Autumn this year has been a little slow to arrive, but now the weather’s beginning to turn a bit cooler, I suppose the leaves will soon be falling thick and fast. And because it’s been a very dry September, quite a few in my garden had fallen already, when I went out to look the other day. Here’s one I came across in my backyard. It’s a sycamore, which is a member of the maple family of trees. The leaves of some of the maples are among the most attractive in autumn because of the bright colours, and many people cross the Atlantic at this time of the year to see the colours of fall in New England or Ontario. We were there last year but just a few weeks too early to get the full effect of the changing leaves.
So the nearest I generally get to the bright colours of fall is likely to be a bright autumn day in the Ironbridge Gorge or at Lake Vyrnwy. Here too though, the leaves can glow so brightly in the autumn sunshine that you might almost think the hills were on fire. And yet these colours are in fact the colours of decay, for all that they can seem for a short time to glow with life and fire. The autumn colours we see were in fact there in the leaves all along, but while each leaf is active and living, those background colours of red and yellow are hidden by the green of summer. That green pigment is chlorophyll, and chlorophyll is in a way the powerhouse of our living planet. This is the magic component that allows a plant to tap into the energy of the sun, and to use that energy to turn carbon dioxide into food, while at the same time issuing out oxygen as a waste product. This process, called photosynthesis, is what provides an atmosphere we can breathe in, as all kinds of plant life flourish in the sun, from little mosses and ferns to the wheat and potatoes in our fields, the dahlias and chrysanthemums in our gardens, up to the giant trees in our woods and forests.
Having trained as a plant scientist, I know how the system works, and yet it still feels like magic, in a way. Not all life depends on what green leaves are doing, but if those green leaves weren’t doing what they do, there’s be precious little life around above the level of bacteria. We certainly wouldn’t be alive.
So, sitting the other looking at this leaf, I found that quite a sobering thought, just for a moment. What if the leaves stopped doing what they do? What if they all died? What if the system stopped working? We’d all be gone in no time.
While our distant ancestors knew nothing about chlorophyll and photosynthesis, they were probably more worried than we are by the fall of the leaves in the autumn, and about the cooling temperatures and the shortening days. How could they be sure the sun would ever grow strong again? How could they be sure the leaves would reappear on the trees. Somewhere behind many of our autumn and winter ceremonies, whether it be bonfires or yule logs of holly and mistletoe, those primaeval fears lurk. The sun has faded but maybe our fires can bring him back. The leaves have fallen, but the evergreen branches that remain are a promise that they won’t be gone for ever.
We haven’t quite got to those darker days yet; but we’ve reached the first of our autumn ceremonies, harvest festival. The origin of this celebration is the harvest home: all is safely gathered in (as the hymn reminds us), so there’s a chance to put down our rakes and sickles and have a bit of a party. Behind the joy of the celebration there’d have been relief too in past times, if the harvest had been good - this year at least there’d be enough put by to see folk through the dark and testing weeks of winter, when nothing could grow and the land was gripped by snow and frost.
This year’s harvest has for most of us been a good one, I think. Some of my gardener friends have had record crops. For most of us though whether the harvest is good or not so good is more a matter of degree than of life and death. Prices may be higher if the harvest hasn’t been all that good, but most of what we need will still be there on the supermarket shelf, and we’ll not starve. Not so in the past. Mass starvation in Europe was a reality of life only a matter of a few centuries ago, and more recently in Ireland, if you think back to the potato famine of not that much more than a century ago.
The Bible includes many stories and incidences of famine. The one that brought Jacob and his sons to Egypt, for example, or the one that threatened to starve the widow and her son with whom Elijah took refuge. People back then knew how close to the edge they lived; nor has famine finished with the human world today - we may always have enough to eat in Europe, but that’s not so true in other places.
So the edge is perhaps closer than we’d like to think. Leaves may not fail us, but there’ve been some scare stories this year about bees. And other insects too, together the pollinators without which - well, without which the plant world would fall apart: no fruit, no seeds. Whatever the truth and the science behind the particular stories and scares that did the rounds this year, it remains true that we need the bees, and that all insects can be very vulnerable to environmental changes we may well make without even noticing.
Tonight our theme is thanksgiving, and you may think I’ve taken rather a long time to get to there. When the old harvest homes began to include singing hymns and prayers in church or chapel, they became harvest thanksgivings. So let’s think for a moment about what we’re being thankful for.
For me this is a time to give thanks to God for all the complexity and wonder of creation, with its possibilities and opportunities, and its beauty and fruitfulness and wealth. And to remind myself that our harvest doesn’t just depend on weather and soil, on leaves and photosynthesis, on bees and other pollinators, it depends on him. We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land, but it is fed and watered by God’s almighty hand. Or so the hymn tells us.
It doesn’t always feel like that, these days, when a field can be harvested, cleared, manured, ploughed, prepared and sown all in a matter of days. But even though we’ve so much power at our disposal, so much knowledge, so much technology, we’re still at the mercy of the forces of nature, as people in many parts of the country discovered only too well over last winter with its widespread flooding. But still there’s a need to give thanks that’s deeply ingrained within us; it’s good to pause at this season of gathering in, and to be reminded that for all our power, harvest begins not with what we’ve devised or done, but with what we’ve been given.
Thanksgiving, then. Thank-you’s come in different shapes and sizes, and some of them can be perfunctory and disinterested, just a nod in the right direction for form’s sake. I hope our thanksgiving at harvest isn’t that sort of thank-you. Some gifts are treated poorly - quickly broken, thrown away or sent off to car boot sales. How much of a thank-you did they ever get? To be truly thankful is to value the gift and to honour the giver. So in our harvest thanksgiving, firstly, we praise God just because the world is such a fantastic place and it’s good to be alive in it; secondly we pledge ourselves to look after the wonderful world that he’s given into our care, leaves and bees and all; and thirdly we recognise the responsibility of harvest, that it’s ours not just to keep but to use.
There’s a lot about harvests in the New Testament, Jesus told quite a few harvest stories, and they’re mostly stories about judgement. And underlying everything else in our harvest thanksgiving is the Gospel message that we ourselves are called to bear a good harvest - thinking back to the parable of the sower, we’re called to be seed set in good soil, that grows as it ought to grow, yielding some thirty fold, some sixty, and some a hundred fold.
This leaf has stopped working. That’s why it fell off the tree as it did. New leaves will replace it and go on working, even if not until next spring. But if all leaves stopped working and never grew back, the whole shebang would come to an end. Not that leaves have any choice in the matter: they’re just components that serve their purpose and are then ditched by the plant or tree when their work is done.
But we as leaves on the human tree of life do have a choice. We can be fruitful in God’s service, we can share what we harvest and care for the world, or we can just look after number one and contribute nothing to the tree. It occurs to me that when a sycamore leaf gets to that stage that’s when the tree gets rid of it - the leaf stops producing food for the tree, so the tree seals off the leaf stem, and a breath of wind soon brings the leaf down. Our best thanksgiving to God at harvest is to be leaves that go on contributing to the life of the whole tree, that have the vision, courage and love to be givers rather than takers, and workers ourselves rather than those who simply depend on the work of others. And as we do that we create an environment in which other leaves will also thrive, and in which our harvest thanksgiving won’t be a single event, a festival day, but something to generate an outward-looking state of mind and a generous and loving commitment of our hearts.
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