A sermon for Harvest Festival at St Thomas, Stanningley. 13 October 2024.
Text: Leviticus 19:9-10
When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord your God.
‘Les glaneuses’ (Gleaning women)
by Léon Augustin Lhermitte
Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons
Have you ever been scrumping? I don’t mean stealing apples, but eating windfalls, or picking fruit from neglected trees or overhanging branches? Or do you ever go foraging for wild food – nuts, berries, mushrooms? Do you grow some of your own food? I ask these not to shame anyone – I don’t grow anything myself and rarely forage anything – but to start us off thinking about what were once common practices.
Our reading today from the Old Testament is part of the teaching about harvests. Harvests feature quite prominently in parts of the Bible. In a warmer climate where crops grow more quickly, there were two harvests a year and many regulations and traditions around them. But at the heart of them was giving thanks for God’s provision, and ensuring nothing was wasted.
The practice described here is known in English as ‘Gleaning.’ It can cover picking grain or fruit that the harvesters missed, or which has fallen to the ground. The right to do this, to benefit from what others have left over, was restricted to those who needed it most – poor people and immigrants.
As well as the obvious benefit of letting poor people have food, this practice of gleaning helps to build inclusive and trusting communities, where those wealthy enough to own farmland or orchards let the landless have their share of the harvest. There is also a spiritual dimension. The verses finish with the reminder ‘I am the Lord your God,’ or in some translations ‘I am your God, the Eternal one.’ God’s eternal principles include that the earth is his, the fruits of the earth are to be shared with all, and all people should have equal dignity in the community.
Throughout the Bible we read of a people who live close to the land, enjoying a mostly regular pattern of sowing and reaping. Winter was followed by spring, rain watered the earth, crops grew, the sun shone, crops were harvested, the poor gleaned, and the whole community gave thanks.
Jesus built on this Jewish teaching by telling parables such as that of the Rich Fool [i]who built bigger barns to hold every last sheaf of wheat, rather than give some of it away to the poor, and paid for it with his life. Jesus also spoke of the importance of having ‘Treasures in Heaven’[ii] by which he meant building up credit with God by giving away what we don’t really need on earth.
I’m reminded of Oscar Wilde’s story of the Selfish Giant[iii] in which the giant’s garden, put out of bounds to children, remains like Narnia in perpetual winter until he allows children in to share it, and spring returns at last.
Until very recently in historical terms people reading their Bibles would have understood all this very well. The cycle of nature that I have just described still happened just as it always had. In many parts of Europe, including England, the tradition of poor people being allowed to glean continued until the late 18th century.[iv]
The founder of Methodism, John Wesley, understood this principle too. He also lived in the 18th century, growing up in a poor family in rural Lincolnshire at the end of the pre-industrial age. His rule with money was always to tithe first, then meet his own basic needs, then be aware of the needs of others before enjoying any luxuries. It is often said that while teaching at Oxford University, he was comfortably off on £30 a year, gave away a tenth of it and living on £27. But when he was rich and famous, earning over a thousand pounds a year – a fortune in those days – he still lived on no more than thirty, saved no more than a hundred, and gave away all the rest to the poor.
But we don’t live in Bronze Age Israel, or even 18th century England. Since Wesley’s day, several things have changed our world enormously. Firstly, the Industrial Revolution and the rise of large commercial farms put a stop to gleaning, along with many other rural practices. Most of the world no longer lives by subsistence farming or in small villages. Industrial scale farming provides most of the world’s food, and as city dwellers we buy most of it in shops.
All this means that world farmers produce enough food to feed everyone, if it was shared equally. Yet an enormous amount of food is wasted – some studies suggest as much as a third of the food grown around the world either never reaches the shops, or is bought and not eaten, for a whole host of reasons.[v]
Then again, climate change means the seasons are no longer reliable. I hardly need remind you of the younger generation of the impact that the effects of climate change will have throughout your own lives. Across the world, harvests are failing year after year as longer droughts, heavier rainfall and depleted water reserves make it ever harder for farmers to make a living, let alone have food left over for the poor to pick up for free. For example, parts of Uganda are on the verge of starvation this year following five years of drought.[vi] Development agencies such as Tearfund and Practical Action are helping to tackle this by teaching better farming techniques and developing more drought-resilient crops, but much remains to be done before famine ceases to claim so many lives.
So how can we – younger or older – apply these Biblical principles of gleaning, tithing and inclusion in a rapidly changing world? Before I look at practical details, let’s go back to where I started, with harvest thanksgiving. Because thanksgiving to God for all his generous provision should be the motivation for all our giving: we give because we have received. As Christians, we are always thankful for God’s provision of an abundant world, for his Word in the Bible to guide us, and for sending his only Son to teach us to love our neighbour as ourselves, and ultimately to give his life for us. That’s where we start.
There is a Sanskrit saying (sometimes wrongly attributed to Pope Francis, though I expect he would say Amen to it) – that goes like this:
Rivers do not drink their own water;
Trees do not eat their own fruit;
The sun does not shine on itself;
And flowers do not spread their fragrance for themselves.
Living for others is a rule of nature.
We are all born to help each other.[vii]
So now let’s look at the detail of what we can do, given that we can’t get back to agricultural village life when we live in a city. Do you head for the clearance shelf at the supermarket, or go to the market at the end of the day when prices are reduced? Or eat at a junk food café? As I asked at the beginning, do you gather windfalls or pick nuts and berries from trees in public places? If so, you are gleaning. You are stopping good food going to waste. Do you freeze the leftovers from your meals for another time, and check if food past its best by date is still OK before throwing it away? Again, minimising waste.
Many community groups are doing something about this issue. Examples include junk food cafes, community pantries, FareShare, community orchards (I’m going from here to a meeting about planting one in St Peter’s churchyard in Bramley), and last but not least, foodbanks. As you may know, I work for the Trussell foodbank in North and West Leeds. Last year we provided 16,000 meals, a third of them for children and the majority for households including someone with some form of disability. We have over 100 volunteers across nine locations. In the long term we’re campaigning to put an end to the need for foodbanks, but as long as there’s a need, we’ll be there, with your help.
But it isn’t just about giving, it’s about sharing, another Christian principle. The foodbank is more than just offering free food, it’s about solidarity, support and community. Our principles are welcoming everyone whatever their circumstances, helping them to access all the financial and practical support available to them, providing a listening ear to people who have no-one else to turn to, and of course treating everyone as equals. So, thank you for anything you have brought today, which we receive gratefully. And please consider what you can offer to the community regularly by way of food or money donations, your time as a volunteer, or supporting us in prayer.
Let me finish by offering this prayer for us all:
Lord of the harvest, make us thankful for what you have given us.
Bless us with enough to meet our basic needs.
But make us aware of the needs of others around us,
Willing joyfully to share whatever we have grown or earned,
Allowing others to glean whatever we have to spare.
In Jesus’ name. Amen.
[i] Luke 12:13-21
[ii] Luke 12:33
[iii] From ‘The Happy Prince and Other Tales’ (1888), reprinted in e.g. ‘Oscar Wilde: Complete Short Fiction’, Penguin 1994.
[iv] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleaning accessed 8 October 2024.
[v] Guardian Newspaper, 8 October 2024 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/08/the-scandal-of-food-waste-and-how-we-can-stop-it
[vi] https://www.tearfund.org/stories/2024/04/uganda-hunger-crisis-only-a-matter-of-time accessed 8 October 2024.
[vii] Quoted in a social media post by Tandag Diocese but various fact checking websites refute the attribution to Francis.