Someone I know was fond of saying ‘nostalgia isn’t what it used to be’. But they didn’t say it quite as well as they did the first time… Harvest is a chance to reminisce about times past and sing all those great hymns. It wouldn’t have been a proper harvest if we hadn’t started with: ‘We plough the fields and scatter’ even if the closest most of us have got to ploughing or scattering is watching Countryfile on the BBC.
Around the world, Harvest is often celebrated on the day of the full moon closest to the September Equinox. Unsurprisingly, that moon is called the Harvest Moon which this year was a couple of weeks ago in mid-September and for once we had a clear night in the North-West in which to see it.
Haerfest
Our word ‘harvest’ is from the Old English word hærfest… meaning ‘Autumn’. In Canada and the US, Harvest is celebrated at set times in the calendar and called Thanksgiving. They are big National Holidays – the second Monday in October for Canada and the fourth Thursday in November for the US. Any Turkey that escapes Thanksgiving has Christmas to look forward to!
My home church celebrates it on the second Sunday of October. This is one of our Parade Sundays when we have the Rainbows, Brownies, Beavers and Cubs with us. And, just like here, our church is decorated with flowers and fruit and we bring along dried and canned food to be shared with those in need within the community. We also have a small lunch together, giving thanks for what we’ve been given and thinking about parts of the world where people’s very survival can rest or fall on how good the crop is.
Daily Bread
Like you, our church is in a mostly urban setting. Food comes from the shops rather than directly from the fields and it’s sometimes easy to forget our dependence. This is summed up in a poem by Malcolm Guite, which he wrote as part of a series on the Lord’s Prayer.
Give us this day our daily bread we pray,
As though it came straight from the hand of God,
As though we held an empty plate each day,
And found it filled, by miracle, with food,
Although we know the ones who plough and sow,
Who pick and plant and package whilst we sleep
With slow backbreaking labour, row by row,
And send away to others all they reap,
We know that these unseen who meet our needs
Are all themselves the fingers of your hand,
As are the grain, the rain, the air, the land,
And, slighting these, we slight the hand that feeds.
What if we glimpsed you daily in their toil
And found and thanked and served you through them all?
Return home
Where I grew up it was a rural community near the coast in Dorset. So, both rolling green hills and the seashore. Harvest Festivals at church alternated with a plough and bales of hay one year and fishing nets and a small rowing boat the next, which we somehow managed to get through the church doors!
I also now go to Four Lane Ends Congregational, which is in the countryside the other side of Bury. Harvest is one of the few times when people with long family connections to the village church return home from wherever they’ve moved away to so that they can be together again and catch up.
In China they have a Mooncake festival. Here they give thanksgiving over a number of days for the harvest and pray for longevity and the future. But most of all they travel long distances to just be together as a family, to reunite.
Reminiscences
Recently our very own Peter Sanger gave me a book of reminiscences written by a distant relative of his, Mary Sewell, mother of Anna Sewell, the author of ‘Black Beauty’. Mary was writing during the Napoleonic Wars and grew up on a farm in Suffolk where her father was the landowner.
I want to read you an extract of a memory from when Mary was a child. It’s very much an ‘all is safely gathered in’ kind of scene. Perhaps close your eyes and imagine the picture that she paints:
I must not omit a little description of harvest time for that, to the children at least, was a season of joy. The harvest men were all boarded in the house, the coppers full of dumplings and the boilers full of beef.
If the men were working near the house a horn was blown by the girl and the men came trooping home, washed at the pump and then came and sat down at the big kitchen table. There was always a leader who sat at the top and kept order.
When they were working further from the house, a horse was attached to a light cart and the eatables were placed in square covered tins, meat in one, plum puddings in another, with vegetables in a third. There were baskets of bread and pewter plates and stone bottles of beer and tin mugs so that there was not much to break.
When the cart appeared in the field the scythes and sickles were laid down and a place chosen for the repast, under a tree or hedge. This was a convivial season, where often the loud laughter spoke the vacant mind!
When all the fields were cleared the harvest supper was the crowning achievement. The last wagonful of corn was adorned with the branches of trees and drawn into the yard. Then, all the labourers went home and dressed in their best to come with their wives to the supper.
