Something that’s very important to us in the Church, and in life generally, is tradition. Tradition is a set of customs and practices, or beliefs, that are passed on from generation to generation. And so traditions are a way that we can maintain our link with the past, whether that’s our own ancestors through family traditions, our history and heritage through cultural traditions, or indeed with the faith of those who’ve gone before us in the Church, through our Christian traditions. And as a way of maintaining our links with the past, traditions are very important to us in the Church because, as the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, once said, if we don’t remain linked to the past through our traditions, we run the risk of the Church disintegrating into a ‘pluralist mess’ in which anything goes and nothing is sacred.

Having said that though, traditions aren’t always so set in stone as we might think. When I was an ordinand at the College of the Resurrection at Mirfield, for example, something that was of great importance both to the monastic community there, and the college, was tradition. In fact, if anyone asked why things were done there in the way they were, the only answer anyone ever got was, because it’s ‘the Mirfield Way’. But, as an assistant sacristan and then senior sacristan at the college, I worked very closely with the community in preparing for worship, setting up the church, rehearsing altar servers and so on. And through doing that, what I discovered was that much of the ‘Mirfield Way’ was simply, as near as anyone could remember, the way it was done last time. So tradition, whilst it is linked to the past and does help us to maintain our connection to and continuity with the past, isn’t set in stone; traditions can, and do, change. And another good example of that is Harvest Thanksgiving.

Giving thanks for the harvest goes back to pre-Christian, pagan times but, like many pagan festivals, it was ‘Christianised’ and taken over by the Church. As a Christian festival, certainly in this country, it goes back at least to the Anglo-Saxon Lammas (lit. loaf- mass) Day celebrations of the early English Church. But, even though harvest thanksgiving celebrations in the Church do go back so far, Harvest Thanksgiving, as we know it, only dates back to the 1850’s. So Harvest Thanksgiving, as we know it, is a fairly recent tradition of the Church in England, and even so, it’s still changed from what it once was.

One thing that’s changed is the name – we used to call it the Harvest Festival, and I can remember, and I’m sure many of you can too, when the Harvest Festival was one of the biggest and most important celebrations in a church’s year. People used to spend weeks preparing for it. They used to bake loaves especially for it, that would go on display at the Harvest Festival. People would spend days decorating the church for it (and then very often much longer arguing and falling out about whose display went where and whose display was best). And the church would be full of fresh produce, fruit, vegetables as well as the harvest loaves. And then, after the Harvest Festival, all the food from the displays and the food that had been brought as gifts on the day would be sorted into parcels and taken out to people in the parish who were thought to be in need of it. And very often there’d be arguments about that too, not least from those who didn’t get anything, but who thought they were just as deserving, if not more deserving than some who did. (And if you ever wondered why some clergy really don’t like Harvest Thanksgiving, it’s because of these arguments and the trouble it caused in the church and the parish that they’d then have to sort out.)

These days, that doesn’t happen so much because, in most places, Harvest Thanksgiving is a much smaller affair than it used to be. Churches aren’t decorated in the way they once were so there’s no reason for people to argue about that. Most of the gifts that people bring to the Harvest Thanksgiving service now are in cans or packets; people don’t bring so much fresh produce these days and so we don’t get the comments about people’s gifts we once did. I’m sure you’ve heard them; I hope you haven’t used them:

“Look at the state of those apples (or bananas or whatever it might have been) that such and such has brought. You can’t give those to anyone. The only thing they’re fit for is the bin!”

We don’t get that because, rather than going to individuals, the harvest gifts now tend to go to food banks, who don’t want fresh produce these days, so there’s no reason to argue about who gets what either.

So, whilst giving thanks for the harvest is a tradition of the Church that dates back a long time, the way it’s celebrated has changed over the years. The Harvest Thanksgiving services we have today maintain a tradition and a link with those who’ve worshipped God in this way in the past, but the fact that we can do that whilst at the same time make changes to the way we celebrate Harvest Thanksgiving, shows that being faithful to our traditions, doesn’t mean that we have to do things the same way for ever.

