Harvest Thanksgiving 2017

Deuteronomy 8:7-18 and 2 Corinthians 9:6-15 and Luke 12:16-30

Today is our Harvest Thanksgiving. Today, we come bringing food for the foodbank, recognising that the good gifts God gives us are for the relief of those in need as well as our own well-being; and recognising the injustice that results when, as a society, we choose not to look beyond ourselves. As we come, I want to draw out some principles from our readings that might help us to go deeper.

Turn with me to our reading from Deuteronomy. Moses has led the people through the wilderness, but will not be the one to lead them into the land that God had promised to their ancestors. So, Moses gives them his final words of wisdom. The first thing I want to draw out is the idea that the land God is giving them has within it everything they need, either directly or through resources to trade. Of course, it will require effort—God will no longer drop manna and quail into their laps; they will need to sow and reap, mill and bake; they will need to mine and smelt and forge—but the land itself contains everything they need. And I wonder whether we believe that the same is true of the ‘land’ God has settled us in, Sunderland, in the north east of England? Are the resources we need, if we are to flourish in this place, to be found in this city, this region, this nation? What do you think? Is what being true then and there also true here and now? Is this a good land too, or a scorched earth?

The second thing I want to draw out relates to the experience of plenty and the experience of need. Moses goes on to tell the people that the resources of the land will multiply. If you have a male goat and a few female goats, you will get a flock of goats. In an agricultural society and a trade-based society, resources tend to multiply, at least in the long-term. And Moses understood that there was an inherent danger in that: the danger that when we have plenty, we attribute it to ourselves. We believe that we deserve it, that we have earned it through our effort. And because we attribute plenty to ourselves, we must equally attribute lack or need as earned or deserved. Moreover, we must believe that the earth is not fruitful as abundant gift, and so we must compete for resources: which in turn casts those in need as a threat to our plenty. Moses confronts such a tendency head-on: all we have is a gift from God. At times we might need to lose everything to rediscover that in our inability to meet our own needs, God provides: and, in his mercy, the times that humble and test us may turn out, in the end, to do us good. We may be invited by God to experience such times, and may discover them to do us good. We do not, however, get to discover that for anyone else: we do not get to decide that having to rely on a foodbank will do other people good.

Where, then, do we experience multiplication? And where do we experience the humbling of vulnerability and need? Perhaps we experience both in our Iranian brothers and sisters, a community that has grown from one person to many. Their faith has greatly encouraged many of us in our faith. But their lack of resources has also become our lack of resources, our shared need: and our shared opportunity to experience God’s provision.

Turn with me to our reading from 2 Corinthians. The context of this passage is this: the church in Jerusalem is experiencing the hardship of a local famine, and Paul is mobilising the churches he has planted in Greece to send financial support. They have been blessed—spiritually—by the church in Jerusalem; now they can bless them—materially, in this instance—in return. The church in Corinth had committed to give a certain amount, but were now struggling to raise it. Paul encourages them to give as they have made up their mind to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, but cheerfully and as a way of entering-into God’s abundant provision.

Each year, the Bishop of Durham writes to the parish churches of the Diocese asking them to prayerfully consider what they will contribute to the shared cost of providing ministry across our communities. The Parochial Church Council has agreed that we will give £30,000 this year, and the same amount next year. In fact, we would like to give more, but in considering our circumstances as a congregation, this is the amount that we believe is enough beyond our financial resources to require faith while not being beyond the faith we have at present.

This is, indeed, where we find ourselves. Financially, we are behind on our target; but we have faith that it is what God would have us give, and that God will provide. Indeed, I know that this is a congregation that knows God’s generosity and has been set free to be generous ourselves, because again and again I am blown away by the generosity of the Minster congregation. But we need to talk about our financial commitments and needs, because we have a turnover of committed givers who move on, or have died, and new people joining our community.

