Harvest Festival

Among the great curiosities of the history of the Church of England is the fact that celebrating a Harvest Festival only became a popular feature of parochial life after the industrial revolution. The academic year may still be structured around the assumption that people must be available over the summer months to gather the harvest, which is why we wait until Michaelmas for the new academic year to begin, but the truth is that most of us have very little direct experience of the agricultural cycle at all.

We sing hymns like ‘We plough the fields and scatter’, and ‘Come, ye thankful people, come’ – note both hymns date from the nineteenth century, the first being the translation of an eighteenth century German hymn – but I suspect that most of us would not know what to do with a plough if invited to operate it. Some of us may grow our own food on an allotment or tend a few herbs in a plant pot, but our subsistence rests largely on the labours of others. Supermarket shelves are packed with all sorts of produce from across the world: asparagus from Peru, green beans from Kenya. We rarely give much thought to the mechanization of modern agriculture, or the working conditions of agricultural labourers – particularly those from Eastern Europe – living a nomadic existence, picking fruit in the summer or sorting salad leaves in industrial scale sheds, while Aldi, and Morrisons, and Tesco, and Waitrose, pull down their barns and build larger ones.

And yet as we discovered in the course of the pandemic, food security in Britain today is fragile. We grow very little of the food that we actually eat as a nation, leaving us at the mercy of international markets. The quality of our food is directly related to questions of health, obesity, diabetes and heart disease. And of course the prevalence of food banks alerts us to the fact that there are people in Britain today who are hungry, sometimes to choose between a square meal and heating their home. We are becoming acutely aware of the fact that the neoliberal economic consensus, which has held sway since the second world war, is failing us. And we are becoming sensitized to the fact that food security is an increasingly political issue. One only has to contemplate the war in Ukraine, one of the great bread-baskets of the world, and the distortions caused by the amount of Ukrainian grain flooding into Poland in recent months, to recognize just how complex questions of food security have become for us.

Now, this sermon is not going to continue in the style of a feature article in The New Statesman. But it has become a truism that neoliberalism and the ideology of the free market has adopted an expansive mission in recent years. There is a widespread assumption that all spheres of social life, in order to achieve maximum efficiency and potential, should be subject to market conditions. We use the market as the lens through which we order and make sense of the worlds of education, politics, health, social care, welfare, employment, even leisure. And the tragedy is that the Church is just as vulnerable to this phenomenon. The evangelistic endeavours of the last fifty years have so often adopted the methods of the market for religious purposes: with a bit of glitzy branding, we imagine that we can render the Christian gospel as a saleable commodity. The strategy of the Church of England in recent years has been to ensure that the average parish church becomes more productive, generating an ever-increasing number of ‘missionary disciples’. To use an analogy employed recently by one of my former students, this vision of the future of the parish church is rather like the Department for Culture, Media and Sport turning every public library into a bookshop, insisting that the person who has come in to idly browse or simply sit and enjoy the warmth, now has to buy the book. Such a strategy would seem foolhardy when one considers the plight of independent bookshops and the impact of internet purchasing.

But by focusing entirely on ‘missionary disciples’, our leaders are in danger of losing sight of the fact that the ministry of Jesus was accompanied not only by his disciples, but also by the crowds, and by his friends. The paradox of course is that while the leadership of the Church of England adopts a pattern of neoliberal religion for its parishes, Bishops make speeches in the House of Lords lamenting the way in which the ideology of the free market has ravaged the communities they serve.

And yet, such a strategy is bound to be rather perilous, perilous because the Christian gospel is not a saleable commodity. The gospel is often difficult and demanding as a way of life. As the memorials on these walls remind us, it may involve martyrdom and sacrifice and death. This way of life makes demands of us. This way of life alerts us to the reality of sin, our own fragility and brokenness, our own complicity in patterns of selfishness and injustice, our need of forgiveness and mercy. This is a way of life which challenges us to see beyond a world of restless competition and anxious self-defence, whether it be the war in Ukraine or the violence of Gaza.

Jesus says: ‘Do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing.’ Jesus presents a theological vision to us which possesses its own integrity, which doesn’t arrogantly pretend that it can displace other disciplines, ways of thinking about our life together, but which recognizes that there really are different ways of talking about human activity and flourishing and that not everything can be reduced to one sovereign model or standard of value. And yes, that applies to theology, just as it applies to economics, and evolutionary biology. But what Christian theology does enable us to see is that our lives are characterized by mutuality. As Rowan Williams so eloquently puts it – and yes, I see the irony, I know he writes book reviews for The New Statesman – but he says this: ‘The Christian Scriptures describe the union of those who are identified with Jesus Christ as having an organic quality, a common identity shaped by the fact that each depends on all others for their life. No element in the Body is dispensable or superfluous; what affects one affects all, for good and ill, since both suffering and flourishing belong to the entire organism,… The model of human existence that is taken for granted is one in which each person is both needy and needed, both dependent on others and endowed with gifts for others. And while this is not on the whole presented as a general social programme, it is manifestly what the biblical writers see as the optimal shape of human life, life in which the purposes of God are made plain.’

This theological anthropology lies at the heart of the Christian theological vision, even if it presents us with a kind of cognitive dissonance which propels us beyond the cheesy cliché of your average Victorian harvest hymn. Attentive to the working conditions of agricultural labourers, the instability of our food supply, the challenge of climate change, even in the face of all their complexity, we learn that we do not need to be anxious or afraid. For Jesus invites us to see beyond our own dramas of success and failure, of profit and loss, of scarcity and abundance, to recognize our shared identity in him. This is pure grace, a gift which we receive in the sacrament of baptism, a gift which we receive again and again in the eucharist as honoured guests at Christ’s table. In this gift, we discover the grace which coheres in the generosity and the mutuality of love.