Harvest and fairness.

This week we celebrate the 236th anniversary of Keyston URC, and our harvest!

I have split the 'sermon' into 2 talks on each reading

 Psalm 145: 1-9

 

Talk 1: Giving thanks

The Psalms are the hymn book of the Bible – they are words used to express what people want to say .. or sing.. about the God they believe in, and the way their lives are with God taking care of them.

 

This Psalm (145) was written in Hebrew as an acrostic – with each line starting with a different letter of the alphabet. In English it would be a line beginning with A, then B, then C and so on.

 

You have heard how many times that Psalm talks about praising God – or proclaiming how great God is, or thanking God. I think the idea of an acrostic is the writer’s way of amazing us with a great list of things God has done.

 

Let’s try it!

Let’s see if we can think of things to thank God for starting with each letter of the alphabet (or at least the first 9 letters, as we had the first 9 verses of Psalm 145..

 

A…thank you God for …

B..C..D..E..F..G..H to I

 

Being grateful to God, as we are at Harvest.. includes taking time to think about all that we owe to God’s goodness.

 

And when we take time to list these things, we are also helping other generations who come after us to share our faith that God is the giver of all good gifts.

The Psalm says ‘What you have done will be praised from one generation to the next’ – when we hear what the generations before us were thankful for, we realise just how great God is – and how much he loves people.

 

One of the things this Chapel is proud of in its history is that the vestry here was the first meeting place of Keyston Young Farmers in 1948. 

 

Just this week I have met the new generation of Young Farmers, now meeting in the Camrose Community Centre & Joe and Aled are with us today. 

By chance we also had the funeral service for Patricia Rees of Dudswell Farm here this week, and I was especially moved to hear in the address given by Pat’s grandson, Tom,  that she and her husband Charles met through Young Farmers. It was great to hear Tom say “Grandma joined Young Farmers, and like so many of us here it became an addiction”. One generation can really pass on to the next something that is good news.

 

Over 236 years now, people of this Chapel have tried to pass on the good news that here we can meet with God and with one another, and grow good things in our lives and community.

 

As we celebrate the harvest every year, God continues to bless us and through our celebrations we remind one another how much God has given, how much we have for which to be thankful. We pass on the message of thanks and praise.

 

                  

Reading: Matthew 20: 1-16

 

Talk 2: Fairness?

This parable of Jesus once got me into real trouble!

It was when I was teaching (which I’m horrified to realise is about 35 years ago!): we used to talk it in turns to lead the School Assembly, and one day I was given this parable, of the workers in the vineyard, to talk about. 

I can’t remember what I said, but I found this description on ‘BBC Bitesize notes for GCSE Religious Studies’ this week, and it’s probably just about what I said at the time:

 

“The parable means that those people who consider themselves the most important in the Kingdom of God because of their good deeds will be surprised - this is not how God’s grace works.”

 

I probably said something like ‘God’s grace, God’s love for people, isn’t fair – it’s better than any of us deserve’. 

We finished the assembly, trooped off into the first lessons of the day, and by 10.45 and breaktime I was ready for a cup of tea. When I got inside the staff room, I was nearly pinned to the wall “that’s a terrible story” “so unfair” “makes Jesus sounds like a communist or something”. 

Ever since then I have always been careful in what I say about this parable, because it definitely has the capacity to get people worked up. It just isn’t fair.

The people who have worked all day only get the same amount as the ones who have just worked an hour. But I think Jesus wants us to feel something when we hear this story – he wants us to get outraged.

 

Jesus starts the conclusion of the story with the level of pay for the worker who worked the least. Imagine this is the fair level of pay – you can see why the ones who worked all day hoped for more. Surely the level should go up in line with the amount of work done.

When everyone gets the same, they feel outraged.

 

But imagine Jesus had told the story differently.

If he started with the ones who worked all day and got the fair amount.Then people might have expected the ones who worked half a day to get half that, and the ones who worked only an hour just to get a small amount – that would be fair. 

If the story was told that way round we might feel a little pang for the ones who only worked an hour – what they got was better than nothing, but it’s not really enough.

But Jesus say that all the workers get a living wage – they all get enough, the level of pay is the same for all of them.

When we get worked up about fairness in this story the way round its told, really we should feel that same anger when we hear about people not having enough work, and therefore enough pay to survive. We should be angry that some people’s lives are always below the line of what we think is enough.

 

One reading of this parable is that when we see injustice, we should feel outrage: and want to speak out. Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is like this, a place where his followers get angry about injustice and unfairness and want to speak up about it. God’s love really is for all people, and our love should be, too.

 

So how does this affect our celebration of harvest?

We are thankful for all we have, and grateful to God for his gifts to us: but is we just rub our hands and say “how lovely!” we are forgetting Jesus’ teaching to love our neighbour . I had a look in our cupboards at home to see what was there – and it turned out there were quite a few duplicates of things:

Pasta – not got round to eating since the grandchildren visited a few weeks ago.

Hot chocolate – my favourite little treat before bed, and the other jar was getting low.

Teabags – I never want to run out of those!

Tins of beans – another thing we usually have a few of on the shelf.

I’m very lucky that I don’t have to think too hard about these things – they were just there, ready for when we need them. But this harvest, instead of thinking ‘lucky me!’ I’m thinking ‘what about the people who look at their cupboards at the end of the month and see almost nothing?’. And so these extra things can go to PATCH – to be available to help people who need them – to bring the empty cupboards and the full cupboards closer to the same level.

 

It’s a small step towards getting the levels right – making sure all God’s children have enough.

I pray this harvest God moves us to live with a generosity and a love like his, and opens our eyes to the needs of others, in Jesus’ name. Amen,