Reepham Benefice

What are we here for this morning? Or perhaps a more specific question: what is the point of blessing our old plough? Well, we could say that we are doing it because this is an ancient tradition. This is something that has been done in this church and other rural churches for centuries. But our plough sitting here in church is a plough that is no longer used. Nowadays we have mechanised farming. Plough’s are pulled by tractors. Not only that, many of us here are not, this year at least, going to be going out to turning our hands to the plough. So, what are we doing?

One of the problems with ancient traditions is that they are often seen as quaint or irrelevant, so much so that some of the ancient traditions of the church, some of the traditions that happened up until 10, 20 or 30 years ago have fallen away as society and even as church communities have seen them as being irrelevant and out of touch.

In fact, there are very few rural communities that gather together on this Sunday and bless their plough, for a whole variety of reasons. And I think one of the reasons why these traditions have fallen away is because we as human beings think we know how to do things. We think we are able to subdue the world and everything that is in it. We think very much like our ancestors in the Victorian times that we know how the world ticks, we are able to master our environment. Indeed, in my hand I have a memory stick. I bought this a couple of years ago, they are probably a lot smaller now; but on this memory stick are contained every single photograph I have ever taken with my digital camera, all the emails I have ever sent and received and everything I have ever written and both on the computer I have now and computers I have had in the past, which I have transferred from one to the other. And there is still space on that little stick for loads more. We can send men to the moon; we can send satellites out in to space; we can send space craft into other solar systems - we can do the most amazing things, and yet all it takes is for a cold autumn evening for the sea to swell and the wind to whip up and we realise that we are not masters of our environment at all, but we are precarious creatures in God’s hands and that’s why Plough Sunday is so important because we remember even though we know the science of farming...

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