We can make changes and, at the same time, still be traditional.  Some changes, in fact, can be good, and can actually improve on the tradition. The way we celebrate Harvest Thanksgiving now causes far fewer arguments than having a Harvest Festival used to. And the simple fact that instead of calling it a Harvest Festival, as we used to, we now call it Harvest Thanksgiving is a good change too because that reminds us of what our harvest celebration is really all about; it’s about giving thanks to God, not just for the food we eat, but for all his grace and goodness towards us.

As we celebrate this Harvest Thanksgiving though, some of the changes we’ve made remind us of the situation we’re all in at the moment. We’d struggle to take harvest gifts to individuals, even if we wanted to, because we’re not allowed to visit many of the people we’d take the gifts to. And so we’ve had to ask that no fresh produce at all is given today. The way the gifts have been given and received, being brought forward one at a time and left at the altar rail, rather than being given to myself and the servers as is the tradition. These things remind us that we’re in the midst of a pandemic. They remind us that we’ve all been forced to make many, great changes to our lives in the past year. And, as we think about those things, it reminds us too, that many people at this time despair of things ever going back to normal. For many people it seems as though the past, the life they used to know, has gone, forever. Many people think, and have said, that the world will never be the same again, that in a sense, this pandemic marks a break with the past, a break along the lines of what was before Covid-19 and what will be after Covid-19. And so, for many people, the idea of finding anything to be thankful for at this time, is strange and difficult.

There’s no doubt this is a difficult time, for all of us, but this is not the first pandemic to afflict the world.

The Black Death killed perhaps as many as 200 million people between 1346 and 1353, including, it’s thought, about half the entire population of Europe. But, although the world changed because of it, life went on, and there was no complete break with the past. The harvest thanksgiving celebrations of Lammas Day pre-date the Black Death, and although our Harvest Thanksgiving today is not the same as the Lammas Day celebrations of the early English Church, it has it’s roots in those celebrations and links us to the world before the Black Death and to the people who lived in that world.

The Spanish Flu, the influenza pandemic of 1918-20 is thought to have infected 500 million people and led to between 50 and 100 million deaths. But life went on and the pandemic didn’t cause a complete break with the past. In some parishes the Harvest Thanksgiving celebrations now are hardly changed from the Harvest Festivals of the 1850s. If we were able to sing hymns in church today, we’d be singing the same hymns people sang then, We Plough the Fields and Scatter; Come, Ye Thankful People, Come; To Thee, O Lord, Our Hearts We Raise; harvest hymns written or translated into English between 1844 and 1864. They all pre-date the Spanish Flu pandemic but the fact that we still sing them today shows that the flu pandemic of 1918-20 didn’t bring about a complete break with the past.

As terrible as the Covid-19 pandemic is, the two pandemics I’ve just mentioned were far, far worse. Of course, we don’t know how long the current pandemic will last or how many people will suffer or die in it, but these great pandemics in the past didn’t cause a complete break with what had gone before. They didn’t separate the world after from the world before. The two times and the two worlds were linked, at first through living memory, as all times are at first, and then through traditions as all times also are through history, and our Harvest Thanksgiving today is part of the proof of that. So whilst the current pandemic has caused changes and will no doubt cause more, it will not separate us from what has gone before and the life we knew before. The only way it can do that, is if we let it. And we won’t do that by changing what we do, we’ll only do that if we draw a line under what’s gone before and let our traditions die.

And even in the midst of this pandemic, we can still find reason to give thanks. We can still give thanks to God for the necessities of life, the air we breathe and for our food and drink. We can still give thanks to God for life itself and for the promise that, come what may, he will never abandon us, in life and in death, he will be with us. And whilst death and suffering do cause us great sorrow and pain, we can give thanks that, through our Lord Jesus Christ, God will be with us beyond death because we have his promise that life goes on beyond death. And perhaps, through the suffering and difficulties this pandemic has brought, people might learn to be a little more thankful generally. Thankful for the good things we had, and more appreciative of them when those good things return. More thankful for one another, for our families and friends and a bit more loving for it. More thankful for simple things like being able to walk into a shop and buy what we need when we need it. More thankful for all those who work to bring us those things and who spend their lives working to care and look after us, perhaps especially for all those who work in the health service. And perhaps too, people might take a moment to stop and think about life a little more, and when they do to remember that we, human beings, are not so clever, self-sufficient and all-powerful as we perhaps like to think we are. And, if we can do that, who knows, we might find that few more people become a little more thankful towards God, the giver of life and of all good things, too. 

