Harvest Sermon – St. Andrews Patras 7th October 2018

Revd Canon Leonard Doolan

 

The words of so many of our harvest hymns are great. They express the beauty of God’s glory in creation, but also there is something very comforting about them.

The seasons come and go, not with relentless monotony, but each season with its own distinctiveness . καλο  φθινοπορο. The evenings begin to change, and even in Greece there is a crispness at times in the early mornings and late evenings.

For the beauty of the earth,  For the glory of the skies,

For the love which from our birth, Over and around us lies.

Yet despite the beauty that God reveals in his creation as his handiwork, there is much that distorts it, which is our handiwork.

Only yesterday afternoon I was sitting in the garden around St. Paul’s Church in Athens with someone whose view of life and of the world had been destroyed by elements of witchcraft that affected his life, causing such unhappiness that he saw the world through a semi drunken haze. This prevented him from seeing the goodness of creation, and the goodness of so many people.

The gap between seeing the glory and distorting it to ugliness is so slender.   Fortunately this man has a sense of how things have gone tragically wrong, and earnestly desires to rectify things – seeking to follow a more Christ-like pattern in his life.

For the wonder of each hour, of the day and of the night

Hill and vale and tree and flower, sun and moon and stars of light.

Our Diocese, the Diocese of Europe, is urging all its chaplaincies to consider ways in which we can be more ecologically friendly, with a commitment to being a ‘Green Diocese’. We can’t be too worried about saving the planet, because f we do, like some Christian ‘eco-warrior’ we will end up being driven by guilt because of failure. It is a huge, almost unimaginable task, but with billions of us on our planet, we need only do a couple of small, realisable things and it will make a difference.

Back in June I had the privilege of visiting our congregation of Holy Trinity Corfu. By the way, the chaplain there, Jules Wilson has had open heart surgery in the last week or two, so keep him in your prayers. Corfu town was a lovely place to visit, and the experience of the Sunday worship was encouraging and uplifting.  However Lynne and I noticed that all the street rubbish bins were not only full to overflowing but metres and metres of the road around each bin was piled high with rubbish, and sprinkled white with disinfectant. We asked Jules if there was a strike of rubbish collectors, but he explained that Corfu has run out of space to dump all the domestic waste. The land fill site was full but it had been built just above the water plate, so horrible poisons were seeping through, and you can no longer drink water from the taps, so that means all water drunk by Corfiates has to be bottled. We know what this means – yet more plastic bottles piling up.

To add to this problem Corfu can be visited by up to 5 or 6 cruise liners at one time, each one spilling out 3-5000 people on to the island, with the rubbish that 30,000 tourists will leave on the island.

Jules said that the situation was a sin against God and his creation. I tend to agree with him. We are called by God to be the stewards of his creation – and this places a responsibility on us to sow and reap, to gather and garner, to feed and to nourish from the beauty of the earth, but is also places on us a burden to care and tend, to respect and honour as if the work of creation is God’s greatest sacrament. Each of us is a priest of this sacrament.

Yet, we might feel overwhelmed about the enormity of the task. Just take a small decision yourself, such as saying to a waiter or waitress, ‘no plastic straw please’ unless your drink really needs it for the sake of propriety.

For the joy of human love, brother, sister, parent, child

Friends on earth and friends above, for all gentle thoughts and mild.

As we celebrate this rich season of harvest it is right to remember and pray for all who farm the land, who pick the grapes, who gather the olives, who pick the fruit, who herd the sheep – but we will only be able to continue to do this if we look to the wider care of creation, and give God the glory in all his wonderful handiwork.

Christ our Lord, to you we raise, this our hymn of grateful praise.