A Harvest Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
2nd October 2022
Exodus 14.5-7, 10-14; 14.21-29
Call to Worship
From slavery to freedom, from darkness into light;
From despair and depression to wholeness and hope:
Out of Egypt you have called your people.
From compliance and complicity to subversion and resistance;
From hesitation and distrust to exploration and adventure:
Out of Egypt you have called your people.
From stagnation and apathy to journey and pilgrimage;
Through wasteland and wilderness, through hardship and sadness:
Out of Egypt you have called your people.
You call us to journey through desert and Jordan;
With sacraments of water and manna to keep us:
Out of Egypt you have called your people.
Through Miriam and Moses, through prophets and pastors;
To fulfil the promise of Canaan and Kingdom:
Out of Egypt you have called your people.
Call to Worship
From slavery to freedom, from darkness into light;
From despair and depression to wholeness and hope:
Out of Egypt you have called your people.
From compliance and complicity to subversion and resistance;
From hesitation and distrust to exploration and adventure:
Out of Egypt you have called your people.
From stagnation and apathy to journey and pilgrimage;
Through wasteland and wilderness, through hardship and sadness:
Out of Egypt you have called your people.
You call us to journey through desert and Jordan;
With sacraments of water and manna to keep us:
Out of Egypt you have called your people.
Through Miriam and Moses, through prophets and pastors;
To fulfil the promise of Canaan and Kingdom:
Out of Egypt you have called your people.
Finding a meaningful way to celebrate harvest
in the centre of one of the world’s global cities
can be a bit of a tough assignment.
I mean, I know we’re technically in the parish of St Giles in the Fields,
but the reality is that it’s been a few centuries
since anyone gathered in the sheaves around here.
But this doesn’t mean, of course,
that we are cut off from harvests.
Everything we eat, the very things that keep us alive,
are the produce of harvest.
Someone, somewhere, harvested the grain
that makes up the bread we will share shortly.
Someone harvested the grapes
that produced the not-wine that we will drink together.
Just because it doesn’t happen here anymore,
doesn’t stop us being deeply, intimately, and existentially connected
to harvests around the world;
harvests which, through the complexities of global supply chains,
help keep our cupboards stocked and our stomachs full.
But of course, such mechanisms of global supply are fragile.
It doesn’t take much to disrupt them.
One of the impacts of the invasion of Ukraine
has been that this war torn country, often called the ‘breadbasket of Europe’,
is no longer able to send as much of its grain to the market.
The consequential rise in food staples has been a significant contributor
to the rise in the cost of living that we are seeing,
and which so many in our city are struggling with.
And another facet of the globalisation of food supply
has been the almost ubiquitous practices of exploitative farming.
From the exploitation of farmers in the two-thirds world,
who are forced to work for subsistence income or worse,
to the exploitation of the land
through intensive farming and habitat destruction.
Harvest is an issue of justice,
and it is an issue of global justice.
From those who live in poverty in our own country,
unable to feed their own families;
to the ways the wealthy empires of the west
exploit and oppress the poor in other parts of the world,
to deforestation in the Amazon basin,
there is a deep injustice
built into the economics and practices of harvest.
And my question for us this morning,
is what does God say about such injustices?
What would God have us do?
Well, as a way into this,
I’d like us to spend a few minutes thinking about the hymn we sang
at the beginning of the service,
and then we’ll turn to our scripture passages
and hear some insights from Israel’s story of old.
But first, the hymn.
I’m sure you know it well;
but I wonder if you’ve ever stopped
to think about what you’re really singing?
Come you thankful people, come, raise the song of harvest-home!
All securely gathered in, safe before the storms begin;
God our maker will provide for our needs to be supplied:
come with all God’s people, come, raise the song of harvest-home.
It starts quite innocently, doesn’t it,
a rural song of thanksgiving for a successful harvest.
You can imagine the autumn sun shining on the grey stonework
of a typical English village church,
the farmers and their workers coming to worship at the end of another week
of gathering the wheat into the barns.
It’s idyllic.
But then we get to verse 2.
All the world is God’s own field, bearing fruit God’s praise to yield;
wheat and weeds together sown, unto joy or sorrow grown;
first the blade, and then the ear, then the full corn shall appear:
Lord of harvest, grant that we wholesome grain and pure may be.
Things have changed gear a bit, haven’t they?
The writer of the hymn has introduced Jesus’ parable
of the wheat and the weeds from Matthew’s Gospel (13.24-30, 36-43).
Suddenly we’re no longer talking about the harvest of Little Snoring on-the-wold,
we’re talking about the great harvest of the whole earth,
a vision of God’s judgment being enacted
against all that is unfruitful, all that is unjust,
all that is exploitative, all that is wicked.
