Harvest Service - SERMON

When I was a boy of about 8 years of age I was never able to understand why truck loads of fruit were destroyed. I lived in Summerland, surrounded by huge orchards, a land of plenty of fruit. In the summer the packing and canning factories were busy, people were employed, the harvest was gathered. Cherries in season, then peaches, followed by plums and eventually the various apples. All summer into the fall the pickers and packers were busy. But why the deliberate waste? Goin past my house every day I noticed trucks, dump trucks, filled to overfull with peaches. They were dumped in the dump and lime poured over the fruit, a deliberate waste. ‘Why?’ I asked as a little boy of eight.

That question has never left me. And I am still looking for an answer. The peaches were destroyed because they were too big for Canada Grade Choice #1. They were destroyed because there were too many for making jam. They were destroyed because the dehydration plant that made packaged preserved fruit had burned down the year before. The beautiful, juicy peaches were thrown away fecause the B.C. Tree Fruits Marketing Board said so; prices had to be kept high in order for the middle marketing system to make a profit.

Today in Summerland there are still peaches being grown, but not so many. Farmers sold the land because they couldn’t make a living. Houses have grown where once the trees blossomed row on row. Why?

If this was a local problem, an Okanagan situation, just a few farmers involved, then we might forgive the system. But when I hear political leaders saying on TV that “the wheat farmers of our prairies either have to be fully subsidized by Canadian taxpayers or go out of business forever”, then I wonder what is wrong.

I know, and so do you, of the world hunger problem. And I know that food for 125% of world population’s needs can be grown right now. Yet children are dying, populations are in famine, the stores in Russia have insufficient food. Bread in the United States costs $2.81 a loaf, that same loaf costs $2.69 in Safeway Canada, $8 in the North. The farmer gets 2 cents. Our stores are bulging with consumable items mostly packaged in material we throw out and haul to the landfill.

The world and corporate distribution system is crazy. The economics of food production are mind boggling. The use of nutrition, basic rights supposedly guaranteed by the United Nations, are applied to the political expediency of the leaders of today.

The solution to the problem of under-poverty-level seniors living in high-priced cities who were eating dog food from tins, was to raise the price of dog food so that even these poor people could not afford to eat. The Food Banks, mainly run by church folks just like you, have become the solution for too many. Some years ago Grace McCarthy as Social Minister of B.C. saw that as good. She said, as the social welfare cheques were reduced, “Let the churches do it.” She did not know that churches had passed this mission on to the government two decades earlier!

The massive local, national and worldwide situation is not just one of growing enough, or inventing a better distribution system, or even of us sharing a bit more with each other. It is a spiritual poverty that we are facing, a poverty of the collective human soul. Fundamental values have been lost. Basic understanding of what creation is all about has been obliterated.

Individually we may say “Isn’t it a shame, something has to be done”, but we feel powerless and leaderless, detached from the source of all life and justice and goodness and love.

There is a need for a voice, many voices, a tidal wave of voices to be raised up in a loud proclamation. “You shall know that I am in the midst … and that I, the Lord, am your God there is none else.”

If God is entwined with the very fabric of our daily life, is intimate in the affairs of the world, is the Provider, then we had best begin taking this fact quite seriously. To begin with, this Harvest Festival Service is an opportunity for each of us to acknowledge the Providence of God in our life. To give thanksgiving is more than saying thank you. It is recognition or our finiteness and our place before the Almighty.

“Fear not, O land; be glad and rejoice, for the Lord has done great things.” And the greatest thing that God has done has been to make it abundantly clear that this world, the universe, and all that is within it is cared for by the Creator. You and I are cared for, loved, and preciously looked after by God. “For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself a ransom for all.”

I do not know what solutions may be available to the needs of the humgry of the world. I do not know what system can be created so that all humans can have enough to eat, I do not know what will stop the peaches from being destroyed. I do now that the changes necessary to the equitable sharing of justice and righteousness with all people begins with me and you. That we have the power of the Spirit of God to seek out the Will and Resolution to solve the problem of living in an unfair world. This is our starting point.

Jesus said, “I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor about your body, what you shall put on. Is not life more than food or the body more than clothing?” Hollow words to be spoken to the masses of people who have insufficient food and ragged clothing. Even more shallow words if spoken to the broken and humiliated and defeated people of the world by those of us who are overclothed and abundantly fed. Yet the Word of God spoken by Jesus our Lord haunts us, calls to us, and saves us. Our conscience may feel uneasy. We may have to get involved and take some real meaningful action. We may have to acknowledge that we are indeed in need of Salvation.

Well, what is that we eat? With what are we clothed? What is it we seek? What is it we are called to do? If we listen, not just for ourselves but for the world, we will hear Jesus saying, “Seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well.” Do we have something to be thankful for? You bet we do – and it is life itself. Thanks be to God.

Father Art