Even as we bring generous gifts to help those in need of food, this passage from 2 Corinthians gives us the opportunity to think about our committed financial giving. There are two things you can do. The first is, if you do not at present give a regular, committed donation—that is, giving that enables us to plan a budget—then please consider doing so, and talk to Sandra. If you already give, thank you. Please review your giving regularly. You may be able to increase it, cheerfully; you may need to reduce it, if you are to remain cheerful, in order that it doesn’t become burdensome: what matters is that it is an active decision you can act on.

The second thing is this. On Sunday 3^rd December—Advent Sunday—we will be holding a Gift Day, on which we will celebrate the generosity of this place and this people, expressed in the giving of our time, our skills, our money. We will take up a collection towards our Parish Share, and I invite you to prayerfully consider what God might be asking you to contribute, over-and-above your regular, committed giving, and to bring your gift that day. More on that to come.

Finally, turn with me to our Gospel passage, from Luke. The famous parable of the rich fool, who hoarded his wealth for himself instead of blessing others; contrasted with God’s abundance on display in the goodness of the land. I am struck by God’s words to the man whose land produced abundantly: ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’

I think we assume that God says this because the man will die that night—and indeed, that is implied. But I wonder whether his demise is incidental, or, rather, simply becomes the point at which it is too late to change? I wonder whether the point of the story is this: that our life is demanded of us by God continually—not as slaves, but as covenant partners in creating a society marked by loving-kindness and steadfast fidelity and mercy and justice. And that, therefore, all the resources we have been given are always to be shared: so, we are to continually ask, who else will benefit, who will share in what we have? In this way—all that we are and all that we have freely given to God—we discover ourselves to be truly rich. And discovering this may we increasingly be known for ‘blessing our communities in the name of Jesus for the transformation of us all.’*

*this, from the Durham Diocese mission statement.

Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity 2017

Isaiah 5:1-7 and Philippians 3:4b-14 and Matthew 21:33-46

I’ve been sitting with our reading from Isaiah this week. In it, the prophet sings a song of the love of God for his vineyard. The song tells of how God chose his site, on a very fertile hill, taking into account aspect and drainage; of how he turned over the soil, and got earth under his fingernails clearing out the stones; of how he selected the best vines, and planted them; built a watch-tower to protect them; and then, while the grapes grew, how he hewed-out a wine-vat from a large rock, a basin in which to tread the grapes, with a channel cut for the juice to flow out from, to be collected in wineskins to ferment. It is a horticulturally-slow labour of love, that conjures up the image of a hard patch of skin on the ball of the thumb from the rub of a tool handle, and the deep satisfaction of tired limbs at the end of the day, when God looks at what he has done and declares it good. Very good. But when the grapes have grown, they are small and bitter.

The prophet turns from singing of God to giving voice to God, asking his listeners, ‘What did I do wrong? Was there anything more I should have done and failed to do?’ And the audience surely responds, ‘No, you’re good.’

God continues: ‘This, then, is what I plan to do: I shall take my cultivated vineyard and return it to the wild. I will no longer prune or hoe or irrigate, no longer tend the garden. If my vines choose to bear wild grapes, then wild let them be.’ And the audience, listening to the song, must surely agree that this is an entirely reasonable course of action. And then comes the sting in the tail: you are the vineyard, o listeners, o divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah. God expected fruitful lives, a celebration of his goodness; but instead all he found was the bitterness of injustice.

Alongside listening to Isaiah’s song—and wondering whether we celebrate all that God has done for us, or blame God for the bitterness of life—I have been thinking about our second reading, from Paul’s letter to the church in Philippi, where he lists the ways in which God had prepared his life with good things in hope of fruitfulness, and in response longs to be fruitful, to offer something precious back to God just as grapes, when crushed—their skins now a waste product—offer up wine to the owner of the vineyard.

And I have been thinking about the ways in which God has invested in me, within the context of a ‘vineyard’ or community of his people, or, church.

The first church I can remember being part of was a city-centre Church of Scotland. There, I drew-in a love for scripture, in a place where being allowed to go out to the evening service as well as the morning one, at around the same age as starting secondary school, was held as a real rite-of-passage into adulthood by the youth.

