Article
- Date:
- Sunday 2nd October 2022
Year C, The Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity - Place:
- Holy Trinity, Cuckfield
- Service:
- Harvest Evensong
- Readings:
- Deuteronomy 26.1-11
Philippians 4.4-9
Thinking of the sermons i might have preached today, you will be relieved to hear that I rejected the obvious options such as our obligation to be stewards of the environment, to share our gifts with the poor and to think about the lilies of the field; these are all very important subjects but I have attempted to deal with all of them since the last Harvest, so I thought that I would follow the strict, literal meaning of this evenings' Readings and talk about thanksgiving where, no doubt, some of those other themes might just creep in.
When we thank someone for a present that is not the end of the episode, rather it is the beginning as we deal with the present according to its nature: we look at a picture or listen to music, we wear a jumper, we eat chocolate, we mow a lawn. There is nothing sadder than receiving a present we can't use: a loud tie, a book of puzzles we can't solve, a picture we can't relate to. this is what can make Christmas a bit of a lottery when givers don't think carefully enough about receivers or just don't know them well enough.
We, on the other hand, have been given a set of gifts by God, who knows everything about us in general and in particular, which are bespoke for us as a community and as individuals. We already know what these are so I will simply list them in summary form: we were created in love to love God and each other with our gift of free will; when we misused free will, as we were bound to do, we lost our immortal status and were doomed to die but Jesus by his death and Resurrection restored our gift of immortality by separating the misuse of our will from its mortal consequences; we were given a wonderful world to live in prior to its unification with the divine world and even though we have tarnished and scarred it terribly there is still enough evidence of its beauty; we have been given the grace to overcome our genetic propensity for competition, turning the natural procreative urge into a complex phenomenon we call love; we have taken our human experience and turned it into what we call art.
Our first response, then should be pure thankfulness for what we have and what we have been promised but, as with other gifts, to be thankful is not enough, so what should we do with these gifts?
In the case of the non-material gifts, the simple answer is that we should share them within our community, however defined, because sharing is not a zero sum game; quite the opposite; the more we love the more we are loved. Likewise, the more joy we show in our relationship with God the more likely we are to grow our Christian community. There is a place for individual acts of piety and for personal prayer but Christianity is fundamentally a communal religion whose nature is set out in the very first Christian writings, the seven letters consensually attributed to Paul who is concerned with communal health, communal spirituality and communal salvation, so our sharing spiritual gifts is natural.
Much more controversial is what we do with our physical gifts. There are differences of emphasis in the New Testament but the central message is that we should have no more than meets our modest needs. Christianity's departure from this central truth has been a disaster not only for the poor but for the excessively wealthy. Christianity's failure to respond robustly to the horrors of neo liberal capitalism has been one of the major disasters of Christian history and may see our planet as non-viable for human survival within the foreseeable future; but this disaster is not just visceral, it's spiritual. There will be exceptions but I think it's generally the case that the more you have the harder it is to avoid pride and to love God according to our created purpose.
Atheists are always going on about the impossibility of a good God in the face of so much human tragedy but in this they are wrong in two very important ways: first, if we look round the world, most of what goes wrong is the result of the misuse of our free will; secondly, the disasters and suffering over which we have no control are worldly conditions which we are challenged to accept but also to overcome. If God had created a perfect world there would be no such thing as free will, and no such thing as love; but this gift of free will is the most difficult of the great many gifts we possess.
On the other hand, the gift of grace, the presence of the Holy Spirit, the example of Jesus and the love of God more than counterbalance any disadvantage.
Another thing we should not do with presents is to misuse or abuse them; over and above our material selfishness, which is a form of abuse, we are all too apt to turn the spiritual community of the Church, of the Body of Christ, into a socio-cultural experience. How often do I hear people telling me how they like the King James Bible because its language is beautiful, even though the translation is inferior to many others; how often am I told how beautiful people find Choral Evensong but if the beauty does not deepen our relationship with God it's simply a cultural experience, which is very handy for people who want some kind of religious gilding to conceal their material selfishness.
Finally, the worst thing we can do with a gift is to send it back which is another way of talking about pride. Time and again in Christian history we have renounced the mystery of hope, of our salvation, in favour of cunning plans to get into heaven through prayer, good deeds or philanthropy, frequently filing death-bed insurance policies all of which, of course, is self-delusional.
So at this harvest time let us give thanks unreservedly for God's gifts but let us then treat these gifts with the honour and purpose they deserve.