those who have not. Furthermore, he takes life for granted, as if the purpose of his life is just to feed himself. He lives to eat. Jesus teaches us that food is important and to pray each day for our daily bread but He also reminds us in this passage: “life is more than food and the body than clothing.”
There’s nothing wrong with enjoying food of course. I have heard of monks and nuns who are so self-denying that they mix up all their food sweet and savoury so that they don’t enjoy the taste of it! I can’t help thinking that’s a pity. It’s good to enjoy the food but it’s not our sole purpose.
We live to please God and to do his good works. We live to sow seeds of goodness in the way that we live. St Paul tells us to be generous people. How very different is the attitude he encourages in the second letter to the Corinthians as he urges them to come to the support of the church in Jerusalem. God loves a cheerful giver!
If we are kind to life, life will be kind to us and we will also be acknowledging the deep, deep truth that we are all just receivers of God’s generosity so we shouldn’t clutch on to the things we have been given when God prompts us to share them. If we are really thankful, we have to be generous. Generosity is the fruit of thankfulness.
So let’s all try to be generous with the things that God has given us in abundance. As we recognise and are thankful for the beauty of the world that we enjoy, let’s live in such a way that it is there for others to share.
The harvest call to be generous because we are thankful doesn’t just apply to giving money of course, important as that is if we can afford to give. As we think of all the riches that God has given us, time, life, peace, joy in believing, comfort, blessing… we show our thankfulness by looking for ways to share those riches with others.
Amen.
