Recent Sermons

HARVEST 6 October 2024

By Revd Dr Frances Caroe (Curate)

Joel 2.21-27 || Psalm 128 || 1 Timothy 6.6-10 || Matthew 6.25-33

It is hard to celebrate the harvest these days.

'The Lord has poured down for you abundant rain,' says the prophet Joel. But September 2024 was the wettest month ever recorded in Oxfordshire. This year's harvest was bad, but next year's harvest is already under threat.

'Do not worry about what you will eat or what you will drink,' says Christ. But the fragility of our food supply was exposed only four years ago, when supermarket shelves were emptied by nothing but panic.

'Look at the birds of the air,' says Christ again. But the all-species index of British birds is down 15% since 1970, a figure which masks far greater declines in some areas -- 60%, for example, in the farmland birds that surround us here in Wantage.

And finally, the psalmist cries, 'Peace be upon Israel!' But tomorrow marks the one-year anniversary of the Hamas attack on the State of Israel, which began the latest cycle of conflict in that region. What's more, last week, the 30 September, marked the second year since Russia declared its annexation of four Ukrainian oblasts. All this reminds us that so much conflict, so much death, takes place because of land: who owns it, who tills it, who may eat of its fruits.

Even here, whilst we may celebrate the harvest today in our donations, our Harvest Lunch, and our services, nearly one quarter of English school pupils are eligible for free school meals -- in other words, one in four English children are deemed to be at risk of not having enough to eat. We're doing slightly better than that average here in Wantage. Here, it's only one in five children.

On top of all which, most of are increasingly divorced from the need to celebrate the harvest that our forebears once felt. When almost everyone had a hand in food production, not least in the harvesting itself, almost everyone was personally aware of the work that had been done to put food on the table. Moreover, when food production was genuinely uncertain, and a bad harvest meant that some of us would surely starve, to celebrate whatever was brought in was a natural response. But now, many of us are hazy about how, exactly, our food reaches our plates; and in this country, at least, famine has been largely unknown for over a hundred years. So, many of us do not truly understand what it is that we are celebrating today.

But famine does still happen in the world. And that famine happens anywhere, now that stockpiling and advances in food production mean that we could avoid it if we wished, means that famine anywhere is no longer the consequence of misfortune, but the consequence of human activity: of greed, of war, of inaction, of injustice -- in short, of sin.

It is hard to celebrate the harvest these days.

***

Our scripture today talks about how to respond to God's blessings, and it speaks in terms of consequences. Not, importantly, of conditions -- God does not say, 'If you do this, then I shall do that.' Where is the love, the mercy in that? No, God and God's good creation is striving to bless us, if only we will heed God's word.

Thus, today's passage from Joel comes after a call to repentance, which we hear on Ash Wednesday: 'Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, with mourning; rend your hearts and not your clothing.' When we act in accordance with God's will, or repent when we catch ourselves not so doing, we become able to receive God's blessings, which God is always pouring out for us.

A little example -- will you harvest wheat, if you don't plant it? God does not curse you if you don't plant it, but you won't be blessed with a harvest. However, if you do plant it, then shoots will spring up from the earth and a harvest will form in the head. This is what I mean when I say that God, and God's good creation, is always striving to bless us, if only we will listen.

Will hoverflies and bees not pollinate our crops, without our lifting our finger, if we do but let them, and do not kill them off?

Will there not be food in the shops and on our tables, if we do not panic-buy and hoard it from others?

Will there not be peace, if we do not prepare for war?

Today's passage from 1 Timothy describes a Christian approach to living in the world. 'If we have food and clothing' -- if we have food and clothing -- 'we will be content. But the rich...' The problem in this world is never scarcity. There is no scarcity in God's economy. The problem is our hoarding of God's abundance, of God's blessings: of wealth, of land, and of its fruits.

***

How do we, as Christians, respond? Obviously this is beyond the individual. It's beyond billionaires, beyond governments, beyond multinational corporations -- to say nothing of those who are only victims in all this, victims of others' greed, without any wealth or power of their own. That's because this is fundamentally a problem of human nature -- or, rather, of human un-nature -- that is, of sin; of which we are all (in the end) victims.

But -- Jesus comes not only to save us when we cannot save ourselves, he also invites us to anticipate the Kingdom in our own lives. And so, if we are blessed -- if we are blessed -- let us be content with our blessings; not eager for greater riches, not falling into the temptation to grasp for more or to hoard. And let none of us worry about having, but worry only about being: 'striving first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness'; as a consequence of which, our harvests may truly be blessings, and our celebrations of them without restraint.

MICHAELMAS (St Michael & All Angels) 29 September 2024

by Revd. Katherine Price

Genesis 28.10-17 || Psalm 103.19-end || Revelation 12.7-12 || John 1.47-end

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. 

On the roof of the royal chapel, at the palace of Versailles there are thirty-two angels. They don’t of course look like angels as they are described in the Bible but the way that most of us expect angels to look: cute little cherubs with big wings, covered in gold, each made from one-and-a-half tons of lead.

