All in the End is Harvest: a farewell sermon

‘Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost’ says Jesus to his disciples after he has fed the crowd. That seems like an apt theme as my time in Durham draws to an end, indeed, as I venture into the pulpit one last time after forty years of public ministry. ‘Five barley loaves and two fish – but what are they among so many?’ Ordained ministry can feel like that at times. Yet out of such meagre resources is shaped this demonstration of God’s generosity and goodness. The fragments scattered on the hillside are its memory. And because this is God’s doing, nothing must be lost. In one of her poems Edith Sitwell concludes: ‘Nothing is lost, and all in the end is harvest’.

Perhaps in St John, the gathered fragments in the fields are meant to echo harvest-time. We know from the next chapter that this was the season of one of the three great Jewish pilgrim feasts, Sukkot: Booths or Tabernacles. It marks the end of summer, the gathering-in of the harvest, the celebration of the year’s abundance. Tonight there is a big harvest moon, and a total eclipse to go with it. Tomorrow the Jewish community from which I come will keep the first day of their harvest festival and today they are preparing for it. We heard the Torah’s instructions in the first reading. The people are to make booths out of branches of willow and palm and live in them out in the open for a week. Here, exposed to the elements, to the creation, to one another and to themselves, they are to ‘rejoice before the Lord your God’.

There is a rich symbolism here: touching the earth and living close to the soil that has yielded this harvest; putting aside the securities human beings surround themselves with and learning a deeper dependence on God; and as the text says, reliving the memory of the past ‘so that your generations may know that I made the people of Israel live in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt’. For the Hebrews had themselves been a pilgrim people, a migrant community looking for a home. Therefore, as so many passages in the Torah tell us, Israel must never forget the homeless, the migrants, the displaced, to whom they must be as compassionate and merciful as God himself.

I see this theme of going out, leaving our securities behind as a metaphor of saying farewell today. I don’t simply mean leaving this Cathedral where we have been so happy for a dozen years. I am also recalling the places that have shaped these forty years of ministry: St Andrew’s Headington in Oxford where I was ordained deacon, and Balliol College where I was ordained priest, Sarum College and the Cathedral at Salisbury, the parish of Alnwick, Coventry Cathedral, Sheffield Cathedral and Durham. These communities have welcomed us, made us feel at home, offered friendship and forgiveness, cared for us, taught me everything I know about the art and the craft of ordained ministry. They have yielded a harvest for which I want to give thanks. In the passion Jesus says: ‘of those whom you have given me I have lost not one’. All these places have been given us to treasure and keep safe in the memory. ‘Gather the fragments so that nothing is lost.’

The themes of harvest, this time of Booths, can help us see what life should mean for us as people of faith. Thankfulness to God because to praise Almighty God, to practise gratitude, eucharistia, is the first principle of religion and the foundation of all it means to be human. Dependence on God because it is as we turn back to him and acknowledge his reign over us that we understand how he made us for himself and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in him. Living close to the earth because reverence for life, treating the world with courtesy and charity is to discover our true place in God’s creation. Remembering where we came from because the story of the great acts of God is the foundation of all Christian life, mission and the pursuit of truth and justice. And solidarity with the poor and needy such as the desperate and voiceless, the refugees and asylum-seekers, because as the sanctuary knocker on the Cathedral door announces, God’s household is a place of refuge, safety and care.

For twelve years, St Cuthbert has been a travelling companion. I was installed as dean on his day in 2003. I have often pondered that mighty stone slab in the shrine that has his name etched into it and been moved. The letters are rough and crude, in contrast to the finely wrought architecture of this cathedral where he would be amazed to find himself lying more than thirteen centuries later. When you are dean a cathedral that is loved all over the world, it could go to your head. You could become grand, think of yourself as Someone, whereas Jesus teaches us that his kingdom is for the nobodies of this world, the poor in spirit, the mourners and the meek, all who know their brokenness, their frailty, their need for mercy.

