A good harvest

As you can tell it is harvest today. In the week I found some harvest jokes that I would am going to tell you ….

Why shouldn't you tell a secret on a farm? Because the potatoes have eyes and the corn has ears! 

Why did the scarecrow win the Nobel Prize? Because he was out standing in his field! 

What day do potatoes hate the most? Fry-day! 

What farm animal keeps the best time? A watch dog! 

Well, harvest festival is here again. I am sometimes over polite – I am the type of person who will say thank you to someone at a shop counter for taking my money _ Why ? I will thank people for insulting me . Why ? When we are visiting our close family, I ask if I can use their toilet please – Why ?

Anyway, being like that you can imagine that having a day when we are told to give thanks is an amazing event for me. Harvest is a reminder to say thank you to God and it is also a reminder of the good food and comfortable life that we have. It is also a day when we remember those who are less fortunate. 

All our harvest gifts will go to Swansea foodbank which is doing brilliant workin feeding people who are in a crisis. There is a statistic that the majority of people in our country are two paychecks away from bankruptcy. Think about that just imagine what sudden redundancy or illness preventing people from working can do to a family? The foodbank works on referrals from named professionals. This means that medics, teachers, Church leaders, social servicesare able to give vouchers to people who are in need. 

Harvest is a great festival, we can do so much and celebrate so much. It is one of those things that we are used to. I keep saying once harvest happens Advent is just around the corner. The seasons outside may be very different to what we are used to – I heard someone bemoaning the lack of good pine cones in Singleton park the other day ! but the Churches seasons stay the same. At the moment we are in the season of ordinary time, this means that we do not have any major celebrations. 

However, in the midst of this long period from Pentecost to Advent, harvest comes along. A special day that reminds us that even when everything is fairly ordinary God is extraordinary and we have an opportunity to remember the need to thank Him.

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. I am not going to do that today, but 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’ ! 

Harvest is great, it is comforting it is what we are used to – we know what to expect.

The Church looks great with the displays and all the food that people have donated. This is one of our ways to say thank you to God. 

We have heard about harvesting in our gospel reading this morning. The reading from the gospel of Matthew (21:33-46) talks of vineyards and harvesting.

In the parable that Jesus told he talked of someone having a fantastic vineyard that he wanted to protect whilst he went away. He had tenants come in to look after it. However, when the man asked for the harvest of grapes the tenants refused, the man sent various messengers and each one suffered badly. In this story Jesus was comparing the people of Israel to these tenants. God had done so much for them, saving them from slavery in Egypt, sending them prophets to help them, but all these had been met with disdain or worse.

Back to the parable. The landowner sent his son and guess what … that was even worse. These tenants were not prepared to share what they had or to listen to the landowner – the one who had invited them into the vineyard in the first place.

Jesus then asked what the landowner should do, and of course the answer was to get in new tenants.

It’s hard to believe it, but the religious leaders were only just realizing what Jesus was saying as he told the parable. Jesus was alluding to the religious leaders as being like the evil tenants. They were preventing the good harvest by standing against Jesus. God the Son – Jesus- had been sent by God the Father to change the world to produce a good harvest of people coming back into relationship with God. 

Jesus was pointing out that the harvesting would be done by others, the oneswho recognized who Jesus was. 

Jesus spoke of the fruits of the Kingdom of God. Those fruits are the way that we are to live. They are the fruits of people coming to know God, living more like Him and bringing others to know Him too. 

We need to harvest the good fruits that God has given us by the way that we live and the people we are. 

The good fruits are people coming to know God, and for us to be more like Jesus. I like using the Fruits of the Spirit from the epistle to the Galatians (5:22-23) those fruits are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self control. 

These are the good fruit, these are the fruits that we are to show. When we do this then we can, as I said last week, become infectious and contagious with the good fruits that God gives. When we have these fruits and show them – well people won’t be able to fail but to notice them and want to experience them for themselves.

Back to harvest festival. Today we give thanks for the harvest, we think of the challenge to us to reach out to those in need no matter who they are as part or our thanksgiving to God and we think of the way that our lives are showing the good fruits of the Kingdom of God. 

We are giving thanks, we are receiving the good gifts that God brings and we reach out to others by helping those in need and by showing the good gifts, the good fruits of God and His Kingdom.

May we be ready to give thanks, to receive and to reach out. AMEN