Trinity XVII, Harvest Festival Sunday 12th October, by Fr Jack

With the Worshipful Company of Gardeners
Jeremiah 29. 4-7
2 Timothy 2. 8-15
St Luke 17.11-19

It is a great delight to have our friends the Gardeners’ Company back with us for Harvest. Master, Wardens, members of The Company, your presence here adds so much to our keeping of Harvest, which let’s face it, is a rather strange enterprise here in The City. The markets here do sell fruit and veg, but as digits on a screen representing global markets, more than streets full of fluffy cauliflowers piled up in wheelbarrows. 

But, ‘No!’ I hear you cry. 

What about St Giles’ Urban Farm. We are thrilled to be partnering with our friends at The City of London School for Girls and other neighbours here in the parish to green the churchyard out there with the growing of vegetables. Do get involved if you’d like. The Master Gardener, also a City Alderman, is the Chair of the Girls’ School. It is a lovely project of people coming together to make a difference locally. 

A good reason, then, to keep Harvest here at St Giles’.

And we’re the parish of Mark Catesby, the famous naturalist. And we’re the home of the annual Thomas Fairchild Service, Fairchild the leading nurseryman of his day.

So having established all that, it is the task of the preacher to shoehorn in some stuff about Jesus that is tangentially connected to horticulture or agriculture.

‘Not so!’. This time its me crying out, even if you’re not.

Because Harvest is not Gospel-related-but-adjacent. No, Harvest reflects some of the most fundamental Gospel truths.

The Harvest-time Gospel is one that flows all the way from Eden to Jesus’ healing ministry. God invites us to steward the Earth and everything in it with love; gently, generously and well. 

In today’s Gospel the man with leprosy comes back to thank Jesus: harvest is a feast of gratitude, of cultivating a lifestyle of gratitude and generosity. 

St Giles’ has recently helped partner one of the local independent Preparatory Schools, Lyceum, with our own St Luke’s Church of England Primary School for Harvest. The harvest offerings between the schools were wonderful. The children show us the way: in the current climate of estrangement and insecurity, the harvest is a time of embracing our identity as God’s children in one human family, a spirit of communion and openness.

All these are fundamentals of Jesus’ ministry - giving to the poor, thanking God, allowing no one to become ‘othered’ or ‘outside’ our concern. They are fundamentals for Jesus, and for Harvest. Let’s turn to the readings set for today and see what emerges.

 We are invited by the Gospel given for today, and the Good News of Jesus as a whole, and the message at the heart of harvest, to make thanksgiving the pattern of our lives. It sounds a small thing to do. It is not.

As we’ve already said, all the people with leprosy were cleansed, but only one shows the theological excellence of coming back to say thank you. Gratitude is what marks him out as wise and right. 

We here aspire to the same virtue of gratitude. It is at the heart of Christian life all year round, not just the Harvest. Each day we are invited to begin and end in prayer; and a prayer of thanksgiving is often the most honest and best prayer we can offer. For life itself, no matter the challenges we face, which we also bring to God in prayer. For the people in our lives - those we rush to thanks God for, and those we don’t!

 But more than that, we choose to be here. The Eucharist/Holy Communion/The Mass/The Lord’s Supper is the source and summit of Christian life. It is the ground beneath our feet, our food for the journey, and the destination towards which we live. It is the drumbeat of our lives Sunday by Sunday and day by day. And at its simplest, it is what it says on the tin: Eucharist - that is of course, thanksgiving in Greek. 

We are people who day by day, Sunday by Sunday, harvest by harvest choose to define our lives by thanksgiving. It sounds so simple and inoffensive, but it is in fact radical and remarkable.  

I, we, make our life an act of thanksgiving by being part of the Eucharist every Sunday, and midweek. We choose this pattern and character for our lives. And everything else in our lives flows from this thanksgiving we have chosen: our politics, business, family, community. By being here, and then by living from here (or at least trying to!) - by living out the themes of Scripture, living out the texture of hymnody and sacred music, by living lives that resound with the love of the One we have eaten and drunk here. Transformation by thanksgiving.

For some that might be how we live with responsibility at home, work or elsewhere. How we live with the effects of ageing or complex health. For some it might be how we consider vocation, what our lives are for and what they will be. 

And how we live is what Jeremiah wants us to attend to today.

Build, plant, garden, eat, says the Prophet Jeremiah. Seek the welfare of your surroundings and be a blessing to them, as you receive the blessings of them. A wonderful philosophy at the heart of the Harvest, so appropriate for gardeners here today, and at the heart of Christian life. 

Seek the welfare of your surroundings and be a blessing to them, as you receive the blessings of them. Realise that we are all inextricably part of a greater whole; and live with gratitude, as a blessing, says Jeremiah to us today. As we hear these ancient words, how does that affect the way we care for the world that God has entrusted to us, how we formulate our politics and identity in a climate so eager to estrange us from one another, and grow fear and propagate insecurity? Jeremiah has a lot to say to us today, and we would do well to listen deeply. 

And one of the things that will help us to listen deeply and live well is what St Paul is getting at today in his letter to St Timothy, today’s epistle, with which I’ll finish. The Apostle Paul wants us to see that it’s all a matter of perspective. The death and resurrection of Jesus changes everything about how we are invited to see life. Value, purpose, what really matters - it is all fundamentally changed by living in the light of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And (and I’m not being silly here) it is not so unlike the perspective of a gardener. The gardener requires a perspective informed by trust, patience, by a rejection of cheap profits or flash-in-the-pan quick results. We do rejoice in the simple and immediate beauty of a bloom, but it doesn’t stop us having the hope-filled long-term perspective of nurturing and nourishing growth over years and years sometimes, before results start to show. The gardener cannot exploit and walk away, the gardener persists in loving care-ful relationship. There is something of this spirit in St Paul’s words today.

So the Harvest is not such a strange thing in The City after all… You see how it all comes together? The perspective on life that St Paul and Jeremiah are inviting us to embrace. And perhaps the key to it all: how gratitude is not a nicety, but a radical and truthful way of really living - a Eucharistic life.