Sermon Archive
Rural Values or Harvest Values
Sermon preached by John Armes at Matins on Harvest Festival, 29 September 2002
Deuteronomy 28 1-14; Luke 12 16-30
There's been a series of murder mysteries on TV recently, called Midsommer Murders.
All the stories are set around a cluster of idyllic villages with names like Midsommer Major, Midsommer Yokel, Midsommer Nasty-People-with-too-much-Money, Midsommer Slightly-Sinister-Inbred-Farming Types. Here, in the heart of England it is always sunny. But appearances are deceptive, for behind the hearty, bucolic façade murder lurks. And not just one murder, at least three each week.
Indeed, these villages are so beset with murder that they appear to have their own special police force with Inspector Bergerac (I think that's the name) and worthy but naïve Sergeant Troy plodding their way through the intricacies of each case.
Two things particularly irritate me about Midsommer Murders. The first is that they treat murder as a semi-comedy - the police are resolutely flippant. The second is that it is full of rural stereotypes - villages made up of forelock tugging yokels, country squires, people with rather too much money and, yes, slightly sinister inbred farming folk. I suspect that I stand alone in my irritation; the popularity of the series suggests that the majority of viewers like to see village life presented in this way.
I fear that the Countryside March in London recently will have done little to dispel these stereotypes. I don't mean that the several thousand marchers were not each sincere in their concerns - rather that the march itself presented so many mixed messages that it was easier for most city folk to latch onto the particular images that suited them.
There were farmers highlighting the pressures and problems of making a living; ordinary village people pointing to the loss of shops, post offices, schools, bus services and so on; activists making a party political point; but it was the hunting and shooting brigade protesting the loss of their traditional pastimes who caught the media attention. So far as the media was concerned the march was about fox hunting - thus undermining the concerns of the thousands on the march who don't hunt and who believe that there are more fundamental issues at stake than fox hunting.
And yet even these issues are hardly straightforward. Some of the leaders of the march spoke of the erosion of rural values. But what are rural values? Having spent some years living and working in the country I cannot identify any such things.
The leaders also spoke of a growing divide between town and country. This, it seems to me, is a very simplistic way of speaking about a very complex process of social change. For I would suggest that there really is no monolithic, identifiable group of people called 'country' any more than there is one type of person called 'city', and there never has been Certainly there are changing values and a changing economy, and this has placed traditionally country occupations lower on the pecking order.
And yet, if we were to study the process of rural decline various curious contradictions would come to light. For instance, how many of those who marched on London were themselves partly responsible for the problems they protested about? By buying second homes at premium rates they had priced young families out of rural areas. By buying their neighbours' farms they had brought about the loss of small family farms. By using their cars they had contributed to the decline of bus services, or by travelling to town to shop they helped to kill the village shop, or by choosing the countryside as a place to retire they produced no children to populate the local school. In short, rural people bear their share in undermining the very way of life so many claim to defend. This makes me wonder whether a part, at least, of the motivation for the march was a kind of soft focus nostalgia for a past long gone (if it ever existed at all) and now every bit as unreal as life in Midsommer Murders.
Harvest reminds us that there are values at stake here - but far more fundamental ones than those associated with warm beer and hunting horns. These values are suggested in the parable we heard from St Luke's Gospel. The rich man's life has been devoted to acquisition. The problem in his behaviour is not his hedonistic desire to enjoy his possessions - God gives us good things to enjoy. Rather it is, firstly, that he has no thought of sharing what he has, he is living only for himself; and secondly, that he has such limited aspirations. When all is said and done, and whether he takes his ease for a long or short time, what has he to show for his life? As TW Manson put it, 'Against death and the issues of the hereafter the man of property is as naked and defenceless as the man who is poor.' (TW Manson's commentary on St Luke, Moffat Bible Commentaries, p153)
In other words the rich man would fail completely to understand what we are doing today. Yes, as the countryside marchers rightly remind us, it is too easy to forget that the food we enjoy each day on our plates has had to be produced somewhere. Modern Harvest Festivals ask us to appreciate our food producers - and we know that farmers have not had an easy time in recent years. Indeed, increasingly there seems to be an exploitative relationship between farmer and consumer whereby we pay very little for what they work so hard to produce. But Harvest does not and cannot stop there. If it did then our rich man could be excused his self-satisfied conviction that he has done it all himself. No, Harvest reminds us to be grateful also to God.
Harvest is a recognition of God's care for us and it is fundamentally an expression of continuing trust in God. As we read in Deuteronomy, true life consists in being in a relationship of commitment and loyalty to God. In this relationship all blessings flow - all things that really matter. However, whereas Deuteronomy seems to be concerned still with material prosperity, implying that somehow if we do everything God wants we will be rich, happy and successful, Jesus points out that ultimate values are not to do with this at all. He calls us to be rich in the things of God, to store up treasure where it really matters.
The rich man was locked into self-interest. It doesn't take a great feat of imagination to link this with the Western world's concern for its own riches. As Jesus puts it, 'the nations of the world strive after these things' - namely, to produce plenty that is stored in bank accounts rather than barns, to adopt a lavish and wasteful lifestyle. Death and the hereafter is rarely discussed by the nations of the world, of course, but nevertheless we are capable of asking whether our rich society is in the end just as naked and defenceless before God as our poorer neighbours. When God tells us, figuratively speaking perhaps, that our soul, the soul of our civilization is required of us, will we be any more able to respond than the rich man in the parable?
These are Harvest values. To live not just for ourselves but for others. To have a concern not just for what we can store in our barns but, as the recent Earth Summit challenged us to do, to have an eye also for others' harvests. We are here as stewards of the land, as all good farmers will tell us, to hand it on to future generations. But stewards not just of British land, but of the whole globe we share and its whole environment. And so to move forward together into a future that we must make for ourselves according to the values precious to God. Indeed, to be the means by which the words of Jesus might come true, that no one need worry about food or clothing, or need to strive for 'what they are to eat or what they are to drink', precisely because enough of us are striving instead for God's kingdom.
These, then, are the values that really matter - kingdom values. Are they rural or urban? Who cares! For sure, they require us to see each other as we really are, not as stereotypes. They demand that we take a worldwide perspective when it comes to our care for creation. And they invite us to give glory to God whose care for us in creation is merely a pale image of his care for us in eternity. And to recognise, as the rich man did not, that as someone once put it, 'The only possessions worthy of [human] striving are those that death cannot take away.' (GB Caird's commentary on St Luke, Pelican Bible Commentaries, p163)
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