Waiting Patiently for Harvest: Sermon Preached on 16th June 2024 (Third Sunday after Trinity)

Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings – 2 Corinthians 5. 6-10, 14-17; Mark 4. 26-34

“The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.”

On Monday evening shortly after eight, I popped into Devizes to buy a few things at Lidl, and was captivated by the quality of the late evening light; the amount of rain we’ve had this Spring has made the air unusually clear when the Sun does shine, and the greens of the landscape are especially vibrant at the moment. Luckily, I had taken my camera with me and, being at that side of Devizes already, set off along the road that goes through Horton and on into the heart of the Vale of Pewsey. There is a particularly attractive prospect on the north side of the road just before entering the hamlet of Allington from the Devizes side. Wheat fields, clambering up the foot-slopes and catching the late evening sun beautifully at this time of year, are overlooked by the ridge of hills crowned by Tan Hill, the second highest point in Wiltshire; which always looks to me like a sleeping dragon, the green of its scales being caught by the fire of the setting sun.

It is especially interesting to look at the individual stalks of wheat at the moment – the head and the stalk are certainly there, but we are still some weeks away from it being ripe enough to harvest.

We take plant growth for granted – yet it is a miracle. A wheat seed averages only around 6 millimetres in length, or a quarter of an inch, yet it can turn into a plant that is taller than we are. We bury the seed in the ground and God gives the growth. Mustard seeds are even smaller, only one or two millimetres in diameter. Around 1,500 could fit along the edge of the altar, literally millions of them piled on top of it. How does a mustard seed turn into a mighty tree so big that birds can nest in it? It seems impossible to believe that they are the same organism. Yet they are.

Animals, including humans, also grow from tiny simple seeds and tiny simple eggs into complex adult forms. Some creatures even change forms at different points in their lives – caterpillars turn into to butterflies; tadpoles turn into frogs and toads.

It seems strange to assume that growth, and indeed, transformation, can only take place in our physical bodies. Surely it can also take place in our souls.

St Paul wrote in this morning’s Epistle reading that in Christ we are new creations. I don’t know about you, but that phrase sometimes makes me feel a little inadequate. I wouldn’t want to presume that I was in any way transformed beyond the ordinary run of people. Yet it’s important to remember that Paul wrote that phrase to the Christians in Corinth, who were a very long way from Christian maturity, full of bickering and backsliding. Yet something new had been begun in them with their baptism into Christ; a seed had been planted that was slowly growing and maturing in them, making them ready for everything to become new.

This morning, I will baptise a baby who has just turned two months old. Some ask what’s the point of baptising a child? Surely they don’t even know what’s going on.

The point is that it is not we who are at work in baptism, but God the Holy Spirit who through baptism is at work in in us. Christianity isn’t about achievement – we can’t win God’s favour. God already loves us. Christianity is about trusting that God has already done all that is necessary for us to achieve salvation by taking flesh as Jesus Christ and dying on the Cross, only to rise to new life, opening the way to eternal life for all whom trust in Him.

That’s central to the symbolism of baptism – going down into the water to rise up to new life afterwards. When Jesus was baptised by John the Baptist at the start of his public ministry, it prefigured what would happen at its end—His descent from the Cross into death and rising to new life afterwards. Babies are too young to be dunked in the water, so we represent this with three splashes of water, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Just as we bury a tiny seed under the ground trusting that God will turn it into a stem of wheat or a mustard seed, so in his baptism we will bury this baby with Christ, trusting that God give him the growth into full Christian maturity in the fullness of time.

We adults too are only at a stage in our journey; that will only be fully complete when we see God face-to-face in Heaven. We are like the stalks of wheat we see in the fields at this time of year; recognisably of the shape we will become – already in the image and likeness of God – but still rather green and some way from being ready to harvest. That will only come when we meet God face-to-face at the end of our earthly lives and He reaps the harvest from what He sowed in us at our baptisms.

What precisely does that mean? As I often say, if we were capable of truly understanding what it means to live with God in Heaven forever, it would scarcely be worth believing in. It can make no more sense to us than flying would make sense to a caterpillar or leaping through the air to a tadpole. Jesus, as this morning’s Gospel reading reminds us, taught people in parables “as they were able to hear.” We cannot know what Heaven is; but we can get an inkling of what the kingdom of God is like here on Earth. It is like a mustard seed; like crops growing; like buried treasure in a field; like a merchant who chances upon a fine pearl. Something much greater than it seems at first sight, something that requires patient trust in God to see mature, something of unparalleled value, something that seems so often to be hidden. Yet, when we do catch a glimpse of the Kingdom of God on Earth, we catch a glimpse of the eternity that Christ has opened to us in Heaven.

Yet for most of the time, as St Paul wrote to those squabbling Corinthians, “we walk by faith and not by sight”. I can’t give you hard evidence of eternal life, any more than I can explain why we human beings have a sense of beauty and awe, or why we produce music; or any more than I could give a scientific explanation of love. But I can tell you the nature of the universe rhymes with the idea of a loving creator who made it, who made it to be beautiful and made it to be alive and not dead. Our human nature is also in harmony with that idea. We walk by faith because our sight perceives so many things that give lie to the idea that we are just a collection of atoms arranged by random chance. We are not in control of this world, but God; the God who breathes in everything that is alive, whether it is us, or the stalks of corn that grow so quickly in this season.

Our job is to scatter the seeds of faith around us, even at a time like this when the climate for faith seems cold and the ground stony. After scattering, our next job is to nurture and nourish the faith we find around us, trusting that God will give the growth, even in circumstances that seem unlikelyto us, and that God will reap a harvest in us when we meet Him face-to-face.

And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.