“We plough the fields…”By The Revd David Burgess
Harvest is a busy time if you are a minister with four churches and two schools. If my maths is right I have five services (three church, two school) and three harvest suppers in the space of 14 days.
It does concentrate the mind very well on the task in hand, but there’s also a need to avoid being ‘harvested out’. It always occurs to me, though, that this simply isn’t an option for our farming community. I see this again and again in the late summer when I finish work, perhaps at 9:00 or 9:30 in the evening, as trucks and carriers go by and I know that our farmers still have at least an hour’s work ahead of them in the day.
It may be a cliché to say that as consumers (literally) of the food provided for us, we take that means of production for granted, but like most clichés it happens to be true. Perhaps in the last year our thinking has been sharpened by the very visible rise in food prices, but as a society I think we’ve tended to use this as a basis for criticism rather than appreciation of the work done on our behalf.
As well as running the risk of being ungrateful if we pursue this approach, we run the risk of being un-Christian. The Bible knows about agriculture; with a few exceptions (Jerusalem, Rome and Babylon) the stories from it are set in rural communities. For example, the book of Ruth runs the whole course of grief, exile, re-settlement and romance all taking place within a farming community at harvest time.
The Bible also knows about agricultural hardship; poor harvests were as bad news then as they are now and the provision of food similarly was equally vital two or three thousand years ago. The blessing of the land, its crops and those involved in harvesting those crops isn’t a modern invention; it’s rooted in a biblical understanding of God’s grace and provision and the call to bring all our needs to him, however local or small they might seem to us.
In the light of that, I do hope that you’ve kept our farmers and our farming communities in your prayers at regular intervals throughout the year. They need them as we all do as human beings, but especially in times of very hard work and uncertainty, typified by the last couple of months.
In a real sense those involved in farming are doing God’s work at its most fundamental. Stewardship of the land, of creation itself, is the first task that human beings were given by God and it’s a continuing way of life that should be honoured and respected and not taken lightly.
One service and one harvest supper will have taken place by the time you read this, but there’s plenty more! We do invite you to all that’s taking place across the parishes at harvest time; details of these events appear in the village newsletters.