Versailles is where the French Royal Family lived before the Revolution. You might have seen it on the olympics coverage over the Summer as it was one of the venues in Paris. And if you’ve seen the film Marie Antoinette with Kirsten Dunst You might remember that the day at court would start with everybody crowding into the king’s bedchamber to watch him being woken up and washed and dressed all of course with great ceremony and splendour! If anybody wanted to leave the king's presence they couldn’t just turn around and walk out of the room: they had to walk backwards all the way with tiny little steps. All of this splendour surrounding the king’s majesty was reinforced by the building itself: To get to the throne room, you pass through a series of rooms each one grander than the last so that by the time you come into the presence of the king you are well and truly intimidated… I’ve known managers who set up their offices in the same way!

Angels are if you like the courtiers of heaven in traditional accounts of who they are and what they do they stand around God’s throne, waiting on him and doing his will. And just as there is a hierarchy in a palace from the grandest duke to the lowest lackey all decked out in their appropriate attire so, in traditional ‘angelology’ – yes, there is a subject called ‘angelology’ – There is a hierarchy of angels: Seraphim, cherubim, archangels – we’ve all heard of those – But also thrones, dominions, principalities, virtues, powers… Look out for a list of them when we sing the hymn after communion!

‘Rank on rank the host of heaven’ – The heavenly hosts from the Field Marshal St Michael himself down to the lowliest non-commissioned cherub: Each one rung on a ladder with God at the top and us at the bottom.

There is both something beautiful and something fundamentally sad and wrong about that vision of heaven. The beauty of this vision – the ranks of angels all worshipping around the throne – is that it’s a vision of order, of harmony, of obedience everything and everyone being where they should be, with God right at the centre.

When the prophets were granted visions of heaven and of angels they understood it to be a glimpse of the true and hidden reality. It was a reminder to them, and to us, that God is ultimately in control  and that the world is good and beautifully made even when it looks as though all is chaos and nothing makes any sense at all. That is why we try to reflect something of this order and harmony in our worship especially when we sing together the ‘sanctus’ – holy holy holy – the song of the angels around the throne. It is our prayer – your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

But this vision of heaven goes wrong if we forget the words that God says to Jacob under the ladder of angels: “I am with you wherever you go” – If we forget that we are more likely to meet an angel in the wilderness than high up on a palace roof covered in gold.

In the years before Jesus’ birth people felt as though God was very far away; he was on his throne in heaven – absolutely holy, absolutely perfect and we were on earth - beneath his feet and maybe beneath his notice. And that is when people became very interested in angels. Angels have turned up throughout the Bible

But it’s really in these few generations before Jesus that angels become really fascinating. People want to know their names – Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, Uriel – All of the names end in ‘el’ meaning ‘God’, because the Angels belong to God and serve God. And it’s in this period that we first get stories about fallen angels, about the devil and his angels being cast out of heaven. You might be surprised to learn, that’s not in the mainstream Old Testament bible! 

One of the things that the Sadduccees and the Pharisees argued about is that the Pharisees believed in angels – they believed that God could speak to people through dreams, through visions, and through angels. So angels were messengers, they were go-betweens they were a way that ordinary worshippers might hope to have some communication with this very distant very great very high and holy God in the same way that in the court of Versailles you might hope to catch the eye of a footman who would catch the eye of a chamberlain who might take a message to the king… 

This encounter in our Gospel between Jesus and Nathaniel is about as far from the throne room of Versailles as you can possibly get. Nathaniel is face to face with his king – ‘you are the king of Israel!’ he says. And yet he has not just walked through a dozen gilded state rooms, he has not handed his calling card to a doorman, he has not bowed low to the floor. In fact, he’s just insulted Jesus by badmouthing his hometown.

In Jesus Christ, this whole great hierarchy – this ladder with its different rungs and ranks – is totally collapsed. Because if this ladder reaches from earth to heaven, from human beings to God himself, Jesus is both ends at once. He is the ladder, all by himself. In Jesus the man, we meet God the Son, right there, face to face, just as God once walked in the garden with Adam and Eve before we put all this distance between us.

The vision of angels should not remind us just of God’s extraordinary holiness but also of his intimate and active involvement in every moment of our human lives. The vision of heaven which is given to John the Divine in the book of Revelation is not still and peaceful and restful but dynamic, full of movement, full of conflict. There is war in heaven. The angels are, first and foremost, the ‘hosts of heaven’ – the heavenly armies. But if the vision of heaven is not the vision of ‘somewhere else’ but of ‘how things really are’ that means we too are part of a cosmic war, and what we do here in earth matters. So we should not be surprised if it sometimes seems that we – The church, Christian communities – Are more rather than less vulnerable to temptation, to division, to sin and to schism – to all the assaults of evil - than those who are, as it were, non-combattants in the heavenly struggle.

In this vision of war in heaven it is not really the angels who win the battle - or rather, the angels do not win alone. Rather, we are told that it is “our comrades”, the members of the church on earth, who have won the victory. And they have conquered not by violence, not by force but by “the blood of the lamb, by the word of their testimony” and by their own self-sacrifice. In this topsy-turvy mirror-image world we see as heaven it is by choosing words rather than violence that we strike a blow against the enemy; by enduring suffering, when it cannot be avoided, that we defend ourselves; by choosing forgiveness rather than vengeance, that we strengthen ourselves for the fight. And in this topsy-turvy world of heaven the one who is high and mighty on his throne surrounded by rank on rank of angels is also the one standing right beside us and whispering in our ear, “I am with you and will keep you wherever you go.”

Amen.