Harvest: Stone soup

 Harvest 2022

2 Corinthians 9:6-10, John 15.1-11

I began last week’s sermon with a folktale, and, as it happens, I’m going to begin this week’s in the same way. This week’s story goes like this:

A traveller came to a certain village, and asked for some food, but none of the villagers would help him. So the traveller said to them, “never mind, I’ll make myself some soup, using my magic stone, and then there will be plenty for us to share.” He produced a stone from his pack, and asked if he could borrow a pot. The villagers were intrigued, so someone fetched him a pot – a large pot – which he filled the pot with water. He built a fire, and set the pot over it, and then, solemnly, dropped the stone into the water. Now and then he stirred the water about a bit, and eventually he took a sip from his spoon. 

“Is it ready?” asked the curious villagers.

“Hmm” he said. “It is tasting good, but it would be even better if I had an onion to put in it.”

One of the villagers happened to have an onion – she’d had a glut in her vegetable patch that year - so she fetched it and gave it to him. 

Once again they waited, until he tasted it again.

“Not bad,” he said, “but it would be even better with a carrot, if anyone happened to have one.” Someone scurried home to fetch one, and the traveller added it. 

They waited, until he tasted it again, and said that, with a little salt it would be truly excellent. So, someone gave him some.

Again and again, he tasted and added herbs and vegetables, a few bits of bacon, some beans to thicken it, all given by the villagers.

Finally, he proclaimed that now the soup was ready, and that, if anyone wanted some, he was very happy to share it. So, everyone fetched a bowl from their homes, and everyone ate their fill, and said that it was the best soup they had ever tasted. The traveller thanked them, cleaned off the stone, which was all that was left in the bottom of the pot, put it carefully back in his pack and went on his way, leaving everyone to wonder what, exactly, had just happened…

That story, called Stone Soup, is told across many different cultures in many different forms. Sometimes it’s a magic nail, sometimes magic wood, rather than a magic stone but the essence is always the same – people who didn’t want to share what they had being persuaded, or some might say tricked, into doing so, but everyone benefitting at the end. Like most popular folktales its power is that we recognise ourselves in it.

Like those villagers, we can all be reluctant to give, and for all sorts of reasons. We may not be sure of the person we are giving to – the traveller in the story was a stranger, why should the villagers help him? We may not want to get involved; what if more is asked of us later, and we find we can’t back out? We may be fearful that if we give something away we won’t have enough for ourselves and our families – we often cling to our possessions, even become hoarders, out of fear rather than greed. 

“God loves a cheerful giver,” said our reading today, but like those villagers we often have to be cajoled into it, persuaded by glossy adverts or gimmicks like buying red noses or sponsoring someone to do some extraordinary challenge. If we really care about someone, though, none of that is necessary. If it’s a friend or a child or a parent or a partner – someone we have a loving relationship with, we will usually give very generously to support them. It’s as natural as breathing. We don’t think twice about it. Our gifts are a token of our love. It doesn’t occur to us to hold back, or calculate the return to us, because our lives are linked to those we are giving to. That’s the kind of giving Paul’s talking about in his letter to the Corinthian church. 

The background to the reading is that the Christians in Corinth have promised to help out the Christian community in Jerusalem, who are suffering – there has been a famine and persecution there. For some reason, though, they haven’t yet come through with the promised cash. Paul is reminding them that these are their brothers and sisters, fellow human beings who happen to be in need, part of their own family. He is calling them to see their relationship with those they are helping. Jerusalem may be far away. They may not know the people there. But they are family. He also reminds them that their giving is rooted in and tied up with their relationship with God. If they are secure in his abundant love, they will be able to be generous and abundant in their love for others [, just as, in the Gospel reading Jesus tells us that we need to be grafted in, linked to one another and to God, the source of our lives.] We may not always feel we have much to give, but in giving it, we discover that we are richer than we thought, because we become part of something that is so much bigger than we are, and generosity breeds generosity.

At our Harvest services we support Rochester Diocese’s Poverty and Hope appeal.  Like those Corinthian Christians, we will never meet most of the people who benefit from our gifts, but they too are our brothers and sisters, part of one human family. What happens to them happens to us too. That’s always been true, but perhaps because we now get ‘as it happens’ rolling 24 hour news from all around the world, we are much more aware of that. Whether it’s the effects of climate change, or unfair trading practices, the world is getting smaller by the year. It can be quite exhausting, quite overwhelming, but the key to not being overwhelmed is in that story I began with. It might be that no one in that village had all the ingredients that went into that soup, enough to feed an entire village, but everyone had something to give, and through making the soup together, they didn’t just create some food, but also new relationships, which perhaps lasted long after the traveller had left them. 

The money we give today to the Poverty and Hope project is designed to do just that, to build relationships. As the book of Proverbs says “Like cold water to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country.” Whether it is empowering people in the shanty towns of Brazil, or supporting rural education in Myanmar, providing clean water in Tanzania or supporting communities in Zimbabwe to make their voices heard, we can be good news to people who are struggling, and they can be good news to us, challenging us to change the structures that keep inequality going,  so that we can all live in a fairer world which, in the end, will be good for everyone.

I’m going to finish with a message from the Bishop of Tonbridge, which tells us more about the projects this year’s appeal supports.