13th September, 2020.
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My dear friends,

I spoke to a farmer in Aberdeenshire two days ago who said that he had gathered in three-quarters of his harvest and hoped to wrap it all up in the next few days. The fields around Great Bardfield are already empty after harvesting. The busiest agricultural workers at the moment are the bees, busy having a final feed from the flowers before the nights turn cold and it is time for their long winter sleep.
 
            One casualty in my parishes of the Coronavirus pandemic is the Harvest Thanksgiving. I have always enjoyed Harvest Thanksgivings ever since I was a little boy at our school Harvest service. It was dinned into me as a child that I had always to say ‘Thank you’ to grown-ups, and so saying ‘Thank you’ to God for the our food seemed a perfectly natural progression. I also enjoyed the rollicking great tunes of Harvest hymns such as Come, ye thankful people, come, Fair waved the golden corn, To thee, O Lord, our hearts we raise, and We plough the fields and scatter.
 
            Harvest Thanksgiving is not as old as many people think: it only dates back to the 1840s. For several years there were disastrous harvests, resulting in famine and disease. Eventually,
 there was a good harvest and Queen Victoria issued an order that in all churches and cathedrals prayers of thanksgiving for the harvest were to be offered to God. The following year some churches repeated these prayers at harvest time. Special hymns were composed, and Harvest Thanksgiving as we now know it was born. There was even a special harvest edition of Dad’s Army – and you can’t get more quintessentially English than that – in which the Home Guard and the Air Raid Wardens got pie-eyed at the harvest supper, leading to a rumpus during the open-air Harvest service.
 
            In recent years I have taken to mentioning the harvest of our skills, gifts and talents at Harvest services in the parish. We all have skills, gifts and talents. Everyone can do something – and all our skills dovetail together – though we all sometimes need a bit of encouragement to get on with it. One of the things that has impressed me as your Chaplain is the way in which St John draws out its members’ skills of many sorts and gives us all plenty of good-humoured encouragement, whether we are Badgers, Cadets, First-Aiders, members of the Fellowship, or indeed County Chaplains.
 
            We were all delighted to see Bob Mann’s name in the latest list of admissions and promotions in the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem. Bob has been appointed a Knight of St John. He served for many years as County Director of Essex and is widely known around the county for his work with St John training. The list also contained the name of the Reverend Gay Ellis, who has been accorded a Vote of Thanks by the Priory in recognition of her help with our annual services at Little Maplestead. We send Bob and Gay our best wishes and warmest congratulations on their richly-deserved honours

With continued prayers and kindest regards,

The Rev. Dr ROBERT BEAKEN, County Chaplain
TRINITY 14 - 13th SEPTEMBER 2020.
 
Gospel: St Matthew, chapter 18, verses 21-35
We sometimes forget that Christianity is an eastern religion. The tradition of story-telling which Jesus used to convey deep truths has much in common with the story-telling tradition of ‘A Thousand Arabian Nights’. Today’s Gospel from St Matthew is a case in point.

            It concerns a servant who owes his king ten thousand talents: we can imagine Jesus’ audience sitting up and chortling when they heard that. Ten thousand talents was an unimaginable sum of money. What’s coming next, they will have wondered? One talent was the equivalent of fifteen years wages for a labourer. So, ten thousand talents, in our terms, is the equivalent of billions and billions of pounds. When the king called in his debtors, the servant could not pay, so the king commanded that his property be sold, and the servant, his wife and children be sold into slavery. When the servant heard this, he was horrified. In desperation he fell on his knees and begged the king: “Lord, have patience with me and I will pay you everything.” This was rather a cheeky thing to say. If the man and his family worked all the hours God sent for the rest of their lives, they would never earn enough to pay that enormous debt. The king was moved – perhaps he was also amused – and he forgave the servant the ten thousand talents debt. We can imagine Jesus’ audience being impressed: the king must have been a marvellously kind monarch if he was prepared to wipe away – to use a topical parallel – a debt that was the equivalent of the full cost of the United Kingdom’s Coronavirus furlough scheme.

            But the story doesn’t finish there. On his way out of court, the servant who had been forgiven ten thousand talents’ debt by the king chanced upon another man who owed him one hundred denarii, about £800 in our terms: not a debt we should like, but one which we could probably pay off with a bit of determined scrimping and saving if we had enough time. “Pay me what you owe me” said the servant, seizing the man by the throat. “Have patience with me” said the man, “and I will pay you.” But the servant would not budge: he had the man thrown into prison until he had been paid everything.

