Plough Sunday Rochester Cathedral (Is

Plough Sunday – Rochester Cathedral (Is.40.12-31;Mt.3.13-4.2)

It must have been quite an occasion. The celebrations around the blessing of the plough spread over at least three days, bringing light and merriment into the dark and cold of winter. They also marked the beginning of the ploughing season. On the

Sunday our medieval forebears will have dragged the plough, bedecked with ribbons to Church, to be blessed. On the Monday the ploughmen would have dragged it around the village, accompanied by dancing, often stopping at the houses of the wealthy for a contribution which would have gone to the Church....or towards the ale that they would be drinking that night. As well as the ploughmen and people wearing all kinds of costumes, there would have been a fool, a jester-like figure. The fool had

1 a very important role in medieval times because, cloaked in laughter and fun, the fool could speak some home truths and, on occasions, be critical, especially of those in power. The fool appears fairly frequently in Shakespeare’s plays and it is through his mouth that wisdom and insight come. So the procession winds its way through the village until the evening when the real party begins. This is on the Monday. If they do begin ploughing that week, it’s not until Wednesday because they spend

Tuesday getting over the celebrations of Monday.

What this celebration did very effectively was to bring the community together and to get people to focus on the role of the land and agriculture in people’s well-being.

They did this in a spirit of thanksgiving and celebration. Now, I don’t want to look

2 back to these times and pretend they lived in a kind of golden age – life was harsh, tough and sometimes brutal, especially for the poor - but this festival has something to teach us today about blessing, gift and celebration. Let’s think about those three....blessing, gift and celebration.

‘Count your blessings’ is not a phrase we hear so often today. When a person is feeling hard done by, a friend may say, ‘Count your blessings.’ But blessings were very important for our medieval forebears. They could not control much of life – a world without fridge-freezers and overseas’ markets depended upon the rains coming at the right time and the sun shining in the right months in order that their families could be fed. A world in which parents would have a large number of

3 children because of a high infant mortality rate and in which it was not uncommon for mothers to die during child-birth would have made many feel that they were living on a knife-edge and it would not take much to tumble over into the abyss. They would have counted their blessings. Many today in sub-Saharan Africa who face exactly the same challenges as our medieval forebears - many of our soldiers fighting in

Afghanistan who return back to their bases fit and uninjured: they count their blessings. Now, I am not for one moment suggesting that God imposes disasters upon people – I could not believe in such a God – but when we are made aware and confronted with that knife-edge between life and death, we learn how to count our blessings. But when life bloats us with a host of material riches and opportunities,

4 we forget what blessings are, until we are confronted with disaster, illness or death.

In addition, today’s festival shows that we live under the umbrella of God’s love and seeking his blessing reminds us that we are not as much in control of life as we think we are. Seeking God’s blessing frees us to thank God for the good times and it also reminds us that he does not desert us in the difficult times.

Secondly, today’s festival highlights the importance of gift. Our forebears will have watched the seed push their way through the ground to become storks and then grow and mature into crops. They will have looked and marvelled at this growth and they would have regarded it as a gift...... this gift of life was not theirs because they made it, but because it was given to them. It was a gift. I remember hearing an

5 artist speaking about painting but she said that what she feared most was waking up one morning and discovering that she could no longer paint – she saw her skill, not as belonging to her, but as a gift, a gift from God. Our forebears involved in Plough

Sunday would have understood the concept of gift because they depended on the rain and the sun at the right times so that the seed could grow and mature. They would have understood that wonderful passage we heard from Isaiah. The people of

Israel had fallen into the trap into believing that they were self-sufficient and invincible, that they were so much in control of their world and their own destiny that they were gods themselves. Because of this arrogance their society collapsed and their culture almost disappeared...... and this passage reminds them that what they

6 have does not belong to them, was not created by them but came as a gift of God who would even give them strength at the difficult times: Is.40.28-31.

What we have, even life itself, does not belong to us, but is a gift entrusted to us to enjoy but not just for ourselves but for the sake of others, especially for those who struggle. The challenge we face today is that it is too easy to think we have what we have because we have earned it and it belongs to us and us alone. We live in a society of rights, demands and expectations and have lost the language of thanks and gifts. The Christian Gospel is quite clear that nothing that we have belongs to us but is entrusted to us and the proof of this, the incontrovertible proof of this is that we cannot take it with us when we die! When we recognise that what we have are

7 gifts rather than possessions, then we can appreciate and enjoy them and when we use them for the sake of others as well as ourselves then the gifts do not wither and perish, indeed, thanking God for our gifts and using them for others as well as enjoying them ourselves will enable them to grow, blossom and flourish.

Finally, today’s festival highlights the importance of celebration. Celebration was a significant part of the festivities around blessing of the plough. The celebration started at the blessing of the plough on the Sunday and spilled over into the following days. Our medieval forebears used to celebrate together far more than we do today.

In a book called Dancing in the Streets – A History of Collective Joy, journalist

Barbara Ehrenreich demonstrates how street parties and the like were a much larger

8 part of British life than they are today and that there was, amidst the struggle and turmoil of life, a real sense of joy. When I look at society today, there are flashes of joy – and I hope this year with the Jubilee and Olympics will awaken some of that joy

– but by and large today’s society is much more up-tight, fearful and depressed. We need to rediscover how to enjoy ourselves.....and the Plough Festival gives us some hints. Celebration and joy came from a context in which people could count their blessings and recognise that what they had, including life itself, did not belong to them but was entrusted to them as gift. Blessing, gift, celebration belong together.

Celebrating what we possess does not turn to joy, but to binging. We binge when we

9 celebrate what we possess and own and when we don’t know who we are or where we are going.

Today as we ask God’s blessing on the plough and seed and on ourselves, we recognise God’s hand in life and the world, even, perhaps especially, in the difficult bits and in particular we recognise the blessings he brings through the work of the

Farm Crisis Network. We recognise that we have been gifted with much, both within and outside of ourselves and finally God’s blessing and gifts lead to joy and celebration. Perhaps it is our role to play the part of the fool in those medieval plough festivities, encouraging a dancing in the streets which comes from a recognition of our blessings and gifts.