Cuthbert has recalled me to the essential simplicity of Christian ministry, helped me get my values back into perspective. Thankfulness, dependence on God, living close to the earth, remembering where we come from, solidarity with the poor: these were the qualities that were remembered in him. Perhaps the memory of the saints here in North East England is a particular gift to us who seek holiness and look for models to inspire us on the path of discipleship, for Cuthbert was only one of many in his fierce love of God and burning desire to serve the human family. Aidan, Oswald, Hild, Bede and many others: you find these visionary yet humane qualities in them all. We are all called to emulate them, live not out of the risk-free securities we crave but out on the dangerous edge of things where trust and faith in God are everything, as if indeed we were going out into the open air to live a perpetual feast of Booths.  

This is how Jesus himself was and is for us. In his cross and resurrection the broken pieces of our lives are gathered up. ‘Nothing is lost and all in the end is harvest.’ In these fragments, like the bread scattered on the hillside are the abiding traces of God’s generosity in which the seeds of promised glory are enfolded. I mean nothing less than the transformation we call the kingdom of God whose coming we long for, his great project of love that is always moving out to all creation. I have tried for 40 years to give an answer for the hope that is within us, our reason for being alive. In such ways, for all their flaws and brokenness, we bear witness to the story that is both God’s and ours: the tender mercy out of which God reaches out to the world in Christ, finds us and gathers us in as the harvest of his love.

So trusting in that hope, we cast our bread upon the waters and wait to see what God will do. We cannot know what lies ahead for us, what fragments will be for us or others to gather up. But our hope in God is enough to sustain us in the days that are to come. ‘All in the end is harvest’. ‘Gather the fragments, so that nothing is lost.’  

Durham Cathedral, 27 September 2015
(Leviticus 23.39-end, John 6.1-15)

Back to Booths!

When you are embarking on an ambitious building project, it consumes a great deal of your time and energies, as we know well here at the Cathedral. Nehemiah, governor of Judah, has set himself the task of rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem, ruinous since the Babylonian invasions over a century before. A man of energetic character who brooks no opposition, he achieves this task despite the Machiavellian tactics of his opponents. They allege that this huge act of reconstruction is to cover up a conspiracy to rebel against the Persian empire.  Why build walls unless your intention is to declare independence?

If this were all there was to the story, it would hardly be worth telling. But the next part of the book shows that a deeper purpose lies behind it.  When the wall is finished, and families have settled into their homes, a great assembly is convened. The people tell Ezra the priest to bring out the book of the law and read from it. For a whole morning he reads aloud at a ceremony marked by both tears of joy and shouts of thankfulness: sorrow for the years they have been alienated from this torah, God’s instruction for sound and healthy living; thankfulness to have their covenant with God given back to them. And they see how the renewal of buildings, temples, walls, houses is a symbol of something deeper: the renewal of their vocation and resolve to live purposefully in obedience to God’s rule.

Nehemiah sees that the ancient book requires them to do something specific to mark their obedience. It’s the autumn, the season of harvest. Nehemiah realises that according to the law, a long-neglected festival needs to be reinstated.  So he instructs everyone to go out into the fields, gather branches of whatever trees they can find, and construct leafy booths in the open air: on their housetops or in streets and courts and public squares, even in the temple precincts. Then they are to go and live in them for a week. All this the people do. The text goes out of its way to say that they did it gladly: ‘there was very great rejoicing’.

Here’s an odd thing: to celebrate the end of a building project not by occupying the newly created buildings but by deliberately quitting them to live outside. Clearly, the people understood what this meant because the text doesn’t explain why it was important, only that it was part of being thankful. We have to look back into the torah, the books of the law, to understand the significance of the festival of Booths, If there are gaps in the law-codes, we shall need to use our imaginations a little. Here is how I read it.

