On Harvest Sunday (8th October) we were delighted to welcome The Reverend Nathan Mulcock, Chaplain of Mansfield College, Oxford to preach at our Harvestide Service.
As we celebrated the gifts of creation and gratitude for the crops which were harvested, we also reflected on our responsibility to care for the environment.
Read Nathan's sermon below.
In the midst of devastating violence, the question of what shall we eat today? May sound like a luxury, but say it differently. What shall we eat today? And clearly it becomes a most vexed question.
This week I met a woman, I was standing in a very long queue, and I asked what she did, and she told me that she ran some bakeries. Delightful - I thought at first, wrongly, these bakeries are actually in Ukraine. They train veteran soldiers to bake bread, which is then used to supply the front line, where the fighting is at its fiercest.
Periodically, she travels to this war torn region, loads up vans and trains, and here, Southern Rail should take note that in bombed out Ukraine, the trains still run, with bread and other goods and to ship the food to those who need it most. Moreover, as the front lines have changed, she explained, she's been helping secure funds to clear fields of landmines so that farmers can grow soy and wheat and vegetables and have, for the first time in a while, a harvest. Sometimes, she said, people ask me, what's the point of pouring money into this project if they're just going to get bombed again? But whatever tomorrow brings, people still need to eat today.
We don't think about it, she observed, even before I told her I was going to steal all of this for my sermon. When we think about warfare, but for them this is just as vital, and for them it really is a godsend. Bread is as essential as bullets, and in their harvest, a sign of hope. They live out the gospel command we just heard. Do not worry about tomorrow.
Do not be anxious to hoard anything. Be grateful for what is given to you today.
Starkly different is the way in which most of us well fed don't worry about what we will eat. We may occasionally wince at the bill, but we have the privilege of hardly ever having to pay serious attention to something that confronts us three times a day under our noses, in our harvest, rejoicing where we reap what we have never sown, gather what we never planted and eat without ever having put our hands to the plough or gathered into a barn.
And where our unthinking consumption means, the question of what shall we eat? Is one of luxury, that is bought at the cost of a different kind of violence, of others going hungry, of exploited workers and a devastated earth. What is it that we're doing here.
Yet for this very reason, it makes our urban harvest celebration, I think, even more important. Because perhaps for one fleeting moment in the year we take food, and rather than seeing only the calories or the price or the best before date or something just to devour, we place it in its proper doxological, that is, glorifying context, a source of praise to the creator. In the harvest celebration, we have the opportunity to apply Jesus words. Consider the lilies, look at the birds. Yes, he says, but also contemplate the cabbages, ponder the plums.
.jpg)
Behold the bread. Harvest doesn't take something humdrum and, God forbid, unspiritual, and makes it special by our prayers. Rather, by our prayers, we are made spiritual enough to see food no longer as a product for our consumption, but a gift given by the good God, who declares in the 81st psalm, open your mouth and I will fill it. Like Ukrainian farmers and soldiers and civilians, we come to see our daily bread as a godsend.
And as we adjust our view of food from one of consumption to contemplation, we have the chance to strain out some of the violence in our usual guzzling attitude. In this sense, to consider the lilies or the packet of crisps and to seek the kingdom of God become part of the same thing. In early Christianity, this was taken as basic in a world where literacy was low and books were rare. One came to know God not just through the contemplation of scripture, but through the contemplation of nature, each creature a living letter, living in relationships that made up paragraphs, into a world that was a whole book within itself, each part an expression of the word of God through whom all life was brought forth, and a sign and a picture of the faithful care still shown to it. Our own evolutionary and ecological and agricultural knowledge allows us to know even better how intricate and complex the dance of life is.
So look at all this, Jesus says, that comes as a gift. And remember that you don't stand apart from or over this. You belong within it. One ecology of the word who gives life to all creatures and is praised by all creatures in the cosmos. In this contemplative gaze on all creation, food included, it was further understood that humans, with their brains and their tools, were not called to anxiously, violently dominate and control and hoard the good things of the world, but rather to give voice to the ongoing hymn of creation, to put ourselves, our works, and the world that we were looking at and put it all before God.
As Leonidas of Cyprus put it in the 6th century, through heaven and earth and sea, through wood and stone, through relics and church buildings and the cross, through angels and people, through all creation, visible and invisible, I offer veneration and honour to the creator and master and maker of all things and to him alone. It is through me that the heavens declare the glory of God. Through me the moon worships God. Through me the stars glorify him. Through me the waters and showers of rain, the dew and all creation venerate God and give him glory.
Our harvest Eucharist is an invitation for all to share in the same act of sacred veneration, to recall that every meal carries the seeds of sacred ritual, waiting to be called forth in our gratitude for those who have worked faithfully to provide for us in our sharing with those we love or those in need, in prayer for those who remain with hunger. And to remember, like the Ukrainians and so many others across the world, to remember that this is God sent, and each time to begin to let go of our violent consumption and instead learn to work and worship with and within the world, day by day, to the greater glory of God, even in our eating and drinking, praising him who out of sheer love, makes it all possible. Amen.
The Reverend Nathan Mulcock