Sermon for harvest festival
How much is
a chicken sandwich,
these days?
Would you buy one for £1?
Okay if it's one of
Mrs Miggins' sandwiches
at a fundraising lunch,
but not if it's from
Scabby Joe's cart
behind the bins at Tesco's.
£2?
£5?
£10?
That would have
to be a good one!
What about $1500?
Would you buy
a chicken sandwich
for $1500?
[PAUSE]
What's it made from?
Bread made
at the hands of 1000 dusky maidens
(or handsome young men,
if you prefer)?
Chicken directly descended
from the court of Henry VIII?
Butter from
the real Ermintrude the Cow
from the Magic Roundabout?
But a chicken sandwich
does cost $1500
and this has been proved.
[PAUSE]
A man
- a youtuber -
has shown that
the cost of making
a chicken sandwich
from scratch costs
that amount of money.
He bought the wheat,
sowed it,
grew it,
did all that farmers do
to make it grow
into normal wheat.
He reared
and killed a chicken,
himself.
He made the butter
from a cow he milked himself.
He even added
all the sweetners
and preservatives
that go into a chicken sandwich.
All this cost him $1500.
What does this tell you?
[PAUSE]
We rely so much
on the labour of others
for the fact that
we can go to the fridge,
take out a chicken sandwich
and eat it
without sparing a single thought
for all the work
that has gone into
getting that sandwich
into our fridge in the first place.
And then we moan
when we have to go to work.
[PAUSE]
We see here
the sheer complexity
that forms our economy.
No longer are we
subsistence farmers
eking out a meagre existence
through days of back-breaking labour
in order to have
only just enough
to eat in the evening.
But our labour is hard, today.
We still have to worry about
getting enough money
in our pockets in order
to put food on the table.
That worry is not just
in terms of physical produce,
but streams of
data, cashflow
and numbercrunching.
And, as we are finding
in our sophisticated digital age,
whatever we produce
is still not immune
from the effects of
the weather, war or robbery.
And we worry.
We become anxious
about the work we do,
whether it's enough,
whether we can cope
with the demands made on us
for our labour.
As good Christians,
we bring our worries
and the worries of the world
to God.
And what does God say?
[PAUSE]
He shows us lilies
and sparrows.
"Ah! It's alright for Him,
He doesn't need to eat.
He can just magic up some food!"
"Why doesn't He magic up
some food
for us all?"
These folk have missed the point.
It is our labour together
that means that chicken sandwiches
do not cost $1500.
If we choose to invest our work
with the work of others
then we reap the rewards
which we can share.
Our labour is not worth nothing.
It certainly is not worth nothing to God.
[PAUSE]
Work became hard for us at the Fall.
God did not arbitrarily curse us
with hard labour
when we ate of the fruit
from the tree of knowledge
of good and evil.
We effectively cursed ourselves
by injecting laziness,
cheating,
fraud,
corner-cutting,
avarice and theft
into our work.
How much of our work exists
just in order
to protect ourselves
from each other?
[PAUSE]
And God shows us sparrows
to remind us that
He does care and,
if we seek Him
and His righteousness first,
we will have more than we need.
He shows us lilies
to remind us that
His Creation is beautiful
and,
perhaps,
we should bask
in its beauty so as
to want to work
to keep it nice.
God gives us motivation
to invest our labour in His creation
for love of Him,
and that He promises
what the world cannot
- a huge return on
that investment.
Often,
our attitude to labour
needs careful and serious review.
Here,
at our harvest festival,
such as it is,
we give thanks to God
for His goodness
in providing the harvest
as well as blessing those
who gathered that harvest.
This is right and proper.
But do we see
the part we play in that harvest?
Is there a part we should play
in that harvest?