            Jesus’ audience would doubtless have been up in arms by this point. The tale continued. Some of the king’s other servants noticed what had happened and were so horrified by the injustice that they informed the king. The king summoned back the servant and tore him off a strip: “You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you besought me; and should you not have had mercy on your fellow servant as I had mercy on you?” In his anger the king handed the servant over to the jailers until he should pay all of his debt, the ten thousand talents.

            This parable concerns the two great Gospel themes of (1) human sin, and (2) Divine love. The king in the story symbolises Almighty God. The servant stands for you and me. The ten thousand talents symbolises the weight of sin that clings to every human being.

The world has somehow gone cataclysmically wrong and is not the way God wants it to be: this is what we mean by ‘The Fall.’ All men and women are conceived and born in ‘Original Sin.’ Left to our own devices, our natural inclination is to gravitate towards evil rather than good. This inclination – and the consequences of our choosing sin over good – is a terrible barrier between us and God; but, in His love, God decided to do something about it. He sent His only Son Jesus Christ in the world, to die in sacrifice upon the cross for our sins. Mrs Alexander summed it all up in her beautiful hymn, There is a green hill far away:
 
He died that we might be forgiven,
He died to make us good;                                                                                                                 
That we might go at last to heaven,                                                                                                 
 Saved by his precious blood.
 
There was no other good enough                                                                                                 
To pay the price of sin;                                                                                                                      
He only could unlock the gate                                                                                                                          
Of heaven and let us in.
 
O dearly, dearly has he loved,                                                                                                    
And we must love him too,                                                                                                      
And trust in his redeeming blood,                                                                                                    
And try his works to do.
 
Three days after the Crucifixion came Christ’s wonderful Resurrection from the dead. The Resurrection has many layers of meaning. It confirms Jesus’ identity as the Son of God. It shows that God has accepted Jesus’ sacrifice upon the cross, and, as the hymn says, unlocked the gate of heaven and let us in.  The Resurrection is clearest indication possible of God’s wonderful love for us.           

Half the trouble with many modern Christians is that we don’t take sin seriously. In consequence, we don’t take God’s love seriously.

            Back to today’s Gospel reading. In this story, Jesus teaches us that God has forgiven us so very much, and that therefore we must forgive others who hurt us. By comparison – ten thousand talents to one hundred denarii – God has forgiven each of us far more than we shall ever have to forgive other men and women.

            There is another aspect to this parable which only occurred to me recently. Quite often we find it easy to forgive big things. It is much harder to forgive smaller things: a cutting or mocking remark, someone’s petulance, spitefulness or niggardliness. These things lurk in our minds long after we have forgiven and forgotten far greater offences, and that is bad.

We do not always find it easy to forgive other people, but forgive them we must. The more we have experienced repentance and felt God’s forgiveness in our own lives, the easier we can sometimes find it to forgive others. We might not exactly like people who have hurt us by their sins, decisions and behaviour – but still, we must not harbour grudges against them. We may decide that it is prudent to be wary of their judgement, but that is a different matter. I have sometimes taken to muttering “I forgive you” under my breath when someone hurts me. At that moment I probably do not feel that I forgiven them; indeed, I might cheerfully like to shove them in the river. But hearing myself say “I forgive you” reminds me that I’ve got to do it sooner or later, so perhaps I’d better make it sooner and start now. We pray about all sorts of things, and grace from God to forgive other people and not to bear grudges ought to be one of them.

            Christianity, as I tell people in Confirmation Classes, is the religion of the second chance. Having quoted Mrs Alexander’s hymn There is a green hill, perhaps I might be permitted to quote another hymn from which I derive great hope, John Keble’s New every morning. 
 
New every morning is the love
Our wakening and uprising prove;
Through sleep and darkness safely brought,
Restored to life, and power, and thought.
 
New mercies, each returning day,
Hover around us while we pray;
New perils past, new sins forgiven,
New thoughts of God, new hopes of heaven.
 
The trivial round, the common task,
Would furnish all we ought to ask,
Room to deny ourselves, a road
To bring us daily nearer God.
 
Only, O Lord, in thy dear love
Fit us for perfect rest above;
And help us this and every day
To live more nearly as we pray.
  
Each day we can repent of our sins, be forgiven by God and make a new start. There is nothing that God’s love cannot sort out. This message is the very heart and soul of Christianity, and it is indeed Good News.