harvest

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

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A wide field with golden hay bales scattered across the landscape, a blue tractor with a loader stacking bales in the center, and a gentle hill covered with green bushes and trees in the background under a cloudy sky.

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.

A vast golden field of harvested grain stretches across the foreground, dotted with several large, cylindrical hay bales scattered at varying distances. In the midground, a solitary green tree stands prominently on a gentle hill lined with bushes and more trees. The sky above is dramatic, filled with heavy, dark gray storm clouds, with patches of blue sky and sunlight breaking through on the right, casting a warm glow over the landscape.
Harvested fields near All Cannings, Wiltshire, 14 July 2025. © Gerry Lynch

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.

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Soul Harvest: Sermon Preached on 15th September 2024 (Sixteenth Sunday After Trinity, Harvest Festival)

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Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

James 3. 1-12; Mark 8. 27-38

“Can a fig tree, my brothers and sisters, yield olives, or a grapevine figs?”

The harvest comes at the end of a long process. Some of the seed for next year’s wheat will probably be planted in the next few weeks, to benefit from the last weeks of autumn warmth and sunshine, so it can develop a stable root system before the winter, and be less vulnerable to drought in spring.

A large combine harvester completing the reaping of a field, with dust atmospherically coming from its rear.
Taking in the harvest near Stanton St Bernard in the Vale of Pewsey. © Gerry Lynch, 3 September 2023.

Yet at the same time, this year’s harvest still isn’t complete. There are still, for example, a few fields of maize around that might not be harvested until well into October. The late apples and pears still won’t be ready to pick for weeks yet. And many of our root vegetables and leafy greens reach their prime in the middle of winter – the parsnips don’t taste their best until they’ve been through their first hard frost.

Managing all this takes enormous skill from our farmers and a lot of education in science and, if they want to make a living from it, business. It also takes machinery, and electricity, and fuel. And also, whether we want to acknowledge it or not, pesticides. Of course, the weather plays a major role, especially in a year like this when the spring and first half of the summer were so consistently cold and wet. In fact, during the first summer I spent in Devizes, between the lockdowns in 2020, terrible storms came in August and ruined much of the arable harvest, and I spent the autumn walking past fields left in a terrible state. Viruses can also ruin a crop; they hit plants in waves just like they hit humans.

Most of all, much patience is needed to take the crops from sowing to harvest, and while agricultural knowledge and technology makes us much less vulnerable to crop failure than our ancestors, even now there is no guarantee of success. Yet despite the risks from storms and disease, a crop can’t be harvested early—the crops aren’t fit for consumption until they are ripe.

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Harvesting the Bread of Life: Sermon Preached in St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 25th September 2022 (Harvest Festival)

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“I am the bread of life. Who ever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

Readings – Philippians 4: 4–9; John 6: 25–35.

On Thursday, I attended one of the Creationtide talks we are hosting in St Mary’s, this one by Damian Haasjes of the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust. It was a very good talk, but I was amazed at the lengths its funders forced the Trust to go to assemble a hard economic and public heath case that spending time in nature is good for people, especially more vulnerable people. I would have thought it was obvious, because enmeshing ourselves in the web of life so transparently lifts the spirit and heals the soul. Our present Western culture often seems obsessed with the price of everything while being happy to be ignorant of the value of anything. The most transcendent, spiritual, and mystical parts of our lives are expected to justify themselves in pounds, pence, and additional Quality-Adjusted-Life-Years.

Please keep that in mind as we explore this morning’s Gospel reading, containing a phrase familiar to many of you, “I am the bread of life”.

Sunset with crepuscular rays shining behind some low hills t Oare, Wiltshire, on 29 September 2022 © Gerry Lynch
The obvious beauty of nature: sunset at Oare, Wiltshire, on 29 September 2022 © Gerry Lynch

It helps us understand this incident better if we know its place in the chain of events in St John’s Gospel. Firstly, it comes the day after John’s version of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, and indeed the crowd from the day before seems to have followed Jesus despite His attempts to slip away to somewhere quiet.

Many of these people, therefore, have only the day before benefited directly from Jesus working perhaps His most high profile and spectacular miracle, feeding thousands of them with just a few baskets of bread. More than that, they have benefited from a miracle that identifies Jesus as the true successor of Moses – because it directly parallels the way God fed the Hebrews fleeing Egypt under Moses’ leadership with Manna from heaven.

But despite having swallowed His miraculous bread, the crowd doesn’t want to swallow Jesus’ difficult teaching about the bread of life. They want another mega-miracle to feast their eyes on, and shortly after this morning’s passage, when he doesn’t give them one, the crowd turns on Jesus, and He starts to lose followers.

I think there is something profound and easily missed here about our insatiable appetites. One miracle, even if it’s, you know, pretty spectacular, is not enough to convince the crowd of Jesus’ nature. Accepting that we have enough is difficult for us. That lies at the root of our present ecological crisis.

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