A Harvest Service sermon preached by the Revd Dr Trevor Jamison at Saint Columba’s United Reformed Church, Sunday 28th September 2025
Deuteronomy 8:1-10; Mark 4:1-9
Watch the whole service on YouTube
‘This entire commandment that I command you today you must diligently observe, so that you may live and increase, and go in and occupy the land that the Lord promised on oath to your ancestor’ (8:1)
So, it’s Harvest Sunday here at Saint Columba’s United Reformed Church in North Shields, and we are celebrating once again. We appreciate how we benefit from what’s produced by those who work the land and sea – including those who put to sea from just down the hill on Fish Quay. We appreciate the complex systems which have been put in place in order to transport and deliver what we need to live, and all of the good stuff on top of that that is available to us for our enjoyment. So far, so good.
At harvest time, certain Bible passages tend to recur year by year. Each year you come back to the same reading, though you might discover something new because you and/or your circumstances have changed since the last time you read it. This year found I could not get past verse one of our Old Testament reading without seeing things in a new light. It made stop and think about harvest in a different, way: ‘This entire commandment that I command you today you must diligently observe, so that you may live and increase, and go in and occupy the land that the Lord promised on oath to your ancestor’ (8:1)
‘Go in to occupy the land.’
Deuteronomy chapter eight is strong advice from Moses to the tribes of Israel entering into the Promised Land. They had endured slavery in Egypt, then wandering through an inhospitable wilderness for many, many years. Now, though, with reminders to be humble, and to acknowledge their dependence upon God for all that is good in life (8:3-4), the prospect of the good land is set out before them:
‘The Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land where you may eat bread without scarcity, where you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron and from whose hills you may mine copper. You shall eat your fill and bless the Lord your God for the good land that he has given you.’ (8:8-10)
‘Go in and occupy the land.’
We are living thousands of years later, long, long after the events described in the Book of Deuteronomy, but that piece of land is still there. Then it was called Canaan. Now we might call it Israel and Occupied Palestinian Territories. So how do you react now when you hear the command, ‘Go in and occupy the land’?
Today, Israel is a secular nation state, not a God-led band of refugees from slavery in Egypt. Of course, modern Jews, whether they be religious or not, live under the very dark shadow of centuries of persecution at the hands of Christians, culminating in the Shoah or Holocaust. The establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine arises out of that history. It’s not surprising, though, that the violent displacement of those who were living in that land, and continuing occupation and annexation of further land by Israel has led to extreme responses.
So what sort of harvest has been produced by today’s occupation of the land? Particularly, what sort of harvest has been reaped by Hamas’s attack on Israel almost two years ago, and by the dispossession and oppression of Palestinians prior to it, and by the Israeli state’s actions in Gaza since then?
- Destruction
- Dispossession
- Grievance
- Anger
- Fear
- Mourning
- Violence
- Retaliation
- Hatred
- Suffering
- Hunger
And the list could go on.
In Deuteronomy God offered the people a ‘good land’ (8:7) where, they were told, ‘You shall eat your fill and bless the Lord your God for the good land that he has given you.’ (8:10) There’s not much sign of that in Israel and Palestinian Occupied Territories today, but then, in Deuteronomy, enjoying the goodness of the land was linked to the need to ‘keep the commandments of the Lord your God, by walking in his ways and by fearing him’ (8:6), and there’s not much sign of that happening either.
Faced with such a dismal harvest in the here and now it would be easy to despair, but we would be wrong to do so, though not by being sunnily optimistic to the point of denying reality. And that’s where I read our New Testament reading in a different way also.
Jesus, who lived in the land where today’s harvest of suffering is occurring, was teaching a big crowd (4:1) by telling them a parable. (4:2) It was about someone who went out sowing seed. (If you want to think on about that parable after this morning’s service then our prayer space is set up to enable you to do so.)
If we think of Jesus as the sower, what sort of seeds was he (and is he) sowing? Referencing the Apostle Paul (Galatians 5:22), we could say that through his teaching and his life Jesus was sowing seeds of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. And Israel and the Palestinian Occupied Territories could do with a bumper harvest of each and every one of those at the moment – as so could we all.
But what are the chances of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control taking root in Hamas and the Israeli government? Some would say that only a fool would think that this was possible, and maybe they would be right. But Jesus’s parable of the sower acknowledges that sometimes – often – people don’t respond well to what God offers. Love, joy and peace fall where the birds of hatred, anger and aggression gobble them up; kindness, generosity and faithfulness, landing upon rocky ground, are scorched by the rays of nastiness, greed, and betrayal; gentleness and self-control are strangled by the thorny weeds of violence and overkill.
Far too often this is the way of the world, but despair is inappropriate because there is hope. Sometimes such seeds from God fall upon good ground (4:8). The same people who yearn to live a good life in a good land are ready to do what God wants; ready to be lived-out examples of love, joy, peace and patience, kindness, generosity and faithfulness, gentleness and self-control; and their example brings forth a similar harvest in others: ‘grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.’ (4:8)
I’m not guaranteeing that this is the harvest we are going to get, though it’s the harvest we all need. I am saying that Jesus says that such harvests do occur, and so we are called to live lives and take actions that make them a possibility, even in the most unpromising of circumstances. So may God give us all the inspiration and the strength to bring about such a harvest of Jesus-like love in the world today. Amen.