Amen.

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You will find the Propers for Harvest Thanksgiving here.

Over the past few Sundays, the theme of the Gospel readings has been the kingdom of God. Each Sunday for the past three weeks, we’ve heard a different parable that Jesus told about the kingdom. Three weeks ago, we heard the parable of the labourers in the vineyard, in which Jesus said that God will reward everyone who does the work he requires in the same way, regardless of how long they’ve been doing that work. Two weeks ago, we heard the parable of the two sons whom the father asks to work in his vineyard. In that parable, Jesus tells us that it’s not those who say they’ll be about God’s work who will enter the kingdom, but those who actually do what God asks of them. Last Sunday we heard the parable of the tenants in the vineyard, in which Jesus tells us that the kingdom will be given not to those who think they ought to have it, but to those who do the work and produce the fruit that God wants. And today, that kingdom theme continues with the parable of the wedding feast.

In one sense, the parable we heard this morning is different from those we’ve heard over the last few weeks. For one thing, all the other parables speak about the kingdom as vineyard whereas this morning’s parable speaks about the kingdom as a wedding feast. The other parables speak about entering the kingdom in terms of the reward for doing the work, and the kind of work that God wants, whereas this morning’s parable speaks about the kingdom in terms of simply accepting an invitation to enter and enjoy the rewards of the kingdom. Nevertheless, this morning’s parable does still strike a warning note because Jesus tells us that receiving an invitation to enter the kingdom is no guarantee that we’ll actually get in, or be allowed to stay in.

Those Jesus speaks about in the parable as being ‘not interested’ or ‘making light of it’ and going off to do other things were, of course, the Jews of his own day. But we still have people today who act in the same way. Through Christ, everyone has received an invitation to the wedding feast of God’s Son, to the kingdom of God; we call that invitation, the Gospel. It’s through the Gospel that we’ve received our invitation to the kingdom, and the Gospel tells us what we have to do to accept the invitation.

When we receive an invitation to an earthly party of some sort, it usually says R.S.V.P. at the bottom doesn’t it? R.S.V.P, ‘respondez s’il vous plait’ or ‘please reply’ and there’s an address to reply to. Of course the Gospel invitation has no address to reply to, so we have to reply through our actions, by doing in our lives what the Gospel invitation asks us to do. And through our actions, God, who sees and knows all, knows what our reply to his invitation is.

But, of course, just as with any other kind of invitation, some people are not interested in accepting. They’re too busy with other things to go to the wedding feast of God’s Son. These are the people who are more concerned with earthly things and things of the flesh than with heavenly things and spiritual things. Perhaps these are the people who don’t think the invitation is real, people who think that earthly things are all there is, and that there is no kingdom of heaven and no wedding feast of God’s Son to go to?

Then there are those who make light of the invitation. These are the people who believe that the wedding feast is real, or at least say they do, but who can’t be bothered to reply. These are perhaps the people who would like to go to the feast, but who think it’s too much effort to reply, too much like hard work to reply in the way God wants us to reply? These are perhaps the people I spoke about in another sermon recently, those who think it’s enough simply to call themselves ‘Christians’, people who think it’s enough simply to go to church on Sunday, or enough to have been ‘Christened’? These are perhaps the people who think it’s enough to say they’ll do what God asks of them rather than actually do it. These people might also then be those whom Jesus speaks of as trying to get into the wedding feast without the proper attire, without a ‘wedding garment’ or ‘robe’. But what is the proper attire to wear at the wedding feast of God’s Son? 

In his Letter to the Galatians, St Paul says,

“For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.”

