Harvest Thanksgiving

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)