Cry Me a River
Preacher: Revd Dr Donald MacEwan
Readings: Jeremiah 34:7-14; Mark 10:46-52
There is something really comforting about Harvest Thanksgiving. Every year, people give thanks for the safe gathering in of plenty, of produce from land and sea. It connects us, all of us, who eat the food which magically appears in shops with the tiny minority of us in the Western world who grow or rear or catch what we eat. Harvest reminds us of the turning of the seasons, that summer’s warmth has ripened the grain, before winter’s chill refreshes the earth. In Scotland, churches usually celebrate Harvest Thanksgiving in October. Schools are still closed for two weeks in October in Fife because that was when children were required to harvest potatoes. And so, although this is not a formal Harvest Thanksgiving Service, perhaps today is the Chaplaincy’s nod to this annual tradition.
Our readings from the Bible certainly depict the blessing of harvest. They come from a time when most people were involved in tending the land, growing crops and raising animals. In each case, harvest is a sign of hope following sadness and loss.
Jeremiah 31 comes from the time of the Exile. The children of Israel have been taken east to Babylon, tens of thousands of people far from home. As Psalm 137 laments, By the rivers of Babylon, where we sat down, there we wept when we remembered Zion. But Jeremiah offers hope: God will bring his people home: and they shall rejoice over the grain, the wine and the oil, the young of the flock and the herd.
In this harvest, mourning will become joy:
With weeping they shall come, but God will let them walk by brooks of water.
When I read this passage, that song came into my head which I first heard sung in the 80s by Mari Wilson, who had the most fantastic hairstyle called a beehive:
Well you can cry me a river,
Cry me a river.
I cried a river over you.
If Jeremiah looks forward to the return from exile, Psalm 126 which we said earlier, looks back on that return. And again, the joy after sorrow is found literally in bringing in the harvest:
Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed
Will come back with shouts of joy,
Bearing their sheaves with them.
In v.5 this restoration of fortune from God is like the dry valleys again become rivers full of water.
The autumnal picture on the order of service was taken by me last October, of the Moness Burn near Aberfeldy in Perthshire: its tumbling waters such a marvellous sign of life, of fertility, of hope.
At first sight, the healing of blind Bartimaeus by Jesus doesn’t seem to fit the Harvest theme. But it does. For it too is the restoration of something which was lost, the return of sight to the beggar. Exiled in the land of the sightless, he comes back to his home, able to see, a harvest of colour and movement, the restoration of what had been lost. All three of our readings have the same narrative arc: loss, distress, hope in the teeth of sorrow, the creative activity of God, return home and restoration of fortune.
Any other time, I know where this sermon would go. I might speak of the problems students and staff face which they share in courageous honesty with me – anxiety and sadness, loneliness and rejection, broken relationships, stress over studies and work, guilt and fear, sometimes bereavement. I – and other chaplains – listen, and hold out hope for a good future, that time will pass, that there will be healing, a fresh start, the restoration of relationships and return of joy. And, I might go on to say, I believe this, that even when we feel all shrivelled up, unable to flourish, God’s Spirit is at work in us, and there will be a harvest in all our lives.
And yet, today, this Harvest, this October when people are gathering from all round the world for Cop 26 in Glasgow, my home-town, I can’t stop there. All this semester, I’ve asked preachers to reflect on faith and the environment. I’m sure Carmody Grey, had she been able to come today, would have done so. And yet I’ve found this sermon hard to write. Scripture is leading us to the central and beautiful insight that God brings joy out of weeping, rivers from drought, harvest from famine. That all can return, be restored, refreshed and renewed. That the annual cycle of seed-time and harvest is a sign of God’s creative power to bring us back from tears to laughter.
But climate change feels different from everything else.
Climate change feels one directional. Our best hope is for a 1.5C average rise in world temperature, but activists including Greta Thunberg do not expect those who gather in Glasgow to follow through on the commitments required to make that happen. Further global heating will have ever more devastating effects – storms, floods, droughts, famine and disease.
And so some hard questions. Do we really hope for a return to a pre-industrial harmony, such as we sang in We plough the fields and scatter, written in 1782?
Do we really hope for the restoration of species, habitats, rivers, oceans without plastic? Could the Aral Sea, now a salty wasteland, really be sea again?
Does it really feel that God can bring us back from where the way we use the world’s resources is leading us?
Is this reality somehow beyond the creative love of God?
Well, is it?
Believe me – this is not just a rhetorical device. I genuinely thought this week I couldn’t get past this impasse. If not a loss of faith, perhaps a loss of hope. Maybe it is God who is singing of his lost and hopeless love for the earth in the song:
Now you say you’re sorry
For being so untrue
Well, you can cry me a river
I’m going to let you into a secret, about how I write sermons. I’ve been keeping a note of quotations for about 25 years now, half my life. Every time I happen upon a quotable thought in a book, a newspaper, a magazine, I turn the page-corner down, and then later transcribe it. They then turn up in the sermons I write. My wife disapproves of this damage to books. And I confess I sometimes tear whole pages out of in-flight magazines. Though maybe flying in the first place is worse. Anyway, this week, as I wondered if we, if I, could still hope in God in the face of climate change, I thought I’d look at the quotations about hope I’d transcribed over the past quarter-century. Could that help me? And gradually it did.
I read this, from a novel called Anthills of the Savannah by Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe:
Don’t disparage the day that still has an hour of light in its hand.
An hour of light – perhaps that is us. And there is so much that is beautiful in this hour of light. There is a huge, growing movement of children, young people, students and others who are demanding action on climate change. There were the hundreds whom I joined in Line in the Sand on the West Sands two years ago and again four weeks ago.
I read this from Kae Tempest, a poem called 2020:
What scope is there for hope?
We wonder with our slogans worn like collars at the throat
Noah stood back from the boat
Drowning in the doubt this his own hands could make it float
Perhaps a poem for me who wears a special collar, but also a reminder that we’re not alone, that Noah’s ark came through the flood by the grace of God, that God has promised not to let the world be destroyed.
I read this, a quote scribbled down during an address to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland by its Lord High Commissioner, George Reid, in 2019:
A man who lost everything in the recession said, “I might as well be in the grave,” but hope was born in a grave.
And I read this, from Terry Eagleton, a literary theorist whose writings on the Christian faith have more wit and insight than a dozen theologians:
For Christian faith… God has ordered the human narrative to a good end, one that cannot come to grief. No historical event, not even a nuclear holocaust or ecological catastrophe, can shipwreck the fact that history for the Gospel lies in the embrace of the resurrection. Because of the risen Christ, hope, so to speak, has already happened. The future has already been secured by the past.
Reading these, hope began to return to me, to seep back into my heart, to well up, to flow like a river. For the death of Jesus had also seemed one-directional, as he began to return to the dust. But new life came to Jesus. And this was not merely the return of pre-mortem existence, it was a whole new way of being, resurrection life, which can be shared by all life. And so there is hope for creation even in the teeth of climate change, because God’s creative love is always at work, restoring, renewing, returning and bringing new life from the grave.
How? Surely by changing us. Blind Bartimaeus did not return to his old life when his sight returned. The story ends by saying that he “followed Jesus on the way.” Hope inspires us to act. It’s led to 26 United Nations conferences on climate change. We may lament how slow the changes are. But since the first, we have made extraordinary advances, not least in the affordability of renewable energy and the storage power of batteries. Hope is specific. The future is with the activists in Glasgow, not the tired old vested interests. There really can be a Harvest for the world.
END