HARVEST

TERRIBLE HARVEST JOKE:

As an atheist walked through the forest, he smiled at the beauty that was all around him and said, "What natural wonders the powers of evolution have created."

Just then he heard a rustling and a 7-foot-tall grizzly bear was tearing down the path towards him. The man took off like a shot, and when he got up the courage to look back, he saw the bear was catching up fast.

He tried with all his strength to pick up the pace, but he tripped and crashed to the ground. As he tried to get up, the bear jumped on his chest and picked up one paw to whack him.

The atheist screamed, "Oh my God!!!"

Time stopped! The bear froze. The forest was silent. Even the river stopped moving.

As a bright light shone upon the man, a voice boomed from the heavens, "You deny my existence for all of these years, teach others I don't exist, and even credit creation to a cosmic accident. Do you expect me to help you out of this predicament? Am I to count you as a believer?"

The atheist looked directly into the light, "It would be hypocritical of me to suddenly ask you to treat me as a Christian now, but perhaps could you make the bear a Christian?"

"Very well," the voice said.

The light went out, the river ran again, and the sounds of the forest resumed. And then the bear dropped its right paw, brought both paws together, bowed its head and spoke:

"Lord, for what I am about to receive, make me truly grateful."

HARVEST THANKS

Well today is Harvest and Harvest provides us with the opportunity to say thank you to God for the many physical and practical blessings God lavishes on us.

PHYSICAL STUFF IS VERY GOOD

So perhaps the first thing to note is how practical and down to earth our faith is. It’s about the physical things around us - it’s about remembering that God made this world, God loves this world and God hasn’t abandoned this world. The physical world was so good that God himself stepped into it in the person of Jesus and walked and ate and drank and slept in just the same way that we do. So don’t let people tell you that the Christian faith is JUST all about spirituality or airy fairy theory or clever intellectual stuff. It’s also about tins and dried pasta, about potatoes and beans, about pounds and euros, about soil and rivers.

Psalm 24 starts: The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it!

So traditionally Harvest Festival was a way of saying thank you to God for a good harvest of crops from the fields. Harvest is about:

• considering our stewardship of God’s gifts ...and ...

• saying thank God for the things he’s given us.

IF NOT MARROWS, MAYBE MONEY...

Being mostly Townies perhaps we’re a step removed from our own involvement in agricultural produce, but if most of us don’t produce marrows or onions or whatever, most of us “produce” money (wages, benefits, pension etc.) and one way of saying thank you to God for his provision is to use some of our blessing to bless others...

This year our Harvest has two themes:

• in a practical way we’re going to support the SeaView Project

• we’re going to remind ourselves of the Green Policy we drew up earlier this year.

THE SEA VIEW PROJECT

1. The SeaView Project is based in our parish (Southwater Rd) and they work with the homeless and badly housed. Although most clients are men they do a brilliant job in getting all vulnerable people into accommodation. Each day during the week the centre is open for advise, socialising, provision of basics, health care and cheap meals. At the weekends they make up “food parcels” to support clients while the centre is closed. At St John’s we’ve been donating Harvest collections for the past 4 years and running a regular box at the back of church - people have been fantastic about popping in the odd item every now and again and SeaView have been very grateful for the dozens of boxes I’ve taken down to the Project.

So our practical gifts this year will go towards helping a very vulnerable section of our society on our own doorstep.

GOING GREEN

2. And secondly we’re using this Harvest to re-launch our Green Policy.

You may recall that in 2005 St John’s signed the Fair Trade Pledge and we, officially became a “Fair Trade Church” which means that we try where possible to use products which have been fairly traded in our common life together - such as tea coffee, sugar, wine and fruit juices. And we will also try where possible and practical to buy these products for our homes as well...

This is a Good Thing because it guarantees the people who produce the goods we so easily take for granted, a fair, just and stable wage for their efforts. We may pay a few pennies more, but that can make a big difference to a community in the poorest parts of the world where it might mean clean water, or education are available where they weren’t before.

When the bishops introduced the idea and asked parishes to look at their response the Bishop of Horsham pressed the issue by saying that we “couldn’t not” sign this pledge - that it was a practical way of loving our neighbours.

So far so good. And the Green Policy follows on from this good start. It came out of an excellent “home grown” intensive Lent course this year where we looked at the environment from a Christian perspective and considered our stewardship of God’s creation. From this arose the Green Policy which the PCC voted to accept in May 2006.

We believe that how we live is an important part of our witness as Christian people. We need to be as consistent as we can be to what we say we believe. To use posh words: orthopraxis (right actions) comes from orthodoxy (right belief). How we use the resources with which God has blessed us is part of our stewardship of his Creation. That includes water, soil, other life forms we share this planet with, minerals, the seas, as well as how we deal with the waste we produce. An old Kenyan proverbs says that we don’t own the earth; we borrow it from our children...

In this context as we think about our lives and the implications of the gospel about loving God and loving our neighbours as we love ourselves (Mt 22.37-39), there are two aspects to how we live:

• the “green” issues which affect the planet we live on; and

• the “ethical” issues which affect the people and animals we share the planet with.

We believe these aspects are intrinsically linked: how we live and the choices we make affect others

• who produce the goods we consume (clothes, food, beverages, consumables etc.);

• who experience the waste we discard and the pollution we create;

• who suffer oppression by social, economic or political factors which we support by our choices.

So we believe it is our responsibility to do the very utmost we can to reduce our “eco footprint”, corporately and individually; to share the resources we have access to; to try to eliminate the suffering of others through the choices we make; to work for a fairer and more just society - another way of putting all that is to talk about working for the coming of the Kingdom of God.

This is the thinking behind a Green Policy for St John’s.

‘For the Church of the 21st Century, good ecology is not an optional extra but a matter of justice. It is therefore central to what it means to be a Christian.’
Archbishop Rowan Williams

You should each have been given a copy of the Environment Policy - so do take it home and pin it to your fridge and consider whether there are steps you might be able to take to go Green!

Fr. Andrew Perry
Rector, St John the Evangelist, Pevensey Rd, St Leonards on Sea