First, the feast was as an act of celebration. How better to mark the ingathering of the harvest than going out to live in the very fields where you have sweated and toiled all summer to garner the fruits of the earth? It is God’s harvest, but it is also the work of human hands. There is something endearing about this command to go out and be at home in the open air. It is our natural environment, a memory of how once upon a time a man and a woman lived without fear or shame in a garden where the Lord God walked and enjoyed the company of his human friends. What we love about Cuthbert and Francis is that they were so much at home in the natural world.

By contrast, we see around us ever more evidence of how alienated we have become from good earth, so estranged from it that we can contemplate the planet burning because of our contempt for the environment. Tabernacles reminds us how our own health and the earth’s renewal depend on our learning to reconnect with the natural order, learn to treat all things living with courtesy, ‘discover our place in God’s creation’ as the Cathedral’s purpose statement puts it. It looks forward to the day when nature and humanity are reconciled and, in Isaiah’s vision, the wolf dwells with the lamb, the child plays over the hole of the asp, and nothing hurts or destroys in all God’s holy mountain, for the earth is filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

Second, this exercise in al fresco living was meant to teach the Jews something important about dependence. It’s precisely at the time solid structures are completed that Nehemiah says: don’t depend on these beautiful stones and beautiful buildings. Depend only on God. Let your faith in him be re-energised by having to live for a while without the securities you are getting used to again. For this was precisely how your ancestors lived in days of old: ‘a wandering Aramean was my father’ says one of Israel’s oldest creeds: nomads and fugitives in the barren wilderness for all those years they trekked, often despondently, towards the land of promise.

Yet despite their obduracy and lack of hope, God did not forget the Hebrews but prepared a table in the wilderness for them, as Ezra puts it in his magnificent covenant-making speech in the next chapter. Tabernacles was a way of going back to that story, rekindling the memory of far-off days when the Hebrews had no houses, no temple, no abiding city. ‘You shall dwell in booths seven days, so that your generations may know that I made the children of Israel dwell in booths when I brought them up out of the land of Egypt.’ It reminded them how life’s changes and chances threw them on the mercy of the covenant. It told them not to vest ultimate security in anything they could see or touch. It threw them on the mercy and goodness of God. We no doubt expect to learn this lesson in other ways. But learn it we must, if faith means anything.

There is a third theme running through this celebration. How often does the torah instil the habit of being generous and compassionate towards the wanderer and stranger, the outcaste, the disadvantaged, the poor. The more prosperous and successful you become, the easier it is not simply to forget those who need your help, but actively to choose not to remember them. The feast of Booths is a kind of enforced homelessness, having to live in temporary accommodation, discover what it is like to live in the cold and the wet and the dark. When people with a social conscience decide to live for a week on unemployment benefit, perhaps sleeping rough in parks or doorways, it’s easy to disparage this as the token gesture of the comfortably off: acting a part rather than truly taking part.

But this is what Tabernacles calls the people to do. I imagine that it is physically and emotionally
costly to live in a booth for a week. I have never done it. I like to think the Jews of Nehemiah’s day discovered as we can that by taking up roles and acting out rituals, their meanings become more real, are understood in new ways. That leads to the transformation of attitudes and perspectives, in this case a deeper sympathy with and compassion for those for whom living in streets and squares and the open country is not a matter of joy and will not come to an end next week.

The renewal of a people’s mind and heart is what Nehemiah wanted to achieve. He knew that building the walls was the easy part. Much harder to rebuild a community on the values of justice, loving-kindness and truth. This great communal celebration of an ancient festival was only the beginning. But it sowed the seeds of the future when, under pressure and at times of terrible persecution, Judaism covenant would remain steadfast to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob who had called them into this privileged life and promised that in their seed all the peoples of the world would bless themselves. In Jesus, Christians believe that promise to be coming true. This is why we pray as he taught us, ‘thy kingdom come’, and look with eager longing for the day of God when the rich promises foreshadowed in one of the old pilgrim feasts become nothing less than a new heaven and new earth.


Durham Cathedral, 20 October 2013 (Nehemiah 8. 9-end)