We are here to help people love and worship God. We aim to be, and encourage others to become, committed and active disciples of Jesus,
who love God and worship him, who know the power of the Holy Spirit and who show God’s love in every part of their lives.
October means two things to me: Harvest Festivals in school and Church, and thick, warm home-made soup! I come from in a village in North Yorkshire, and although I have never worked in agriculture, I grew up surrounded by it.
In the village Church we gathered produce grown in our gardens and celebrated a harvest supper. It was always an important festival, not only in Church, but for the village. People who only came rarely to Church would come to celebrate the Harvest Festival.
In school we learned how we depend for the food that we eat, not only on local agriculture and local harvests, but on food produced all over the world. We celebrated all who worked to bring the fruits of creation to our tables. It was a lesson in how interconnected our lives are with people, not only in Britain, but throughout the world.
We are learning that lesson again today; in fact it is being forced upon us. This year the cereals in the fields around Ecclesfield and Grenoside were harvested early, and although I am no expert the crops seemed smaller and less abundant.
I heard a farmer on the radio saying that as the climate gets warmer and drier people like him will have to adapt by growing different crops, ones more able to flourish in a hotter and drier climate.
Climate change around the world is affecting harvests on every continent: deserts are growing, fires rage throughout Europe and flooding devastates food production on other continents. the soil on which we depend to grow our crops is becoming degraded.
We depend on the earth for our survival, and we seem to be heading towards a world where food shortages are common. The truth is that we have treated our world for the past few centuries as no more than a store of goods that we can plunder at will, regardless of the consequences, and we only have to turn on the news to see how that is going! We can clearly see that a problem in one part of the world has consequences for all.
There is a better vision of the earth and of our relationship to it. This world is God’s good creation, a treasury for all. It can produce enough for all people. The consequences of our plundering the world affects us all.
The Bible tells us clearly that this world is God’s creation, a gift for all, and it is alive with God’s presence; the creation is holy because it is made by God for God’s purposes. The two parables of creation at the beginning of the Bible speak of humanity as God’s stewards within creation. We enjoy its fruitfulness as God’s good gift; and we are to tend and care for it as God’s stewards placed in His creation.
This year I will celebrate the harvest of the fruits of creation, I will enjoy, as I always do, harvest Festivals in Church and in schools; I will make good and wholesome soups. And I will be praying for a change of heart and a change of vision. It has become a matter of urgency that we re-set our relationship to the creation, I pray that relationship will be healed, and that we will begin to live as God’s stewards within creation; that we will once again see this world as God’s gift, a treasury for all.
God bless,
Tim
St Mary's Church, Priory Road, Ecclesfield, Sheffield, South Yorkshire, S35 9XZ, United Kingdom
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