So, in St Paul, we have this image of putting on Christ, as though Christ was a garment. And, in fact, that’s why those being baptised traditionally wear white, to symbolise the holiness and purity of the new life as Christians they’re about to take on. But in baptism, there is an explicit commitment to Christ and to that life, a promise to live according to Christ’s teaching and example. In many Churches, that’s a promise usually made by parents and godparents on behalf of children, and taken on by those children when, hopefully, they’re confirmed in the Christian faith later in life. So baptism alone does not make us Christians, we have to fulfil the promises we make at baptism, or confirmation, before we can really call ourselves Christians and say we’ve ‘put on’ Christ. And St Paul makes that clear too. In his Letter to the Romans he says,

“So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armour of light. Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarrelling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”

And to the Colossians he says,

“Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts.”

So we have this image of putting on Christ, an image of wearing Christ as though he was a garment, through living the kind of life that he taught us to live, the life we promise to live at our baptism or confirmation. And that is no doubt the attire, the wedding garment, that Jesus is speaking about in the parable we heard this morning, it’s Christ himself. And isn’t that what we read in the Book of Revelation?

“I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes”

And that those wearing them are those who

“have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”

And whom Jesus himself says are “blessed” that is, made happy by God.

The Book of Revelation tells us that it’s those who wear robes washed white in Christ who will enter the kingdom and remain in the kingdom for ever. It’s those who wear robes washed white in Christ who will share in the heavenly banquet prepared for them, the wedding feast of God’s Son.

Jesus ends the parable of the wedding feast by saying that

“many are called, but few are chosen.”

That can be quite worrying, maybe even frightening, because it suggests that not many of us will be allowed to enter the kingdom and enjoy the wedding feast of God’s Son. But that doesn’t really fit with what we read in Revelation about a multitude that no one could number does it? So perhaps we could re-phrase it and instead of saying, ‘many are called, but few are chosen’ and say, ‘everyone is invited, but not everyone accepts or does what’s necessary to gain entry’? And we might also say that many of those who do accept, don’t bother to dress properly for the occasion, and turn up for the feast, only to be turned away.

We’ve all been invited to enter the kingdom and enjoy the wedding feast of God’s Son, the question is, what are we going to do about it? Are we going to ignore the invitation because we’ve got other things to do? Are we going to make light of the invitation and not reply because it’s too much like hard work to get ready? And if we do that, are we then going to expect that we can simply turn up and get in, even though we’re not properly dressed for the occasion? Or are we going to look at that R.S.V.P on our invitation to the wedding feast of God’s Son, and see and take note of how to reply so that, when our time comes to go to the feast, we can go dressed appropriately, wearing the only acceptable attire, the white robe of Christ, so that we can be chosen to enter the kingdom and take our place at the feast?

Amen.

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You will find the Propers for the 28th Sunday (Trinity 18) here.

As I was reading the news feed on my laptop yesterday, I came across a story about a couple of interviews the Prime Minister had given for BCC Scotland and BBC North East, in which he said that the recent rise in coronavirus infections was due to the lack of discipline and lack of attention to the rules designed to prevent infection, or at least slow-down the transmission rate of infection, that people had shown over the summer. In the BBC Scotland interview, the Prime Minister said that people had become complacent and blasé about the risks of transmission.

I don’t know whether you agree with that or not but personally, I think there’s a lot of truth in what the Prime Minister said because it was almost inevitable that people, some people at least, would start to act in this way. None of us want our lives to be restricted in the way they have been during the last few months and we all want things to go back to normal. And so, once the virus seemed to be coming under control, as it did in late Spring and early Summer, and the lockdown restrictions started to be relaxed, people were bound to think the worst was over, relax their guard too, and at least start to get back to something like a normal way of life.

