Preached at Harvest Thanksgiving
Deuteronomy 26.1-11
I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me.
Revelation 14.14-18
The clusters of the grapes of the earth are ripe for harvest.
John 6.25-35
I am the bread of life, says the Lord.
Do not let your hand be stretched out to receive
and closed when it is time to give.
(Sirach
4.31)
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Two fundamental
principles undergird our celebration of harvest thanksgiving today.
The first is that everything
we have – our possessions, property, life itself - is a sheer gift from God.
The second is that in
response to the gift that is life, possessions and property, we offer something
back to God to acknowledge his greater gift.
The tithe is the
supreme example of this in the Bible: offering a tenth of our income to God.
This is applied by many
in church, to give a tenth of one’s income to serve the mission and ministry of
Christ.
Giving is good for us;
generosity is a virtue that we need to make a habit of, in response to God’s
generosity to us.
This is all captured by
Job’s words when he meditated on the catastrophic loss of possessions and all
that was dear to him:
Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall
I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of
the Lord. (Job 1.21)
It’s no accident that
those words are used at a funeral to express that all we have in this life is
God’s gift: we mustn’t fool ourselves into thinking that what we have is by our
merit and that we can take it with us, we have to relinquish control and
ownership at some point!
Harvest, like a
funeral, is also a time of accountability.
At harvest the farmer
measures and weighs the fruits of his labour, just as at the end of life our
deeds are accounted for before God.
But the work of harvest
is not just about the end, but about how the land and its planting was
prepared, cultivated, watered and tended.
So it is in our lives.
That’s why the old
customs of rogation are so important – that’s actually when we ‘plough the
fields and scatter the good seed on the land’, not at harvest, despite the
traditional harvest hymn.
The poet TS Eliot puts
it more intriguingly:
Take no thought of the
harvest,
but only of the proper sowing. From Chorus in The Rock
A good harvest takes
long, slow, patient cultivation just like our lives.
We have God’s gift of
life: how are we going to use it? How will we be fruitful? How will we multiply
what God has given?
It is in our hands.
Literally.
Wheat needs human hands
to be made into bread.
Grapes need human
hands, or feet possibly, to be made into wine.
The gift of life is
shaped by you and me; what does it become in your hands?
So, harvest
thanksgiving is about giving thanks for God’s gift and giving in response.
It is also about
thanksgiving for those people whose skills transform that gift into something
we can make use of: farmers, craftsmen, brewers, cooks, workers: the human
hands that transform the raw gift into something edible, beautiful, functional
for our use.
Harvest thanksgiving
subverts the human tendency to make everything into a transaction: to buy and
sell, make profit, always looking at the bottom line.
The Eucharist is, in a
mundane and eschatological sense, always a harvest thanksgiving.
In other words, it
celebrates the fruit of the land and points us to judgement.
All is encapsulated in
Jesus’ free, gracious, sacrificial offering of himself to us.
Our gospel reading
speaks of the miraculous bread, the manna, given to the Israelites in the
wilderness.
They did not deserve
it, they hadn’t earned it, yet God provided it.
Jesus connects this to
his own giving of himself, the Bread of Life.
Whoever comes to him
will never be hungry, whoever believes in him will never be thirsty (John
6.35).
There: no transaction,
no sale, but a free gift for salvation and life.
We stretch out our
hands to receive that life in Holy Communion with Christ, the Bread of Life,
mindful, I hope, of the sentiment of the book of Ecclesiasticus:
Do not let your hand be stretched out to receive and
closed when it is time to give. (Sirach 4.31)
Finally, our reading
from Deuteronomy spoke of the gift the Israelites were to give in response for
their deliverance from Egypt.
Today we are invited to
bring forward our own gifts for St Alban’s Foodbank and the Skylight Project
for those experiencing homelessness.
Don’t trudge dutifully
forward at the offertory but joyfully, recalling these words:
You shall set [your gift] down before the Lord your
God and bow down before the Lord your God. (Deuteronomy 26.10)
It’s more than ‘helping
out’ or ‘doing a good turn’ – and it is doing that – more fundamentally it is a
freewill way of offering back to God all that you have had received from his
abundance, in service of those in need:
Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens
who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your
God has given to you and to your house. (Deuteronomy 26.11)
