Sunday, October 6, 2013

Celebrate!




Sermon preached on Sunday, September 15 at Church of the Ascension, Munich
Readings for Harvest Thanksgiving: Deuteronomy 26.1-11, Psalm 100, Philippians 4.4-9, John 6.25-35


Today is a celebration! Of course every Sunday is a celebration, that’s why my function in the service was traditionally described as that of ‘celebrant.’ But today is special: our Sunday school children are having a party to celebrate the start of our new Sunday School year with our fun new curriculum: ‘Weaving God’s Promises’. And it’s not too late for children to join that event in the Gemeindesaal or for any parents to register your children!

But today is not just a special day for our children. This is the time of the year when churches in the UK, and as you can see in Germany too, celebrate Harvest Festival or Harvest Thanksgiving. Our equivalent, almost, to the American Thanksgiving holiday. As we heard in the reading from Deuteronomy, harvest thanksgivings or celebrations go back a long way. But this particular festival is comparatively recent. In fact, it dates only from 1843, and at least in the UK was the brainchild of the Reverend Robert Stephen Hawker, for 41 years Vicar of a CofE parish in Cornwall. Hawker was concerned that his parishioners should give thanks to God the creator for all God’s generosity. So he instigated a festival of thanksgiving, in sharp contrast to the prevailing custom of celebrating the gathering-in of crops ‘in pagan fashion with beer and tumult’. Beer and tumult: sounds just like the Oktoberfest, doesn’t it!

The Thanksgiving holiday, as I now understand better having celebrated it with friends twice in the US, has a slightly different focus to Harvest Festival. It’s more intimate and less public: my church in DC offered a church service on Thanksgiving but it was not the best attended service of the church year! The focus is more on relationships, on family and friends, and on giving thanks for more than just a good harvest: for friendships and family or for success at work or sports. Not forgetting of course the focus on turkey with all the trimmings and shopping for bargains at the so-called Black Friday sales!

Giving thanks to God is always a good thing, as the author of today’s Psalm 100 (4-5) tells us:  “Give thanks to him, bless his name. For the Lord is good.” But both Harvest Festival and Thanksgiving can focus a little too much on what we have received and on our own needs. God’s creation is then reduced to being a source of food and sustenance for humanity, rather than something of value in its own right, and God becomes a God whose purpose it is to serve us, rather than the other way round.

Jesus encountered a similar problem in the story we heard this morning from John’s gospel. At the beginning of chapter 6 (6:1-14) Jesus has fed the 5,000 with the help of five barley loaves and two fish – this is by the way the only miracle recorded in all four gospels. Now a day later the people he fed physically have come looking for him. They are very grateful, but they can’t look beyond the material gifts they received. “You are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves,” (6:26) Jesus says to them. They were missing the point: feeding them was necessary because they were hungry and far from home, but it was also a sign of something much greater.

When God answered Moses’ prayer and provided food for the Israelites in the desert it also served two purposes: it saved their lives, it sustained them on their long journey. But the manna was also a spiritual sign: it stood for God’s continuing love and care for the Israelites, even as they quarreled and disobeyed God, it was meant to keep both faith and hope alive. In the same way Jesus’ multiplication of the five barley loaves and two fish was a sign. It showed that Jesus was sent from God, that he was God’s word, that his gift to us all was a sustenance that lasts for ever. Jesus is the “bread of God which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” (6:33) Believing in Jesus and following Jesus’ way is all we have to do to perform the work God requires. Unlike the manna, this bread from heaven does not just keep faith and hope alive, Jesus is our faith and our hope.

So by focusing solely on the physical, the gift of bread and fish, the crowd was in danger of missing the much greater gift that God offers through Jesus. And that is also one of the dangers for us too, if we celebrate and give thanks just for having our own immediate needs fulfilled, if we just celebrate the physical on days like today. We miss that Creation is also a sign of God’s greatness, we miss that the harvest is a sign of God’s love and care for us, we might forget that the bread and the wine that we will share later at the altar stand for God’s love that knows no bounds, for self-giving, for being one with God and one another: for Communion.

The other danger is that the physical can become either the most or even only important thing for us. If we concentrate on ever larger “harvests,” on amassing wealth, on plenty of good food and drink, on success and happiness in this life only, our lives will get out of balance and our celebrations become self-centered and empty routines.

So, how can we celebrate properly, how can we make all our celebrations a sign? Our celebrations, whether festivals or ordinary Sundays, must always be a sign of something greater, they must point to God … but how?

Well, Paul always has good advice on how Christians are to behave and his letter to the Philippians is no exception. What advice does he have then about how we should celebrate and how our celebration, and our very lives, can be a sign?

First of all: “rejoice in the Lord always” (4:4) – celebrate joyfully in the Lord, all the time. Make our joy in knowing God through Christ a public affair. Show our joy – smile, sing out loud, dance …. OK, perhaps dancing in the aisles is a step too far for Anglicans and Episcopalians, but hopefully not the other signs of joy and happiness!

Our public image must be one of a gentle and gracious community: that we are open, considerate and generous in our treatment of all others. The practice of many churches at Harvest Festival of some kind of extra giving: to food banks, donating to allow people in the Global South to buy livestock, build wells, or buy agricultural implements, is a very practical way of demonstrating this gentleness and generosity. This community does so every week with its gifts of food and service to the Soup kitchen run by the Missionaries of Charity.  

Show our trust in God, by bringing all our requests before God in prayer, knowing that while not every request can or will be met, nor all suffering avoided, God is in control and that we have the promise of God’s peace, a “deep peace in the middle of life’s problem and storms” [1] that will guard our hearts and minds.

Celebrate God’s creation, God’s gift of life, God’s goodness by focusing on all that is good:  “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable” (4:8) was Paul’s list. This will enable and empower us to deal with and work against all that is “untrue, unholy, unjust, impure, ugly, or unfair!

Put simply – live a life that embodies the Gospel and is in itself a sign. Paul is willing to set himself up as an example: just do what I do, he says. I suspect we all find that a very tall order indeed, but it is what all of us as Christians strive to do, with God’s help. Our celebrations, our communal life, our own lives, sustained by the bread of heaven, must all point to God: thankfully to a God of peace, love, and grace who overlooks that we are not and cannot ever be perfect examples.

We can and should make every day, not just special Sundays or even just Sundays, a celebration. The signs are: Showing joy, generosity of spirit, trust in God, and being aware of the presence and the goodness of God in all we see and know. That is what will help us and others have the great time God intends us to have. Rejoice in the Lord always, again I say, rejoice!


[1]  N. T. Wright, Paul for Everyone: The Prison Letters, 131