Sunday 24th September 2023

 Remembering God’s Mercy

 Well it is a joy to be here, and to be preaching for the first time here at this Harvest Festival Eucharist as your new Canon Chancellor. I’m very much looking forward to meeting you after this service, and getting to know you over the coming weeks and months!

 Today in the cathedral we celebrate Harvest, giving thanks to God for the fruits of his creation and praying that we might be good stewards of all that he has given us. Long ago Harvest was part of a whole season of feasts and festivals which included Lammas and Michaelmas (which we will mark this evening in music and word) that not only provided a reason for communities to celebrate, but also acknowledged through language and liturgy the anxiety around the sustainability of the community into the year ahead. And so as well as being gathered, the harvest was blessed and along with it, the barns in which it would be stored, as a way of shoring up the potential to sustain the community through the winter months.

 So it is very fitting that today as well as celebrating harvest time, we also concentrate our thoughts on our own household and community sustainability and consider how we might make small changes in our lives to reduce our carbon footprint, and we look forward to hearing from two specialists in this area a little later in the service.

 In today’s Gospel passage, we heard the parable of the rich man – a man who became so fixated on his own survival that he built bigger and bigger barns to store his ever increasing grain and goods, in an attempt to establish his own self-sufficiency. He plots and plans all this singlehandedly, and his self-reliance is illustrated in the little dialogue he keeps up with his soul.  I will build barns, he says, and I will say to my soul, Soul, eat, drink and be merry, and so he goes on…

 But this is the only dialogue the rich man is having. He has forgotten the Lord his God, and instead of living in relationship and response to the Lord’s mercy, he answers only to himself.

 Jesus tells this parable to a man in the crowd who is extremely anxious about the sustainability of his own future. So anxious, that, like the barn builder he has fixed his mind on the one thing he thinks will secure it – he wants to get his hands on his share of the family inheritance; his problem is that his brother will not give it to him.

 So Jesus uses this parable to help shift his focus from relying only on his own means of survival, to the much broader scope of the saving work that God is already doing in him, and will continue to do in dialogue and relationship with him. Your father already knows what you need, Jesus says to him. Do not worry.

Like this person in the crowd, worried about his future, and the barn builder who tries to secure his future, we too have a problem on our hands that threatens our survival: climate change. And we know that there is much work to be done at global, national and local levels to mitigate it. And so the parable of the rich man is salutary for us today. Not as a warning against hoarding the earth’s resources, but as a reminder that we cannot save ourselves or this glorious planet without calling upon the saving power of Jesus Christ.

And this is why it is so important that we bring our problems, and the problems of the world – and especially today our concerns over climate change and the sustainability of this earth – into the scope of God’s saving love – into the context of worship and the Eucharist. For this is the place where God shows us that if we are to survive, if we are to be saved, we need God’s help. In the Eucharist, God takes what scraps we offer, transforms them by his grace, and gives them back to us redeemed, renewed, and restored for his good purposes.

 We see this movement very particularly in the gifts of bread and wine that we bring, and which, by God’s grace and glory, are given back to us as Christ’s own body and blood, to renew us and sustain us.

 And we see it also in prayer, when we bring people and situations into the very presence of God, trusting that by his grace and mercy, they will be redeemed and remade, in God’s time and for God’s glory.

 Our needs and our failures are the raw materials for God’s saving work. And just as we are to bring people and places before the Lord trusting in his power to redeem, so we are to offer up this beautiful earth, its needs as a planet, our failure to care for it, and the hard work that we will do to save it, to the God who made all heaven and earth and who continues to make all things new.

 We are just as liable as the man in the crowd and the rich man with his bigger and bigger barns to forget the Lord our God and to try ever harder to ensure our own sustainability and survival, without lifting our eyes to remember God’s mercy. This doesn’t of course absolve us from our responsibility to care for our planet and to do all we can to save it, but it does remind us to be confident in the Lord who has created us, who sustains us, and who has promised to redeem all that we offer into his hands.