Sunday 11 October 2026
Revd Sophie Ferguson, Assistant Curate
I don’t know whether you have a favourite time of year, but autumn is my absolute favourite. This week, we enjoyed the ultimate autumnal classic in our household: conkers on a string. Finding the biggest conker has become a family tradition and a highly competitive sport! I also had the joy of leading a harvest celebration at a local junior school, complete with an altar table full of carrots, potatoes and an enormous cauliflower, in honour of that assembly classic, Cauliflowers Fluffy and Cabbages Green.
Harvest is a wonderful celebration: it always hosts the most beautiful floral displays, those feel-good familiar hymns and the opportunity to thank God for the food we receive. It also reminds us of our responsibility to care for the natural world. There is, a lot of goodness surrounding a Harvest Festival but it seems important at this year’s harvest celebrations to acknowledge that this has been a particularly challenging one. As it certainly hasn’t been all cauliflowers fluffy! Farmers work tirelessly, but they cannot summon the rain. After a summer of drought, it became clear once again that food is a gift, and not something we can ever take for granted.
Tim Carson is an arable farmer in Alton Barnes in the Pewsey Vale. He said that 2026 harvest was the earliest he had ever experienced. His normal marker for the end of harvest was his daughter’s birthday on the 4th sept; this year it was finished by July 25th. He describes farming as 10% management and 90% weather. And only a few miles from here, on the edge of Salisbury Plain, Dan and Catherine Mercer have been farming through one of the most difficult summers in recent memory. Their farm covers more than 730 hectares, with both livestock and arable crops. Earlier this summer, they described the Salisbury Plain as “burnt up”. The grass was struggling, and they were hoping they had enough to keep their cattle going. These are just two out of countless stories but they tell a larger revealing story of how this year’s harvest has been.
While we give thanks today for the blessings of abundance, we remember, those for whom food insecurity is a daily reality. For people in our own communities, as well as across the world. Conflict, poverty, climate pressures and rising costs leave millions of people struggling to access the food they need. For some, harvest really is a celebration of abundance; for others, the question is simply whether there will be enough.
This brings us, to our Gospel reading, in which Jesus tells the story of a rich landowner whose harvest is so abundant that his barns cannot contain it. He is the landowner who decides to build even bigger barns to store his grain and yet Jesus calls him a fool. The rich landowner’s language is the give-away to why Christ labels him a fool. The farmer says, “My crops. My barns. My grain. My goods.” Everything revolves around himself. The biblical scholar Kenneth Bailey, writing from the perspective of Middle Eastern village life, notices something easily overlooked. The rich man’s only conversation is with “his own soul.” There is no neighbour, no family, no labourer who helped bring in the harvest, no poor who might benefit from his bounty….and, most tellingly, no God. Bailey says, that the repeated “I” and “my” reveal a world that has collapsed in upon itself.
The abundant harvest in this story had become possession rather than a gift. And perhaps that is the warning for our world today. More,… larger,…. bigger and better is indeed not always better!!! Growth can be a wonderful thing. We want our communities to flourish, our churches to grow and our work to bear fruit. But Christ asks us to look more carefully at the kind of fruit we are producing. A harvest can be plentiful and still fail to nourish those who are hungry. A barn can be bursting at the seams while a neighbour goes without. Any institution can become bigger, busier and more statistically successful, while the people most in need remain unseen. How do we notice the unseen?
In the Old Testament, God gives his people instructions about how they are to harvest their fields. In Leviticus, they are told not to reap right to the edges of their land or gather every grain. Instead, they are to leave something for the poor and the foreigner. The book of Deuteronomy extends this provision to the widow and the orphan. This is the practice of gleaning. It is a beautiful and challenging idea whereby, The harvest is not simply gathered in and then shared if anything happens to be left over. From the very beginning, the needs of others shape how the harvest is gathered. The edges of the field are deliberately left open. And this has something important to say about faith at work.
At this Cathedral, we have a strong outward-facing vision: to welcome all, to build partnerships, to become increasingly diverse, and to act for justice locally and globally. These are not simply vision ambitions to add to a fantastic and busy programme. They are vision ambitions that invite us to consider what kind of community is being shaped. The true measure of our harvest is not simply how much we gather in, but how widely we sow, how generously we share, and how many lives are nourished through what we have been given.
We see gleaning at work, in the Cathedral’s work with schools, including its connections with the Magna Learning Partnership, through our wonderful music, the arts and partnerships with local and global organisations and influences.
We see this in the work of the Trussell Trust, Alabaré and local food pantries, whose practical service helps people facing hardship. The gifts we bring today will become food on a table for people who really need it.
These are all expressions of a generous harvest. Resources, relationships and opportunities put to the service of others. But gleaning asks something more of us than simply giving. It asks us to draw closer to those at the margins: to listen to their stories, learn from their experiences and allow their voices to shape our common life. We may assume that we are the ones with the abundance and the resources, the knowledge, the building and the influence while others are the ones in need. But when we share life with people whose experiences differ from our own, we discover that we, too, have much to receive. Their experiences challenge our assumptions. Their questions expose where our communities are not yet Just. Their gifts enrich our understanding of God and of one another.
The more deeply we know our neighbours, especially… those who are poor, marginalised or overlooked, the more fully we understand the harvest God has given us.
Some people are hungry for actual bread. Others are hungry for compassion and care. Some hunger for stability in an anxious world; others for dignity, friendship and a place to belong. The Church exists because Christ refuses to leave those hungers unanswered. Our calling I believe, as the body of Christ is to follow Christ outwards, towards those who are hungry and to make the gifts entrusted to us a source of life for others
The rich landowner looked at his harvest and saw something to keep.
Perhaps the challenge might be to continually look at our harvest fields and see something to share.