In time, we moved from there to a more local church. That community had come out of a Brethren Assembly. The Brethren don’t have clergy, but allow any adult man to share whatever God had spoken to him that week in his personal devotions; and this group came out because they felt that women should be empowered to share on an equal footing. This was a church that both valued and questioned their tradition. Others joined, from other backgrounds; and this community studied the Bible and Church History together to determine what they believed on a wide range of issues. So, for example, Brethren and Baptists dedicated their children and practiced adult baptism, while families who had joined from Presbyterian or Episcopalian backgrounds baptised their children. In this and other matters, the members of West Glasgow New Church considered their own practice, consolidating or changing their view, but seeking to create room for those whose conscience led them to uphold a different practice.

When I went to university, in England, I discovered both the Church of England and the charismatic movement. In Sheffield, we experienced services where, in response to hearing God’s word, scores of people would come forward for prayer, week after week, deeply aware of God’s holiness and of their need for God’s healing touch or simply life-giving presence in their lives. It was like those accounts in the Gospels of whole towns turning out for Jesus to heal their sick. Or the crowds who followed him from place to place; for this was a community that engaged not only with getting healed-up but with the lifelong process of becoming more like Jesus.

For my curacy, we moved to a church in north Liverpool. In a similar way to how a significant part of our congregation here in Sunderland is made up of asylum-seekers and refugees, a significant part of the congregation there was made up of people in Recovery [Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous]. Their lives were messy. Their relationships were messy. Their lives were being transformed by Jesus, but that is a lifelong process—with lots of set-backs along the way. In fact, the kind of process we are talking about in such broken lives takes several generations, because our brokenness has a big impact on our children: the good news is that God works to save not only us, but our children and our children’s children. In many ways, the church was dysfunctional; but it was a community being transformed by the difficult, costly love of Jesus—and it held out hope to the wider community through its foodbank and debt advice and playgroup and community breakfasts.

From inner-city Liverpool we moved to the suburban village of Birkdale, where I continued my curacy in two churches that were wrestling with the concerns of growing old. Both congregations wanted to grow younger, and this too was a third-age issue: many of them were grandparents who lived far [in some cases, across the globe] from their grandchildren, and needed more children in their lives. They were also worried that, as more of their peers died, their story would be lost, because our stories are held collectively on trust for one another, and our stories matter. I guess at times they felt like grapes crushed underfoot, and certainly as with pressed grapes there was a certain amount of rubbish to be strained out, but by-and-large the fruitfulness of their lives was sweet, when it could so easily have been bitter.

All of which brings me to this place, this vineyard, with all that has gone before in the past. The past is a hillside, or several hillsides, I am thankful to have been planted in; but I don’t want to live in the past. The questions that concern me are, how has God shown his faithful loving-kindness to us, here? Will we sing a love-song for the Lord, our beloved, concerning our lives, our community—or will we withhold our song and so be bitter to the taste? And if we sing, what story would our love-song tell?

I think it might tell stories of sharing in the sufferings and death and resurrection life of Christ. Of Mackem men and women who have known bereavement, from the death of a parent or partner to the empty-nest of children leaving home. Of Iranians who have lost everything. All discovering that they are loved into new life by God, slowly, patiently, at great cost. Learning to embrace our fragile life and offer it back in fruitful thanks and praise, in taking a stand against injustice and rejoicing when the cry of the orphan and widow and alien is heard. Failing and falling, and finding in the end of the world as we have known it the anticipation of the one to come.

At times, our song might be led by the choir and the organ, but also resound in the clanging of tins for the foodbank, and the slap of feet at our ceilidhs, and the dancing of children at the summer specials. Or in the silent prayers raised heavenward every day in this place, and the splash of colour of the flowers, and the stained-glass projected onto the white wall of the chancel. In the register that records every child and adult baptised here, and in the eulogies spoken at funerals. And in the bringing forward of bread and wine, broken, poured-out, and shared together.

So, let us sing a new song to the Lord, songs of sufferings and death and resurrection. And in the words of the Choristers’ Prayer: ‘Grant that what we sing with our lips we may believe in our hearts, and what we believe in our hearts we may show forth in our lives. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.’