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2001
21th October (am) - Harvest Thanksgiving

Osama Bin Laden and his El Qaida terrorist network - what kind of 'harvest' thoughts do they have, if any?
Maybe it's just the contorted way my mind operates, but that question that came into my thoughts, as I began to think about Harvest Thanksgiving Services, post 11th September.
Would they have any kind of Harvest Thanksgiving?

Could it be the absence of a dependable harvest and the terrible hardships of life in that mountainous land of Afghanistan, and the contrast with life here in the west that even partly accounts for their fanatical hatred and terrible deeds?
Those very real factors certainly underline the critical importance of the humanitarian aid being dropped in Afghanistan, as well as the military offensive.

I dare not pretend to know enough about any form of Islam, never mind Bin Laden's fanatical form, in order to talk about what Muslims believe about everyday life in this created world, and the harvest it yields ..... but it got me thinking about what we Christians should believe about this created world in which we live out our daily lives, and from which we enjoy the fruits of a good harvest and the high standard of life that follows from it..
I'm not at all sure that we, Christians, understand these things very well at times!

Isn't it interesting that harvest does still tug at our heart-strings - even though most of us don't have much direct connection with farming or the harvest - it's harvest all the year round nowadays -we can have strawberries as easily at Christmas as in summer.
Nevertheless Harvest Thanksgiving still seems to touch things that most of us feel deep down at times.
The staggering beauty and the awesome mystery of this world in which we live stirs most of us.
- a sunset or sea-scene or mountain range, a harvest field, or the sheer scale of planets and stars in the universe.
- the miracle of life itself that we perhaps feel most acutely when a baby is born, or when we have to face up to the vulnerability of life to accidents or illness or destructive attack
- we are so finite over against this big world in which we live for a wee while.
Maybe Harvest Thanksgiving helps to put us in touch with those sort of feelings.

Perhaps there is something in all of us that gives us an awareness that there is more to life than us, more to it than everyday practicalities - that in more ways than one, this is not a 'flat earth', that there is far more than we can see or explain in purely materialistic or scientific terms.
Someone told me recently about a piece of graffiti they'd seen: Thank God, I'm an atheist'! - suggesting that even the person who wrote that had a feeling that there was something, someone more to life - even if he wouldn't admit it.
As we meet for Harvest Thanksgiving this morning, please let me remind ourselves of 3 simple points about how Christians understand this created world and all that it contains and the lives we live here - 3 basic Bible building- blocks which I want to suggest give us the true angle on this world in which we live out our lives.

We ought to rejoice in a Good Creation.
The Bible never ever downgrades the goodness and the importance of this created world in which we live. It never tells us that the everyday things which enrich our lives don't really matter.
- when we read the mind blowing account of Creation at the beginning of Genesis, we cannot miss God's repeated verdict about the world he had made: And God saw that it was good ..... God saw all that he had made and it was very good - seedbearing plants and fruit bearing trees, fish of the sea and birds of the air and livestock in the earth, with human beings given the right to enjoy these things and the duty to care for them.
And that picture of a good and richly rewarding creation does not change anywhere in Scripture, even though it makes very clear that human beings did their level best to use, abuse and generally spoil God's good creation.
Psalm 65 You crown the year with your bounty and your carts overflow with abundance ...... the meadows are covered with flocks and the valleys are mantled with corn.

This is a good creation with a good purpose - it is here for us - to sustain our lives and to give us multi sided pleasure. It is right and good to enjoy and appreciate what it offers - Christians ought not to be doubtful about appreciating this good world - the beauty of nature, the bounty of our lives, the challenges of the world of work and the potential of business, the artistry of music or painting, the enjoyment of all that life has to offer us.
Sometimes some Christians have had a rather negative attitude to the things of creation and the down to earth business of living - as if this world and all that it contains were to be shunned and avoided as much as possible, or at least kept entirely separate from the 'faith' part of life - that only the things of the unseen world and the life to come really matter.
We do know that Jesus warned his followers to beware of 'the world' - and there is a dark and destructive side to this world in which we live - but that does not mean that we are to devalue life in this world, or to downgrade the significance of our everyday occupations and interests.
When Christians do that it is a false view of holiness and godliness - that is to go down the road of some of the world's other religions, like Hinduism or Buddhism, where their highest goal is to escape from this physical and created world into the mystery of the spiritual world.
Of course there is much in this world of which we are to be very careful indeed, many false distractions and deceptions - but let's be very clear the earth is the Lord's and everything in it (Ps. 24). It is right to recognise that this is a good creation and it is good to appreciate and enjoy, properly, all that God has provided for us in his creation. For Christians this is a good creation and we ought to be people who appreciate it and live in it fully and actively.
Christianity is a life affirming, world appreciating, here and now faith.

