Sermon for the Harvest Festival at Kokotos Winery – 9th October 2022

Fr Leonard Doolan

 

When the table is prepared, and the bread and wine are set there, and we are ready, we are well accustomed to hearing these words,

“Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation: through your goodness we have this bread to offer; which earth has given and human hands have made. It will become for us the bread of life.

Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation; through your goodness we have this wine to offer: fruit of the vine and work of human hands. It will become for us the cup of salvation.”

We are in the wonderful setting of the vineyard of George and Anne Kokotos. What could be a finer setting for our Harvest Festival Liturgy, and we are here in partnership with friends from the Swedish Lutheran congregation.

From the words used when the table is ready with bread and wine before us, I would like to focus on two parts of the words, for they take us deep into our theology of God as creator, and into the holy anthropology of humanity.

Firstly, ‘through your goodness’. This is the essence of God – his goodness. It is easy to forget it. God’s very being is sheer goodness and out of his love he is bountiful with his goodness. It cannot be compromised, not negotiated. God’s goodness simply ‘is’. From the abundance of his goodness God creates.

The words we use over the bread and wine offer us a distinct focus as part of our action together in this Eucharistic worship, but the created elements of bread and wine are the sacramental symbols of all that God creates. Creation is the outward expression of God’s goodness, and within his Creation humanity has an exceptional place – so exceptional that mankind is the image of God’s goodness, and in a particular man, Jesus Christ, God’s fullness was ‘pleased to dwell’.

 

So everything begins with the Creator God, ‘which earth has given’, ‘fruit of the vine’.

Then we express the second issue I mentioned. ‘And human hands have made’, and ‘work of human hands’. Both these phrases assert the connectedness of God’s goodness in Creation, and mankind’s activity and industry, as we work to create from God’s goodness what humanity needs to live, and sustain itself with – but not ideally as some gorging consumer and plunderer of what earth brings forth, but as a humanity that reveres and rejoices in working with the Creator God’s abundant goodness.

This divinely human endeavour is not restricted to agriculture, though today we can allow bread and wine  fully to represent all that we do; it applies to how humanity uses skills and materials in digital technology, manufacturing, education, Research and Development, social anthropology, politics and so on.

In 1 Cor 3⁹   we read ‘For we are co-workers in God’s service; you are God’s field, God’s building’; co-workers – synergoi in the NT Greek. This relationship of co-working doesn’t just apply to baptized and ordained ministries in church life, but applies generally to humanity as the priesthood whose vocation it is to give thanks to God for the goodness of his creation. Co-worker may be the translation, but in English we know the meaning of ‘synergy’ – when things come together and operate like one energy.

So as we contemplate in our own time the environmental impact of the misuse of the world’s resources, we as Christians are called back, time and again, to our primary duty and joy – namely to give thanks to God for his goodness, and to work with him for the creation’s divine dignity and well-being.

Let our setting today in this vineyard, and our offering of bread and wine, be our constant reminder and sign that all life, all work, all achievement, has its source in the divine goodness showered upon us in abundance. Blessed be God for ever.  Amen.