I came back to the vicarage from church last Sunday having just conducted a baptism service. I switched the TV on and caught a programme about the resurgence of wild life in our English countryside. As I watched I discovered that some farmers, whilst still trying to accommodate an increasing demand for cheap food, are turning over parts of their farms to things like wild flower meadows in order to encourage wild life of all kinds and reverse the alarming decline in many of our native creatures, birds and insects. The evidence seems to show that their attempts at conservation are being met with considerable success. It is interesting how nature can quite quickly regenerate itself given the right conditions.
October is of course a time of year when our minds naturally turn to harvest and when the church encourages us to be thankful for those who “plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land” thus keeping us fed. We are also encouraged to be thankful to our Creator without whose energies there would be no seed time or harvest.
Harvest time seems to connect with our most basic physical needs but it does more than that as we are reminded when we sing the traditional harvest hymns, for they speak not only of a physical harvest but also a spiritual harvest. There is a sense in which we are reminded of this each week when we take bread, “which human hands have made”, pray over it and then see it as a means of receiving the very life of the risen Christ; likewise with the wine at the Eucharist. Water is of course a vital ingredient in the natural cycle of nature for without it nothing would grow or develop. In Baptism, as in the Eucharist we take a natural element, pray over it and then see it as a means of new birth which brings us into the church, the body of Christ on earth today. The wording of the baptism service encourages all of those present, as they watch the candidate sprinkled with holy water, to consider their own lives and “the progress made on that journey, which is now to be shared with this new member of the church”.
I think that infant baptism is rather like sowing a seed; it is as if the child is given the potential for growing into a committed Christian but, like the seed in Jesus’ parable of the farmer sowing on different kinds of soil, it would appear that the potential life does not germinate and come to maturity in every case. Just as in nature so with the spiritual life; the seed needs the right conditions if growth is to be triggered. The responsibility for creating those conditions lies in part with the parents and godparents who make promises on behalf of the child but also with the church to offer the opportunity for children to learn about the gospel and the love of God in Christ. When this is so we have done all that we can do, the rest, as in the natural world, is the work of our gracious and loving God.
So this harvest season, as we sing once again the tradition hymns, let us give thanks to God for his creative activity and those who work with Him to provide our daily food, but let us also pray that we may play our part in encouraging our children and each other to grow in faith and the knowledge of God, that our church community may prove to be a spiritually fertile environment. It not only tragic that our natural species are under threat it is also alarming that our society is also under threat through spiritual decline and we, like the farmers on the programme I watched last Sunday, need to play our part in reversing that decline.
All the best – Fr Mick