Today we celebrate harvest – it’s one of the great traditions of the Church to set aside one Sunday a year to specifically give thanks to God for all the food he provides, and for those who help to bring it to us. Probably of all the great festivals in the Church calendar it’s the one that’s geared up to make us feel comfortable – like a hot cup of tea, and a piece of toast !
Harvest can bring out the best in a Church community. Surrounded by the gifts of God, we may remember the great harvest festivals of the past, and the trees changing colour for autumn – the slow onset of winter and the anticipation of advent and the festive season… It is true isn’t it, that as soon as harvest is gone, Christmas only seems a very short time away !
But today, through the readings, the hymns, the gifts in Church, and the trees outside, we can pause and just see how blessed we are… Being grateful is at the heart of what harvest is about. We are grateful for the gift of food, for the work of those who produce it, and for others to share it with.
There’s a story about a Vicar who asked the members of the congregation to go through each letter of the alphabet shouting out the name of some food beginning with that letter. Everything was going well until they reached the letter Q, when there was a deafening silence. Eventually one little girl shouted out, ‘Q for cucumber’ !
What this story shows though is how much food we have, the huge variety of gifts that each one of us consume on a regular basis… It’s very easy to take it for granted, but the message of harvest is not that we should set aside one day of thanksgiving a year, but that this day should act as a reminder for the rest of the year of all the good things we have and we are given.
In the reading that we heard from the Book of Deuteronomy (26:1-4) we are told what Moses told the children of Israel to say as they brought their gifts to the Temple. They should say, ‘With this gift, I acknowledge that the Lord your God has brought me into the land he swore to our ancestors…’ In these words we are reminded of our duty to recognise the place of God in our lives.
And as we give thanks we recognise that this is not a message just for this Sunday, but a message for all time; that everything that we have, and everything we are, is a gift from God. And so, God calls us not only to a day of thanksgiving, as he has called his people from the time of Moses, but he calls us to a life of thanks of thanksgiving.
Living out our thanks on a day to day basis is a way of life, not just a one off event or series of events. Giving thanks is important. When we give thanks as a Church, a community, as a family, we are reminded of all the good things and all the good people that we have been given or gifted with.
We remember that we have been blessed, we remember that there is a greater good than ourselves. And as we begin to live out our thanks we begin to open up our lives more to God and give him the place he deserves in those lives… We humble ourselves before him and acknowledge that he is the source of good things, and our awareness of our blessings increases, and our joy becomes fuller.
And as we continue our journey of moving closer to God, we respond to him by offering our lives for his service, as we seek to share all of the blessings that we have…
Because our thanks must be more than words – our thanks must be revealed also in our actions. I said earlier that harvest was a comfortable sort of festival in the Church, and it is rightly a celebration of good things, but we must also recognise that throughout the world today, many people know of no such blessings, they live in fear or poverty, they try to live with tiny amounts of food, no clean water supply… I read earlier this week about someone who had visited one of the African countries and explained to a woman in a small village that in Britain we have hot or cold water whenever we want it, just by turning on a tap.
She responded by saying that the people of Britain must all be very happy… I suspect we are all happy about that when we stop to think about it, but our harvest thanksgiving reminds us that we don’t think about it enough – We are privileged, we are blessed, and we must always seek to share our privileges and our blessings with others. And so, as we give thanks at this harvest festival, let’s remember our calling to be joyful always, to pray continually, and to give thanks in all circumstances.
It is what God wants of us.., and it is what God wants for us. Blessed be God's name, day by day. Amen
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