And so the verse ends, perhaps understandably, with a prayer that our lives
will be found pure and wholesome when they are judged by God.
And then we get to verse 3:
For the Lord our God shall come, and shall take the harvest home,
from this field shall in that day all corruption purge away,
The judgment theme is intensifying,
there is a recognition that the world as it is
is not the world as it should be.
Our world is one of corruption,
of destructive weeds out-competing the fruit of the kingdom of God.
And there doesn’t seem to be any earthly solution to this problem,
so the hymn prays to God,
echoing again the words of Jesus’ parable:
give the angels charge at last in the fire the weeds to cast,
but the fruitful ears to store in God’s care for evermore.
This hymn is a longing for a better world,
for a world where the fruit of the Spirit are borne unhindered,
and where the weeds of injustice and oppression are burned away.
And so we get to the final verse:
Even so, Lord, quickly come, bring your final harvest home;
gather all your people in, free from sorrow, free from sin;
there, together purified, in your presence to abide:
come, with all your angels, come, raise the glorious harvest-home.
There is a recognition here that all of us, each of us,
at a personal - and not just at a corporate - level
are a mixed bag of wheat and weeds.
Ultimately this hymn, as with the parable it’s based on,
isn’t about them and us,
it’s not about the purification of society,
as God purges the sinners to redeem the righteous.
Rather it’s about recognising that each of us needs purification:
there are weeds in my life that need to be burned away,
as I am sure there are weeds in all of our lives.
The judgment of God becomes, by the end of our hymn,
good news for the earth,
because it is a vision of the freeing of humanity
from all that oppresses, from all that enslaves,
from all that creates injustice,
from all that destroys and diminishes life.
The idealised and idyllic vision of the first verse,
becomes the goal and objective of the last verse,
as the consequences of human sin are defeated,
and humans are freed from the weeds
that would otherwise choke the life from their lives.
And I think this is a message we need to hear today, in our society,
as people flock to political ideologies of exclusion and othering,
where foreigners, migrants, and refugees are blamed and victimised.
It’s a message we need to hear in our world
where the global food supply chains in which we are all complicit
are exploitative of the vulnerable and the impoverished.
And it’s a message we need to hear in a world
where despots take what is not theirs,
and wreak violence upon the innocent.
All these, says our harvest hymn,
stand under the judgment of God,
and the vision of a freed and renewed humanity
is predicated on the burning away
of such systems and symbols of oppression.
Which brings us to the story of the exodus
and the crossing of the Red Sea
from slavery in Egypt to the journey through the wilderness
on the way to the promised land.
The image here is not fire, it is water,
but it is in many ways the same image.
People sometimes question this passage as depicting a violent God,
but I think this is a superficial reading of what’s going on here.
Rather, the people of Israel have become enslaved,
Abraham’s children went to Egypt fleeing a famine, as refugees,
and as the generations went past, they became a feared minority,
on whom could be blamed all the ills of ancient Egyptian society.
I can imagine some ancient Egyptian politician,
some early version of Enoch Powell,
predicting that if these Jewish immigrants aren’t controlled,
there will be rivers of blood. [1]
So the Pharaoh took his stand,
and did what oppressive rulers and despots have done
time and again in human history,
and he sought to oppress the minority.
But as is so often the case, even in our own world,
the empire’s economy had become dependent,
on the exploitation of the minority.
So whilst victimising the minority was a strong populist move,
it would have been financially ruinous to obliterate them.
And so the cycle of oppression was created,
and it existed in ancient Egypt against the ancient Israelites;
and it existed at the time of Jesus,
as the Romans exploited the provinces of their empire;
and it exists in our world,
as the wealthy continue to exploit the poor and the vulnerable.
But how can this cycle be broken?
What does God say to a world of such exploitation.
As we’ve seen already with our opening hymn,
God stands against injustice.
And sure enough in the story of the Exodus,
God calls Moses to announce judgment on the empire
for its exploitation of the people of Israel.
If only Pharaoh had listened to Moses
all the bloodshed that followed could have been avoided.
The Nile turning to blood,
the Red sea running with blood:
these rivers and seas of blood
are created by the actions of the empire
in refusing to repent and turn away from exploitation.
And so I want to suggest
that the plagues visited on Egypt,
and the destruction of their army in the Red sea,
are only problematic if you read this story
from the perspective of Egypt, from the perspective of the empire.
Do you find yourself feeling sympathy for the firstborn,
empathy for the soldiers?
I know I do,
but then I also know that I am someone who is deeply complicit
in the systems of imperial domination that we have in our world.
If I read myself back into this story,
I know that I’m an Egyptian.
