1st Oct 2006HARVEST THANKSGIVING

Fr Julian Browning

Joel  2  :  21 – 27 ; 1  Timothy  2  :  1 – 7 ;  Matthew  6 : 25  -  33

“Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow”

Harvest Festival is not about how we manage creation, but about how God manages His creation, despite our efforts to ruin it.

I can report that the raspberry harvest in Tescos continues unabated. However many I pick, there are always more next week. The season will go on for twelve months until I'm sick of raspberries. Our spoilt and unnatural way of life (and they're just as bad in the country) makes me wonder whether we deserve to have a Harvest Festival. So some churches have changed the emphasis from Harvest to the Reverent Use of Creation, the Fruits of Human Work, Ecological Sunday, Green Sunday... Like so many worthy human initiatives, these are slightly misguided. Harvest Festival is not about how we manage creation, but about how God manages His creation, despite our efforts to ruin it. Harvest Festival is about his completed task, Harvest Home. What he has done is sufficient for us.

I have had some Christian visitors from North East India staying with me recently.  They said grace before every meal, breakfast, lunch, dinner. This was not just a quick For what we are about to receive. These were prayers which started with started with a simple thanksgiving for the food set before us, moved into a greater thank you for the company and for all that God had provided that day, and ended with the petition that God's providence and protection should continue. The daily harvest leads to daily prayer. Harvest Festival is like that. It begins, as it has done from medieval times in various forms, with a straightforward thanksgiving for Harvest Home, and that opens our eyes to God as the ground of our being, the source of all that is. Christianity is not an easy religion to have. The demands made on us are great. We try to believe difficult things. We are asked to do things we don't really want to do like loving our neighbours and giving up our lives for others.

The wonderful passage we have just heard about the lilies of the field and the birds of the air is part of Jesus's Sermon on the Mount, a sermon which dismisses the easy answers and disturbs the conscience. So we try to slip away. It can suddenly happen; you've been a Christian for years, and then the meaning of it all disintegrates, we lose confidence in ourselves as religious people, we're on the outside again. Well, here today is a way back in. Saying thank you to God, for all that you have. Many of the breaks in our human relationships could have been mended if someone had said thank you. It's the same with God. We say thank you. The relationship is up and running again. Then we can try to live with God, according to God's seasons, not our own.

Most of the time we are dreadfully spoilt and ungrateful and wasteful. When we can snatch tasteless nectarines off the supermarket shelf in December, Harvest Festival rather loses its edge. We no longer depend on the changing seasons. There is a lot at risk here, a lot to lose. The Church year is also seasonal. And the Church year reflects the human life, which is seasonal, passing, transient, changing, different, and all the more beautiful for it, like the four seasons of the year. So, if we can start again to appreciate and respect what God has created for us, then we are a step nearer understanding ourselves and the meaning of our own lives. The year has a beginning and an end, and so do our lives. Our ancestors, who lived closer to life and death than we do, who knew the agricultural rythm of the seasons, saw this clearly. Death was the grim reaper, armed with a scythe, a harvester at the end of the season. The Bible is full of harvest stories which are applied to human lives. The sower went forth to sow. The seeds which fell into good ground produced the best harvest. The martyrs
are called the first fruits of God's harvest, when God gathers all his people to himself.

We are part of God's harvest, being grown by him, protected by him. But the harvest has always had another special meaning for Christians. Reaping the harvest wheat led to the production of the staple, bread. The crushing of grapes provides that other staple, wine. In medieval England, the harvest festival was called Lammas Day in early August, when thanks were given for the first fruits of the harvest, and bread, made from the new wheat, was offered at mass and blessed. That echoed the promise made in the Book of Joel we read this morning: the threshing floors shall be full of grain, the vats shall overflow with wine and oil. You shall eat in plenty and be satisfied and praise the name of theLord your God. God has not only given us all we need; he has given us abundance. It's a far cry from the joyless queue at Budgens where we wait, not in joyful hope, but with mounting irritation at all the other greedy people in front of me. That's not the way to live. We can do better. Therefore do not
worry, saying “What will we eat? or What will we drink? or what will we wear?”

Let's rise above consumer choice. Our harvest festival is here at the altar, where bread and wine are blessed. That sacrifice, giving back to God what God has given, makes things all right again, takes us into the presence of God in a prayer of thanksgiving. It becomes routine for us, but it points us towards glory and judgement, eternity, the great Harvest at the end of time. The harvest is the close of the age, said Jesus, and the reapers are angels. Lord thy glory fills the heaven, Earth is with its fullness stored.