This is a good creation and secondly,

We ought to remember that this Creation has a Creator. One of the inherent dangers of appreciating and enjoying this creation is that we fail to see beyond the creation itself - we live believing that the creation is good, but forgetting that there is a Creator behind it.
We can even do that at harvest thanksgiving. We feel genuinely thankful that there has been a harvest and that we have a quality of life that is bountiful in so many ways - but we don't really go beyond the tokens of the creation to the Truth of the Creator.
If Christians sometimes make the mistake of downgrading the goodness and value of the Creation, perhaps many more people in our 21st century western world make the mistake of downgrading, forgetting, or refusing to think seriously, about the Creator.
Have you ever told your family that they weren't to use home as if it were a B & B - a place to eat and sleep, rather than a home in which to played your part and recognise your responsibilities to parents etc.
Perhaps that is how many people treat God's creation - as a world to be greatly enjoyed, full of so many good things to be grasped if at all possible - glad that the creation is good, and determined to get as much out of it for our own personal good.
A good creation, but a forgotten Creator! Maybe even sometimes a resisted or resented Creator!
Wasn't that at the heart of what happened in the garden early in Genesis: When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some .... and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.
- a creation without wanting any recognition of or obedience to the Creator; appreciating and desiring what the creation offered, but not accepting the Creator's authority.
This strikes me as being the essence of life in our world, and the temptation that you and I feel all the time.
Here is the basic framework for how life is understood and lived by a great many people.
- It is a materialistic way of seeing life - Life is essentially determined by the work you do to obtain the money you have, to make possible the things you can buy. Therefore this becomes life's whole focus - and it actually means that life is out of focus - because this creation, with all the good things it has to offer, has a Creator. And when life is out of focus, and the Creator is out of the picture, then experience seems to show that life becomes a never quite fully satisfied experience, a rat race experience full of selfishness and tension and stress ..... and the world becomes a place of injustice and divisions.
Isn't that what we see in life around us, and might that not be at least part of the problem lying behind the utterly unjustifiable actions of a man like Bin Laden. - the materialism and secularism of our western world.
We need not be surprised for Scripture warns us that when the Creator of the Creation is forgotten, then the outcome is anything but lovely or good: Rom.1 Although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him ...... they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God .... they have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity.
Enjoying the Creation but forgetting that there is a Creator - is that the spirit of our western world? Have we all been infected to some degree by it? Are we to some extent like the rich fool in Jesus' story who said to himself: Take life easy: eat, drink and be merry - the man who failed to think about the finite-ness of his own life and the infinite-ness of the Creator who said to him; This very night your life will be demanded from you.
Perhaps, today, we all need to be thinking about our own way of thinking about life - on this Harvest Thanksgiving Sunday - are we mainly celebrating the good creation from which we benefit so much, or are we truthfully concerned to know and understand the Creator of that Creation and make him the focus of our lives.

A creation that is good, a creation which has a Creator.

We need to realise that this Creation's Creator is able to make people into a new creation.
It is interesting that in the midst of a very materialistic world, maybe as a result of people beginning to find out that a materialistic way of viewing life is not that satisfactory, people do search for something deeper and more lasting - for the truths and the hopes that cannot be supplied by science, purchased by money or enjoyed through possessions.
- people in the west who have embraced Islam or the eastern religions, as well as all sorts of New Age 'spiritual' ideas, as people search for peace and satisfaction and hope in life.
- after the Sept. bombings in America, it is said that the sale of Bibles went up dramatically - just as there were all kinds of religious/spiritual expressions and searchings at the time of Princess Diana's death.
Even though our world frequently focuses on what the creation has to offer, and forgets that there is a Creator, people are often still left feeling after that very Creator they know that there must be something more to life - sometimes they look in all sorts of strange places and listen to all manner of gurus for the truth about the Creator.
-sometimes they become fanatically gripped by misguided untruths about the Creator, with disastrous outcomes - like the religious fanaticism of Bin Laden -the danger of believing the wrong thing about the Creator and what he might desire from people in the world.
It is vitally important that we know the truth about the creation's Creator.
We can't know that simply by looking at the Creation and thinking about its beauty and its bounty. Even though God, the Creator has spoken through his creation - for since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities .... have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been created - men and women in the world have become blind and deaf to the truth, and need a clearer, sharper, louder voice to speak from God into their hearts and minds and souls.
There is a clearer, sharper, louder, voice - for with a view to making himself unmistakably clear, and in order to leave people like us with no valid excuse, the Creator of this creation became part of his creation and lived here as a person like us.
Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. He was in the world, and though the world was made by him, the world did not recognise him.
Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.
In Jesus Christ, says John at the beginning of his Gospel, you and I know who the Creator of this world is, the provider of all the good things of this creation.
In the beginning ........ in the beginning .....
Through Jesus Christ you and I are able to trust God the Creator properly, to know him as our loving heavenly Father with confidence, to be assured that he is still good even when this world and our own lives are not very good, and to believe, humbly, that his forgiveness is far far better than the sad and unsatisfactory best that we can manage by ourselves.
Jesus is the name we honour
Jesus is the Father's glory; Jesus is the Father's splendour, Jesus is the Father's joy.
He will return again to reign in majesty, and every eye will see that Jesus is our God.
Jesus is the Creator's son who came to save us from destroying both the creation and ourselves.
Jesus, we are promised, is able to make each person who allows him into a new creation.
As Christ's new creation we are made able to enjoy and benefit all that is good in God's creation here and now: it is the very opposite of withdrawing negatively from life - it is about entering enthusiastically and appreciatively into life;

it's about being guided and guarded from the dangers, abuses, and excesses and deceptive traps of life in this world by Jesus, the Saviour.

And as Christ's new creation, we are also being made ready, through all the experiences of life in this created world, for the life of the world to come - the new heaven and new earth which God will create - where our scale of what is good and lovely here will not be adequate to describe what is good and lovely there.

I love life - I have found that there is so much that is so good in it, even allowing for how tough it can sometimes be.
But I am also very aware of how easy it is to forget about the Creator of this good creation.
I am also very conscious that I can easily and often misuse God's creation and deprive others of their pleasure in it.
Therefore I know I need the help of Christ the Creator who became part of his creation in order to rescue me from all those dangers that would eventually shut me out of the new creation.
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. we have seen his glory ..... full of grace and truth.
To all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become the children of God.
I want to be among those people - I want to enjoy my life as fully as possible, and I want to have the hope of the eternal life which the Father has created for all the people of Christ. Don't you?