Harvest and Stewardship
1989 (Year C), 15 October / Pentecost 22
St Dunstan and All Saints Stepney
At college a group of fourteen students were looking to sell magazines for charity one weekend. ‘We’ll go to Leeds,’ I said, ‘We can stay at our house.’ So off we went and fourteen people descended on my mother in her small house, to be fed and watered for two days. As I recall it now she smiled as she cooked for us and seemed genuinely pleased that we were enjoying ourselves.
Things are often not said which should be said, and so it wasn’t until much later when we finally talked about it that I realised how unthinking and ungrateful I had been. My mother’s goodness allowed me to be thoughtless. I should have seen, much quicker what I owed her but I didn’t.
My mother wanted her children to grow and thrive on her kindness, to work along with her efforts in bringing us up. There is a sort of unthankfulness which is far more cruel than an unthankful tongue – it’s the contempt and forgetfulness for other people’s services to us.
And so it is with God. His faithfulness and his unseen dependableness make us ungrateful. But today, at the thanksgiving for the gifts of God’s creation and at the beginning of the Stewardship Programme, we remember our manners for once, and come to give thanks which is most justly due to our creator. It’s not an individual reconciliation like the one between my mother and me – it’s a loud and public one.
And like in the relationships between ourselves and those we love, things in church often go unsaid which are better brought out into the light of day. It has become a convention that we do not talk about money. It’s all a bit worldly maybe, even a bit sordid, not for us spiritual beings here on a Sunday morning. Well I’m here today to correct all that and to tell you quite clearly that it’s your money we’re after, so if you feel embarrassed about all this, and you’d rather not hear it you’d better leave now.
I did rather hope no-one would go.
Your money is important to you; you don’t need me to tell you that. It’s important to everybody – Nigel Lawson’s been learning that the hard way this week. Our children, if we forget to raise their pocket money each birthday soon tell us about it. And no matter how hard we try we can’t get away with the odd 10p rise. Yet we treat the Church and God differently. Our forgetfulness, our lack of manners, allows us to believe that 10p is acceptable and that 50p is generous. Well let me tell you that 10p will hardly pay for the weekly newssheet and 50p might just about put three nails in Michael’s coffin.
An excellent example of the importance of money is a man who worked just round the corner from where Michael used to live. He kept a shop which seemed to open all hours and every time you walked in he used to open the fridge door with a flourish and boom ‘May I introduce you to my fridge’. It didn’t matter what you bought from that fridge it always seemed to cost a pound – maybe he had trouble adding up and a pound was a nice round number; can’t make many mistakes with that can you? But he understood the importance of money better than anybody I’ve ever met – he understood it so well that he’s long since finished with work – he’s got enough salted away – he’s retired.
Yet something happens to our brains when begin to think about our giving to the Church and what we offer to God. We somehow just switch off and different standards begin to apply.
It’s tremendously good that we have the opportunity of celebrating Harvest and starting a Stewardship Programme at the same time, for it reminds us of the worldliness – the earthiness, of our religion. The worldliness and earthiness for which Jesus was prepared to die. It reminds us that all aspects of our lives are caught up in our faith and there are not two bits, the spiritual and the worldly. There is one glorious creation, hallowed by God, who cares for it most deeply and wants us to grow and thrive on his kindness. To work along with his efforts to bring all creation to fullness in him.
We’re here today to begin a process which will involve us assessing all our gifts and talents properly and deciding realistically what is right and proper to offer back to God in thankfulness.
I wish you well in your Stewardship Programme and hope that it is the creative time which God wants for you. I hope too that the next few weeks might provide an opportunity for you all as individuals, and collectively as a church, to sit down, remember your manners, and think hard about the things that are important in your lives and are able to give thanks to God for them.
Gerald Garbutt came to the church where I work and told this story which is most appropriate for you to hear today and I tell it to you by way of reward for listening to me for so long. He met a woman in church who told him that she was feeling all cosy and warm. ‘What’s making you feel so warm?’ he asked, ‘Well I’ve got my harvest festivals on, Father’, she said. ‘Your Harvest Festivals,’ he asked, ‘What on earth are they?’ ‘My winter bloomers,’ came the reply. ‘Why do you call them your Harvest Festivals?’ he asked, ‘Because All is Safely Gathered In’, she said, as she hitched them up. AMEN