But those who identify with the enslaved people of Israel,
need feel no sympathy
when the empire reaps the reward of its violent oppression.
It’s no coincidence that the Exodus story featured so heavily
in the language and hymnody of the enslaved Africans
on the plantations of North America.
It’s no coincidence that the liberation theologians of Latin America
turned again and again to the story of the exodus
as they reflected on their experience of oppression and domination.
It’s no coincidence that Martin Luther King wrote,
in his letter from Birmingham Jail,
that ‘Freedom is never given voluntarily by the oppressor.
It must be demanded by the oppressed.’
There is no room here for sympathy for the oppressor,
because God has no sympathy for the oppressor.
The Exodus story, with the people of Israel crossing the waters that ensnared them,
to begin their long journey to a better world,
is fundamentally a story about God’s commitment to freedom,
it is about God’s commitment to emancipation.
The judgment that is visited on the empire
is everything the empire deserves;
as it is burned away, washed away,
as a direct consequence of all the evil it has done on the earth.
The God of the exodus is a ‘liberating God’’
a God who is always for the oppressed,
and never for the oppressor.
And every time an empire has claimed God’s blessing
as they have dominated the world,
they have sowed the seeds
of their own ultimate destruction.
This is true from Egypt, to Babylon, to Rome,
it is true from the domination of Christendom,
to the maritime empires of the colonial Europeans,
and it is true from the financial empires of global supply,
to the exploitative despots of oppressive regimes,
God is always on the side of the oppressed,
and never on the side of the oppressor.
So wherever new Pharaoh’s emerge in human history, grasping after power
even though their own people are destroyed in the process,
God is on the side of the enslaved.
I think that the despotic rulers of our world
need to hear this, and hear it clearly.
But I also think that we who live in the West,
need to hear this, and hear it clearly.
And dare I say that I think our current government
needs to hear this, and to hear it clearly?
God will not stand with those
who stand against the poor,
and God will stand against those
who oppress, enslave, and marginalise.
And if I might widen the perspective slightly,
in a story where it is the waters of the sea
that bring the judgment to the oppressor,
I think that nature itself echoes something of God’s character,
where those who exploit the environment
create a context where many will suffer.
Nature itself is resistant to exploitation,
and the judgment on humanity
unlocked by the unfettered release of carbon,
or by habitat destruction, or by over-fishing,
is a further consequence of imperial domination in our own time,
as well as a revelation of God’s judgment
on those who destroy the earth.
As the Book of Revelation puts it:
‘your judgment has come… the time has come…
for destroying those who destroy the earth.’ (Re. 11.18)
But to return to the book of the Exodus,
eventually, the people of Israel
made their way through the Red Sea,
to the wilderness of Sinai,
to begin their journey to a new world.
And what they discovered, almost immediately,
was that the road to the promised land
was not itself the promised land.
Facing starvation in the desert,
they turned their faces back towards Egypt,
and with rose-tinted spectacles,
remembered the storehouses of grain that had sustained them
through the years of their enslavement.
The truth is that it’s not easy to leave empire,
it’s not easy to stand against injustice.
It’s always a journey of faith,
and will most likely be a costly journey.
Our reading today doesn’t go on to describe the manna from heaven
that sustained them for their journey,
where each received, each day, just enough to live on but no more.
But we remember that manna in our communion service
as we share the bread that sustains us on our journey.
We are, each of us, individually and as a community,
called to make our own journey out of Egypt.
We are, each of us, called to reckon with the judgment of God:
on our actions, our society, and our world;
as those who exploit are called to account and found wanting.
But we are also called to hope,
to a conviction that a better world is possible.
We are the body of Christ in our world,
and we may be broken,
but we are also re-membered,
we are remade as we share bread and wine
around a table where all are welcome,
and this is the symbol and sign of the new world
that God is bringing into being.
So as we eat and drink,
taking into our bodies the harvest of the world,
we must also, as Paul puts it, examine ourselves
‘and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup.
‘For all who eat and drink without discerning the body,
eat and drink judgment against themselves.’ (1 Cor. 11:28-29)
This is not to say that we have to be perfect
before we gather around the table of the Lord.
Far from it!
But we do need to gather in recognition
of our complicity in the sins of the world,
ready to repent of our sins,
to receive forgiveness and new life.
And it is this gift of new life, this calling onwards,
that will bring us through
the seemingly impossible barrier of our own Red Sea
through whatever sins, addictions and weaknesses
are trying to keep us enslaved in Egypt,
or to take us back to somewhere we thought we had left.
As we share in the body of Christ,
we are remade as the body of Christ,
a community of hope,
called together to be the first fruits of the new humanity,
the first fruits of the great harvest of all the earth.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivers_of_Blood_speech