There were two long tables in the kitchen which were plentifully covered with roast and boiled meat and plum pudding and home brewed beer. After this was all finished my father and mother’s health was drunk. Anyone with a voice was called upon for a song and evening ended with taking the tables and boards off the tressels and having a dance. There was, perhaps, no one more glad than the farmer’s wife when the harvest was gathered in and her labours ended.
Complexity
The next page then goes on to describe the introduction of the first Thrashing machine to beat out the corn rather than it being done manually with a flail. As well as the machine causing some serious injuries there is a certain sadness as Mary Sewell talks about the loosening of the bonds between the men and the landowner when this new technology is introduced.
And we equally have some complexity in the words from Joel, that we heard earlier. Those verses are read in Synagogues on the Sabbath before Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the Jewish year. They come after an ecological disaster. A plague of locusts has stripped the land clean. The people are called to fast and weep and beg God to consider their plight. But it’s not only people who are affected – the earth is denuded of vegetation and the animals are starving.
Our verses have words from God, not just to his people, but to the earth and its creatures too. God brings restoration of the earth and promise of rain and crops in abundance.
And at the end we have those words so familiar to us from Pentecost. Here it is in the King James Version: ‘And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions: And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out my spirit.’
Working with God
In its original context, God promises to pour out his spirit on all people, just as all people had been affected by the same environmental catastrophe.
But that restoration was accomplished by more than an act of God. The people cleared the ground and planted seeds, they harvested the fields, the vineyards and the orchards. That’s an important reminder to us if we’re ever tempted to just hole ourselves up in our churches or chapels and pray. The restoration in Joel came through the people working with God in and on the earth – not sitting back and letting him get on with it, which is perhaps the danger in our ‘do not worry’ verses from Matthew’s Gospel. I’ll return to Matthew later in the service.
Elsewhere in the OT, Harvest is a reminder to celebrate like we are today. In Exodus 23:16 – Celebrate the Festival of Harvest with the first fruits of the crops you sow in your field. Then celebrate the Festival of Ingathering at the end of the year, when you gather in the last of your crops from the field.
And at other times it’s a reminder of our responsibility to others who need our support. In Leviticus 23: 22 – When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Leave them for the poor and for the foreigner residing among you. I am the LORD your God.
Discipleship
Scripture has always been concerned about those on the margins. The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, describes this concern as a mark of discipleship. He wrote that if we’re to follow Jesus then we follow where he went, be with the people that he spent time with.
Rowan also talks about seeing each person as a gift of creation and looking for the Christ in them. That might be harder to see in some than in others, but we’re to do it! Rowan says that the truly spiritual person is the one who changes the landscape for others, who casts a new light on everything.
Celtic spirituality echoes this with the idea of ‘thin places’, where you can sense or feel just a small distance, a thin veil, between earth and heaven. That might be up a mountain or in a cathedral or in an ancient chapel on a rugged coastline. But people, people like you and me, we can be thin places too, regardless of our size! We can be a place for others where they can sense that earth and heaven meet.
Seeds that you plant
Harvest is all the things that we’ve talked about. A time to sing favourite hymns and reminisce about times past. A time to re-unite as families. A time to celebrate and give thanks to God for the miracles of growth and all the good gifts around us sent from heaven above.
But Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote: ‘Don’t judge each day by the harvest that you reap but by the seeds that you plant.’
And this day should also be a reminder that we have a part to play. Harvest needs us to do our bit too. To work alongside God. To prepare ground and sow seed and bring in the crop. To be a thin place for others, spreading a new light and changing landscapes for those we encounter. To bring our gifts to help others in need.
We should not just remember those on the margins but be there alongside them. Not just recognising the Christ in those we meet – but being the Christ to them too; bringing them his love. Because if we don’t, then who will? Amen
“Harvest” was delivered by Ian Banks on Sunday 29th September 2024, at the Dearnley Methodist Harvest Festival. It was based on Joel 2:21-29
References:
- Williams, R. (2016). Being Disciples. SPCK
- https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/2016/05/11/7-sonnets-on-the-lords-prayer-4-daily-bread/