Sermon Archive
The mystery of creativity
Sermon preached by Kenneth Boyd at Holy Communion on 1 October 2006, Harvest Festival
Deuteronomy 26:1-11 ; Matthew 6:25-33
Let me begin with some unseasonal words. "In this yeir about the harvest and efter, thair wes suche ane universall seikness in all the countrie as ellyke hes not been herd of." In one district so many families perished from want that for six miles formerly well inhabited there was not within the year an inhabited house remaining. Women were found dead upon the public roads, and babes in the agonies of death suckling at their dead mothers' breasts. [In one locality] many, feeling the near approach of death, crawled to the churchyard so that their bodies might not long be left exposed. Many were buried where they died, as the few surviving relations had neither strength nor means of carrying them to the common burying-place.
No, not Darfur or Ethiopia, but here in Scotland, in the regularly recurring famine years of the 17th and 18th centuries, when harvests failed, and dearth and death prevailed. The winter of 1698-99 was the worst: not least, according to the historians, because no 'public measures were adopted for the welfare of the poor at this time, nor were any uncommon exertions made by the Kirk Sessions, then responsible for poor relief, until the crisis was nearly over'.
Harvest thanksgiving then, that such appalling scenes are no longer witnessed in the countryside of Scotland. It's sometimes suggested, of course, that harvest thanksgiving no longer means very much in a modern scientific and technological society, especially in towns and cities, where supermarkets are stocked all the year round with every kind of foodstuff, in season and out, and where 'public measures' have long been adopted to ensure that those who cannot afford to buy food, at least do not starve. Yet to suggest that, is to miss the real point. What we need to be thankful for today are precisely those developments in science, technology, commerce and civil society which separate our time from those of dearth, famine and death three-hundred or so years ago: the scientific improvement of agriculture, the growth of industry and technology, the commercial creation of wealth and the political will to make it a common wealth, or at least a welfare state.
We need to be thankful for all this, not least because being thankful for something is a sign that you do not take it for granted; and to take for granted the benefits those developments have conferred on our society today is to be ungrateful, ungenerous and unwise. It is ungrateful to take these benefits for granted, because they were and are the fruit of countless people's toil, tears, sweat and sacrifice - in the mines and mills of the industrial revolution, in colonial countries producing raw materials, and in fishing fleets, fields and factories today. It is ungenerous, because our share of these benefits is unjustifiably disproportionate in global terms, and only the most callous can turn a deaf ear to those across the world who even today suffer as our ancestors did. And it is unwise to take these benefits for granted, because the natural resources we rely on, especially oil, are finite, and what we are doing to our environment, including global warming, is fraught with future dangers. Although we celebrate harvest thanksgiving according to the time and season of an older society, the underlying reason for celebrating it at all, is as relevant today as it ever was. The harvest of the earth, the fragile achievement of fallible humans, can never be finally guaranteed.
To be thankful for the harvest of the earth then is not to take it for granted. But is that all that being thankful means? I've said that we should be thankful for 'the fragile achievement of fallible humans'. But should we not also be thankful to God, from whom, as the hymn puts it, 'all good gifts around us are sent'?
But here, I think, we face a difficulty. When we thank God for the harvest, are we not like those who thank God when good things happen to, or bad things are avoided by, themselves or their kin or their fellow-religionists, regardless of what happens to everyone else in the same circumstances - thanking God that our missionary partner was not killed in the earthquake, for example, or that our relative survived the tsunami, as if God was more concerned with our people than with the countless others who perished? The idea of God intervening in such an unfairly discriminatory fashion is difficult if not impossible for many people today to believe in. Thanking God for sending 'the warmth to swell the grain' (or perhaps more appositely this morning, the 'soft, refreshing rain') for our harvest, this year, sounds rather smug and self-centred. It's difficult moreover to make sense of this idea of an unfairly discriminatory God in Christian terms. Jesus himself remarked that people who were killed in a massacre and an accident were no more deserving of that than anyone else. He said that God 'makes his sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous'. And he taught that all our prayers, for ourselves and for others, however heartfelt, must ultimately echo his own prayer "Abba, Father, for you all things are possible… yet, not what I want, but what you want." 'Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven'.
There is more to that kingdom, to the doing of that will, than our wishes can conceive. 'Not what I want, but what you want'. All too often, of course, Christians have interpreted 'what you want' - God's will - in ways that all too clearly reflected the social, cultural and moral prejudices of their own particular age, race, class or gender. All too often too, the temporal power and moral influence of the Church has dictated God's will in ways that confined rather than liberated human lives and the human imagination. So it is not surprising that so many people today are suspicious of such a potential threat to their freedom to be themselves, and protect themselves against it by regarding Christianity as an outdated system of pre-scientific ideas about supernatural entities for which there is no evidence. Such views perhaps are understandable. Nevertheless they reflect a very superficial understanding of the human reality which Christianity has been striving and struggling, fitfully and fallibly, to express.
Today's culmination of Creationtide in Harvest Thanksgiving suggests something more adequate. To talk of the universe as created and of ourselves as creatures does not require us to hold any particular pre-scientific ideas about supernatural entities for which there is no evidence. It invites us rather to trust that we live in a universe which is meaningful in a way that responds to our human desire for meaning, even if that meaning is now seen only obscurely, through a glass darkly. If we then talk of God as Creator, of course, we have to acknowledge that we are talking of what we can neither comprehend - get our mind round - nor describe - encircle with our thoughts: God is not some thing within our human experience, but the ultimate mystery that makes human experience itself possible and meaningful. Genesis expresses this by saying that God created us, male and female, in God's own image and likeness. Our human creativity, in other words, is a finite reflection of infinite creativity. But precisely because it is a finite creativity, its achievements remain fragile and fragmentary, and the ultimate harvest is always beyond the horizon of human understanding.
What we celebrate at Creationtide and Harvest Thanksgiving then is the mystery of creativity, both the infinite creativity for which all our names are inadequate, and its finite reflection in human creativity. That finite reflection includes the creativity of all those, in agriculture, science, technology, commerce, philanthropy and politics, whose achievements rescued our country from the recurring dearth and famines of the past. That we cannot take their achievements for granted, nor rest easy till others share in them, nor be secure in our possession of them in a world of finite resources, is more than sufficient reason to be reminded each year to be thankful both for the harvests of such creativity in the past and present, and for those on whose continued creativity we depend for the future. And our creativity also is required. As our lesson from Deuteronomy about first fruits and tithes reminds us, it is incumbent on each of us to discover how best we individually can contribute our time, talents and money to the needs of the world.
None of this however makes much sense if we live in a meaningless universe. For if the universe is meaningless how can anything make sense? Yet no amount of evidence we may gather can prove that the universe is meaningful. Our only way to prove that, is by practising what Jesus preaches in today's gospel, having the courage to put our faith in what is beyond our present understanding, trusting God, and using our imagination to respond creatively wherever life leads.
'Do not worry', Jesus says. No-one can pretend that that is easy, or indeed that any one of us every really achieves it. But if the name of the unknown God to whom we pray 'thy will be done' really is, as Jesus said, 'Abba, father', then in the calm that sometimes comes to us even here and now, we shall sense, and in the unimaginable beyond we shall know, that all our fallible, fragmentary and even failed efforts have not been in vain.
References
The quotations about famine in Scotland are from Ferguson T The Dawn of Scottish Social Welfare Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, 1948: 19-20.
The remarks on divine and human creativity were stimulated by Wall T Moral Creativity: Paul Ricoeur and the Poetics of Responsibility Oxford University Press, 2005.
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