Made to Flourish as Ourselves: Sermon Preached on 31st August 2025 (Eleventh Sunday After Trinity)

Preached at St John’s, Devizes (Deanery Evensong)

Isaiah 33. 13-22; John 3. 22-36

“For this reason my joy has been fulfilled. He must increase, but I must decrease.”

Before I came to live in the countryside, I didn’t really appreciate that there are many different harvests across the year. I mean, I sort of theoretically knew that, but I hadn’t quite twigged that the garlic is gathered in the spring but maize not until Hallowe’en. I only remembered that blackberries came in August because when I was a boy one of my uncles would take us up the high hills that overlook Belfast to pick huge bags full of them. It was a regular summer holiday activity which has buried itself deep in my memories.

Not until I came to spend my working life driving between the fields in this area, and so many long days walking among them for pleasure, did I really start to understand the rhythm of the agricultural year. So divorced can modern humanity be from the food that sustains it.

Just as crops ripen each in its own season, so every year is different. This year, of course, we have had one of the worst droughts on record. But one of my neighbours in Potterne has just given me some of the most beautiful plums from her trees. In conditions where one crop struggles, another will flourish.

And different crops flourish in different types of soil too—some varieties of grape like sandy soil, others prefer chalk or loam. That’s one reason why wine has such varied flavours. This is one of the glories of God’s creation. God didn’t give us a wonder crop, a sort of manna that could flourish anywhere, but many different kinds of crops not only to flourish in different environments, but to enrich our lives with their flavours and scents.

So each of us is designed to designed to flower, mature, and ripen in different ways and in different contexts. Each of us is made to play a distinct role in the human ecology of our societies and to play a distinct role in the life of the Church. It would be no more a good thing to see every Christian and every congregation being the same than it would be to go to the market and see only one kind of vegetable on sale.

Our second reading tonight is all about John the Baptist knowing His distinct role in God’s plan for salvation. When his followers warned him that his cousin Jesus was baptising people, they seem to have expected John to be upset that his job was being usurped.

Yet John was filled with joy; he understood his God-given mission had been fulfilled when he baptised Jesus. John had ripened unto harvest; it was now time for him to decrease so Jesus could increase. He was ready to receive the everlasting life promised to all who believe in Christ.

Our first reading, from Isaiah, was written at a time when regional powers were aggressively expansionist and small countries lived in fear. Isaiah lived in Jerusalem in the 8^th Century BC. He was a prophet, and that word conjures up for us the idea of mystical and rather vague visions from on high. But some are prophets because of the particularly clear insight into the conditions of their nations and times. Martin Luther King was such a prophet; so was Isaiah.

There were two Jewish kingdoms in the Holy Land in those days, or at least there had been. Jersualem was the capital of the southern one, known as Judah. The northern kingdom, Israel, had just been conquered by the Assyrian Empire, and in accordance with standard Assyrian policy, its people had been rounded up and deported to other parts of their realm, with Israel likewise receiving people from other countries unfortunate enough to be conquered by the Assyrians.

The people of Jersualem feared they and Judah were next. Their golden age, under Solomon and David, seemed like a long time in the past—because it was. It was a time of great uncertainty and fear of the future.

Our first lesson tells us that the people of Jerusalem were divided and some even seemed frightened at the idea that God might reveal Himself, for that might expose their faithlessness and self-centredness. But others were waiting expectantly on God, having confidence that He would ensure that Jerusalem was “a tabernacle that shall not be taken down”. They would be proved right. From this dark moment in its history, Jerusalem would enter another golden age, a time of peace and prosperity, devotion to God, and cultural flowering. Isaiah, the wise advisor and counsel to a succession of kings over more than sixty years, would be a key part of that.

Of course, it didn’t last forever. Golden ages never do. But they can be moments of glory that resound through the ages. Ninety-nine generations since he wrote, we still read Isaiah’s magnificent spiritual-political prose-poetry; and we have faith that the beauty of Isaiah’s writing reflects the still greater beauty of his Creator and ours, for whose nearer presence in eternity we were all made.

So our lives and our works will come to fruition in their due season—that may be during a time of renewal in this somewhat shop-worn country and shop-worn Church of England, or it may be a very difficult time. Whatever the circumstances, we know that God has made us to flourish in a particular soil, a particular climate, in a way that only we can do. Let us pray that we, like John the Baptist, can mature and ripen in a manner so that, when our work is done, we can look forward to the day when Christ gathers in His harvest, and we may be found worthy to remain in His nearer presence for eternity.         

And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.

Top image: Taking in the haybales at Stanton St Bernard in the Vale of Pewsey, 14 July 2025, © Gerry Lynch.