Article
- Date:
- Sunday 1st October 2023
Year A, Harvest Festival - Place:
- Holy Trinity, Cuckfield
- Service:
- Evensong
- Readings:
- Deuteronomy 24.18-22
Luke 6.17-23
When Richard asked me to lead this Harvest Evensong, for the first time in my life my heart sank, for the days of ploughing the fields and scattering, of feasts under a harvest moon when the last sheaves have been gathered in, and the thanks to God for weather and wealth are long gone. Our world is one of industrial farming, fertiliser and soil depletion and ultra processed food in rich countries and the ravages of climate change in poor countries; there is perhaps no sphere of human activity which has so blighted God's pristine world as agriculture, so I decided to choose three Readings to tell the story in Biblical terms.
First, our extract from Psalm 104 emphasises the balance of interests in the environment; everything has its place. There is food cultivation but it largely leaves nature in its natural state. Then our Reading from Deuteronomy describes a system of social welfare so comprehensive that nothing equalled it in our society until the inception of social security just over a century ago; and our Reading from the Gospel of Luke provides Jesus' moral underpinning of social justice, framed in the context of an agrarian society.
Four lessons, I think, arise from these three Readings: first, we really have to stop being sentimental about agriculture as it is a subsidised industry which requires firm regulation to prevent its worst depredations; as an experiment, try to buy a loaf without additives which has been produced naturally not by the Chorley method. Secondly, learn about the relationship between ultra processed food and poverty; not only is this food cheaper than natural food, it is also addictive. Thirdly, most attempts to put nature back where it was are mere tokens and in many ways they are aesthetic rather than fundamental; have you noticed, for instance, how birdsong has become an aesthetic experience, curated in much the same way as ancient pottery in a museum. Finally, there is the tricky issue of importing food which generates food miles but also supports the economies of poor countries.
In spite of some belated heroic efforts, we are past the point where we can restore the earth to the innocence of our Psalm or to the Covenantal status of our Deuteronomy Reading but we can observe the Gospel precepts in our Reading from Luke. I daresay we will ff
properly tell ourselves that our record is mixed: we have done some good things and some bad things; our sins have been largely collective sins of omission; we have really meant no harm. But looking back from the middle of this Century it will be clear that we were the generation that, overall, lived the longest with the highest quality of life, lived a life of plenty, if not excess, clocked up the road miles and the air miles, and lived as if this might never end.
But already the gap between the rich and poor in our own country is widening so that the generation that follows us will be the first to be worse off than its parents since 1850; the life expectancy gap is widening so fast that, for the first time since 1850, average life expectancy is falling. On a wider scale the same gaps are widening between rich and poor countries. We have done our bit but it has not been big enough nor good enough.
So the first attitude to adopt when we think about our passage from Luke is to accept that, no matter how hard we find it to make ends meet, we are the rich. Secondly, no matter what our differences may be over tax policy, we should pay our taxes cheerfully, counting it a privilege that we are rich enough to pay taxes. Thirdly, and this is the most difficult, I think, we owe an apology to our children and repentance before God.
Of course we did not mean it this way but we have been careless at best; sixty years after Rachel Carson first warned us about planetary degradation we are only now coming to terms, well some of us, with what is going on.
Is it then, too late to make amends? By no means. There is a view widely held by anti-Catholics that the Sacrament of Reconciliation involves a simple clerical wiping clean of the slate; but any thinking person knows that this cannot be true. To repent is to resolve to change behaviour, so in our repentance we must use our remaining time to right what we have got wrong. Most of us are probably past the age of active campaigning but we can support the campaigns of our children and grandchildren, we can moderate our consumption, and we can pay closer attention to the moral teaching of Jesus which we find difficult.
These are hard lessons but in an era of fire and flood, of war and famine, of rising tides and growing deserts, we must be hard-headed in our grief. To remember with joy that time when a largely rural England scattered its seed and gathered its sheaves must not be an act of simple nostalgia but must drive us not to restore what is lost but to contribute in our small way to a viable future for our families and communities, for our country and the world.