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.
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 in getting that sandwich into our fridge in the first place.
And then we moan when we have to go to work.
We see here the sheer complexity that forms our economy. No longer are we subsistence farmers eking out a meagre existence by 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.
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?
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, 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?