In one of his interviews, the Prime Minister referred to this in terms of people’s ‘muscle memory’ fading. As I’m sure you all know ‘muscle memory’ refers to our ability to do things almost without thinking because we’ve done it so often or for so long. We often speak about this as ‘practice makes perfect’. The problem with that though, is that once we have done something regularly and for a long time, we can start to think we know all about it and can do it without really thinking about it, and so we don’t think about it, or don’t think enough about it at least. We don’t give it the attention we should, the attention it deserves. We become complacent and perhaps even blasé about what we’re doing. And so we start to make mistakes but, because we’re not really thinking about what we’re doing, because we don’t think we have to, we don’t correct our mistakes and those mistakes become part of our muscle memory. It’s not so much a case of our muscle memory fading but more of our muscle having a bad memory. And when that happens, we go from a situation where ‘practice makes perfect’ to one where familiarity has bred contempt.

That’s a problem we come across in all aspects of life, and not least in our lives as Christians. But then, Christians are not alone in that. It’s part of human nature and so it’s a problem for people of all faiths and none, and it was certainly a problem the Jews of Jesus’ day had, and it’s one of the issues Jesus addresses in the parable we heard in this morning’s Gospel.

In the parable, the landowner is God, the tenants are the Jews, the servants are the prophets, and the landowner’s son is, of course Jesus. The tenants had been put in charge of the landowner’s vineyard, just as the Jews had been given the law and the covenant. But just as in the parable where it’s clear the tenants hadn’t produced the fruit the landowner had expected, the Jews hadn’t done what God expected, and just as the tenants beat and killed those the landowner sent to collect the fruit, so the Jews had beaten and killed those God had sent, the prophets and they would beat and kill his Son too. The problem was that the tenants thought that the landowner’s vineyard ought to be theirs, and the attitude that comes across in the Scriptures is that the Jews thought that what God had given them charge of, was theirs by right. It’s an attitude that’s perhaps summed up in the Letter to the Philippians where St Paul speaks about his own Jewish heritage:

“If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness in the law, blameless.”

The sense of pride that Paul had in being a Jew leaps from the page in those words, but that seems to have been the problem. The Jews seemed to believe that it was enough simply to be a Jew because that made them one of God’s people. And they’d been God’s people for a long time, so they’d become complacent, as Jesus suggested when he admonished the scribes and Pharisees, the very people whom St Paul was so proud of calling himself:

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.”

And the fruit that God wanted from them of course, were the very things they’d let slide and neglected, justice, mercy and righteousness. And they were so convinced that their practice of the minutiae of the law had made them perfect, that they’d treated both the weightier matters of the law, and those whom God had sent to remind them of those weightier matters, and of their obligation to produce those fruits for God, with contempt and ignored them, beaten them and killed them.

Jesus ends this parable by telling us what the punishment for these unfaithful tenants will be, that what they’d be given by God will be taken away and given to those who will produce the fruit God wants, and in his Letter to the Philippians, St Paul makes it clear that the way to do that, is by following Christ.

But if we want to be given God’s kingdom, we have to make sure that we don’t fall into the same trap the Jews seemed to have done. We have to make sure that we don’t become complacent, as many do simply because they come to Church or because they say they’re Christians. We have to produce the fruit God wants, and that means we have to practice what we preach. But we can’t allow ourselves to think that practice makes perfect, because none of us ever are, or will be, perfect when it comes to producing the kind of fruit God wants. So we have to constantly be on our guard against allowing our familiarity with Christ’s example and teaching to breed contempt for his example and teaching. We can’t allow ourselves to beat and kill the words and example of the prophets and saints, and Christ himself, because we’re so sure of ourselves and our ways that we ignore them and theirs. We have to constantly compare ourselves to them, and especially to Christ, and amend our ways and make sure that they conform to God’s ways so that our Christian muscle doesn’t remember badly or lose its memory completely.

The Prime Minister may well be right when he says that the rise in coronavirus transmission and infection is due to some people becoming complacent and blasé about the risk the virus poses, and a lack of attention to the rules designed to protect us from it. But, while coronavirus is a terrible disease and threat to our health, and something we should take very seriously, in the grand scheme of things, a far more terrible thing is the threat to our immortal souls if we don’t pay proper attention to the rules designed to protect them from harm. So let’s do our best to stick to those rules, and do our best to make sure we never become complacent or blasé about them.

Amen.

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You will find the Propers for the 27th Sunday (Trinity 17) here.