My last harvest sermon for this year . . .

I can well remember one of the very first harvest sermons I preached as a young curate. I was preaching at our monthly family service so there were quite a few children there, and I decided to tell the story of a loaf of bread - looking back from the loaf itself all the way to the planting of the grain. The children enjoyed being brought out to the front to play the parts of all the different people involved: the shop assistant, the shelf stacker, the van driver, the baker, and so on, back to the farmer and his seed drill. I remember it because it worked so well, almost too well in fact - by the end of the story we had nearly all the children in church that day and several of the adults as well in a rather crowded line across the chancel steps. The point of the story of course was that at harvest we are celebrating not only things - fruit and vegetables and so forth, but lots of people on whom we depend for lots of things, people we perhaps don’t think about.

Like it or not, we are interdependent. Town and country may not always understand each other, but they do need each other.  We are interdependent internationally, too, taking our share of the world harvest, to be honest maybe more than our share. Take a look through your kitchen cupboards and count up how many countries are represented there. If the pound continues to fall, we might be paying a bit more for some of that before too long - but we’ll still buy most of it, because these things from halfway round the world are part of our staple diet.

I engage with harvest festival in two ways, I think. I value the tradition of harvest festival - the old hymns, the smell of chrysanthemums and apple pie: it’s a rite of calendar passage, marking the shortening of the days, as the year turns as it must away from summer and toward the winter. As we sing, “All is safely gathered in, ere the winter storms begin.”

But also, much as I like the traditions of harvest, I’m also aware of the message harvest festival still has for our modern world. It isn’t just about the world of corn dollies, harvest loaves and morris dancers. Things are different today: all may be safely gathered in, but probably the new crop is already in the ground and growing. We farm more intensively and we live faster than our ancestors did. Harvest festivals today need to add to the traditional celebration a chance to reflect on the world as it is too. Our lives connect with people across the world the fruits of whose labour are on the shelf at Tesco. There are inequalities to think about; not everyone has a rich harvest, but we all share one world.

Traditional and modern are both important in harvest. Our lives are greatly impoverished if we lose touch with tradition - it’s too easy just to pour scorn on the ways of the past, and to claim that the hymns our parents and grandparents sang are now boring and outmoded and no longer needed. Myself, I love them all, and hope we never stop singing them. And I am reminded of the truth in George Carey’s comment when he was Archbishop of Canterbury: when a people lose touch with faith and tradition, they also lose their sense of who they are.

But faith has no point or meaning unless it is lived; its test is its relevance to the real issues and demands of the day. So it’s right that harvest celebrations should each year include God’s urgent call to action in the cause of his creation. That’s actually nothing new as a harvest theme. In the Old Testament the Israelites of long ago were told when they entered the Promised Land that they must honour the land and the Lord who had given it to them. How? By sharing its fruits, not only with friends and family but also with ‘the stranger who lives among you’, and with the weakest and most vulnerable members of their own communities.

None of us lives as close to the land as the people did then, even those of us who are every day on the farm or in the garden, and our lives are no longer devastated by a bad harvest as they might have been in the past. We fill our larders from supermarket trolleys, more than from our own plots of land. But the principle’s the same, however much more we understand about the science of things, however much more horsepower we have, and however sophisticated our lives and our lifestyle choices may be: the land that we think of as ours is also God’s. That’s what the Israelites were told when they first entered Canaan. Their land was also God’s land, their world was God’s world. So the harvest of the land was theirs not only to celebrate and enjoy, but to use and share.

Tonight’s celebration should really be called harvest thanksgiving, and it should be more than just a nod in the traditional direction of God,e a chance to reflect on what it means to live thankfully. I counted how many times people said thank you to me the other day. I’d had quite a busy day, held a few doors open, shopped in a few stores, so the number was actually quite impressive. But if I only counted the thank-yous that came across as genuine, maybe that might have been a much smaller number. Some thank-yous were for form’s sake, and some because that’s what you have to say when you’re serving a customer. Some even sounded as though they really meant “That’s enough of you, then, off you go!” Still, I suppose that any sort of thank-you is better than nothing. But the one or two thank-yous that sounded heartfelt and heart-warming - well, when people say thank you like that it makes your day, and I did have a few of those, which was nice.

What does it mean, to live thankfully as God’s people? We show our genuine thanks for God’s gifts at harvest when we value them and the land that produces them by using them according to the mind of the giver. A former colleague of mine (not a minister, I ought to say) used to write against various sections in the agendas of meetings we attended “SEP.” “What’s that stand for?” I asked. “Someone else’s problem”, he told me. Real harvest thanksgiving never writes off things that sadden the heart of God as SEP, someone else’s problem. It is our problem if we are leaching the earth of its resources and poisoning our environment. It is our problem if people are going hungry while others have more than enough. It is our problem that millions of people are refugees, living in tents in the desert or huts in the mud of any number of the world’s transit points, because other people are firing at each other using weapons we may well have made. Time is too short and our world is too precious and our God is too great for us to leave these things to others.

Individually there may be little that any of us can do about the big inequalities of our world, but there’s always something, and small things add up when people get together. We can support campaigns, give to charities and missions that really do the work as it needs to be done, just be more aware of the issues and not just go along with the general flow of what everyone else is thinking. Aid across the world gets a bad name and a bad press, and a lot of government aid is used poorly and often wastefully. But aid charities and Christian missions work in a different way - with partners on the ground, by listening to stories, by helping people make small but worthwhile improvements to their lives. Many small things added together can make a big change. So as we give thanks for harvest tonight, may it be both celebration and commitment: for true thanksgiving requires both of these.