Have you ever been to a real harvest festival? Back in the 1970s I remember visiting some friends in a tiny village near Stowmarket in Suffolk. The whole community gathered together surrounded by open fields in the shadows of combine harvesters and tractors As the sun was setting we sat on hay bales sharing a barbecue and a barn dance in the open air. For me, a city boy, it was a privilege to celebrate the successful completion of another harvest with the actual workers and families who still grew the food we all eat. Their whole livelihoods depended on a good harvest. That’s what I call a proper harvest festival!
But what is the point for most of us celebrating harvest, some people may ask, when we buy all everything we eat from the supermarkets? We don’t have any part in producing our food. Of course it is good to be reminded of our dependence on the natural world and of the vital part which farmers play in keeping us nourished. But this morning I want to suggest at least three other reasons why it is important to celebrate harvest.
1. WE SHOULD BE GRATEFUL FOR GOD’S BLESSINGS
G.K. Chesterton — ‘When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.’
There are so many different kinds of food for us to enjoy. The Great British Bake Off reminds us that even “our daily bread” comes in so many different shapes and flavours.
1 Timothy 6 17 Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. But we don’t always remember to give thanks to God for all his goodness to us.
It is too easy to take God’s good gifts to us for granted – not only our food but our clothing, our homes, and all the luxuries of life we enjoy while millions are dying without the necessities. We can choose between more foods than we can name or pronounce But billions of people around the world are kept alive by a meagre and monotonous diet. In the Bible the people of Israel lived in an agrarian society. Their world was based on agriculture as its prime means for support and sustenance. Such a society recognises other means of livelihood and work habits but stresses agriculture and farming. This has been the main form of economic organization for most of recorded human history. It was the common way for Medieval European countries to gain wealth which didn’t really change until the agricultural revolution in the 18th century and the growth of cities in the industrial revolution into the 19th century.
Most of the developing world, the global south, still live in agrarian economies. I have had the privilege of two visits to missionaries and churches in Uganda. In 2019 I went with Ruth to Zambia where she worked with a Christian school and orphans project which we still support. In all those very rural villages people have to grow everything they eat. So they live on a very limited diet of a staple carbohydrate, cassava or maize, with vegetables and fruit, and very occasionally fish or meat maybe once or twice a year. They sell any extra crops for money to buy essentials such as cooking oil, salt, candles, soap and toothpaste and toothbrushes. Then when they can they have to buy clothes and shoes and cooking utensils, and then to pay school fees, and medical bills. Spending just a little time in those villages was an indelible reminder not to take God’s blessings for granted but to receive them with gratitude.
Right at the beginning of the Covid lockdown I had what I can only describe as a surreal experience when I went food shopping late one evening. I went looking for a list of 30 essential foodstuffs, but found half the shelves in Sainsbury’s empty. I came back with only five of the items I went looking for, no main meals at all and instead a dozen bizarre things selected from whatever happened to still be there on the shelves. There and then I made myself a promise that I would never ever take for granted all the foods which in normal times are waiting on the shelves for us.
We so easily forget that all our food and drinks only come to us as gifts of God’s grace. We praise the Lord God as Creator of the world, but we often forget that He is also its Sustainer. Without the continuing activity of Almighty God, upholding His creation in love, we would all instantly cease to exist. Harvest gives us an ideal opportunity to pause for a while to give thanks for the countless blessings we receive from the Lord, not least on our dinner plates every day. Here’s an idea for you this week. Thank God for all His blessings in a silent prayer each time you eat a different kind of food. Each different meat. Each different vegetable. Each different fruit. You could count chips separately from mash separately from crisps. Each different kind of drink – the tea-drinker in our house has at least ten varieties of tea. I am sure we will find that we all eat dozens of different foods in a week.
All good gifts around us, ALL good gifts, are sent from heaven above;
then thank the Lord, O thank the Lord, for all his love”
We thank God for our food. But there are so many other blessings we enjoy in everyday life that we can so easily take for granted too. We have just come back from holiday in a country where we were advised not to drink the tap water, or even to cook with it or brush our teeth with it. For me that was a reminder of Uganda and Zambia, where any drinking water had to be collected from springs or boreholes and then carried to the home, sometimes for miles. We should not take safe drinking water for granted. In our lifetimes we have occasionally endured fuel crises, with cancelled buses, and days when drivers couldn’t find the petrol to make their journeys, or times when the lights have gone out for hours. People in many countries face these challenges every day. In Zambia, few people outside the big cities have mains electricity, but the whole country has frequent periods of “load shedding” where power goes out for eight hours at a time.
We should be grateful for our HOMES, warm in winter, dry in the rain, safe from predators. For FAMILY AND FRIENDS. For SAFE TRAVELLING – in many parts of the world every journey begins with a prayer for travelling mercies and ends with thanksgiving for a safe arrival, because for very many people so many journeys are hazardous, if not impossible. We should be grateful for COMMUNICATIONS: mobiles phones and text messages, Zoom and WhatsApp and Facebook. The persecuted church reminds us not to take our CHURCH or our FELLOWSHIP or our BIBLES for granted.
In his book, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, William Law wrote,
“Would you know who is the greatest saint in the world? It is not he who prays most or fasts most; it is not he who gives most alms, or is most eminent for temperance, chastity, or justice, but it is he who is always thankful to God, who wills everything that God wills, who receives everything as an instance of God’s goodness, and has a heart always ready to praise God for it.”
Jesus teaches us to pray, “Give us today our daily bread”. “Give us today our bread for today.” Every time we pray that prayer it reminds us that God is our provider. It teaches us not to take things for granted but to receive them with gratitude. All our food, and everything we have, ultimately comes from God. We should give thanks to him and not forget his benefits. We should acknowledge our dependence on all God’s gracious provision for us God is indeed Jehovah Jireh, our provider. We live in a world of “instant everything”. All we need and want is readily available on a basis of live now, pay later. It can be so easy to take for granted the luxuries of life, never mind the necessities. So Harvest Festivals are important because they help us to be truly thankful for “our daily bread” and for all the other material blessings we enjoy which countless millions in the world do not.
Psalm 103 1 Praise the LORD, O my soul; all my inmost being, praise his holy name. 2 Praise the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits –
Count your blessings, name them one by one. Be thankful! Next, much more briefly, two more things.
2. WE SHOULD REMEMBER OTHERS LESS FORTUNATE THAN OURSELVES
We all need a deeper awareness of our dependence on the goodness of God, and our gratitude to Him, for the quality of life we enjoy every day. But at the same time we should remember that every night one billion people in the world go to bed hungry. That is more than 150 times the population of Great Britain.
In an agrarian economy there are always the risks of failure. Harvest is not always guaranteed. Too much rain, too little rain, rain at the wrong times, and you don’t have anything to eat. Plagues of locusts can ruin the crops and in wartorn regions others can steal or destroy them. This weekend many parts of the UK have been hit by Storm Amy. At least one person has died and more than a third of a million homes lost electricity. We were living just down the road when the Great Storm of October 1987 turned Sevenoaks into One Oak overnight and tragically 18 people lost their lives. But most of us have never experienced a true hurricane or a tsunami or an earthquake. These are part of the precarious nature of an agrarian existence which we are almost entirely protected from. When the broccoli crops fail we don’t eat broccoli, we eat a different green vegetable. But while we are noticing rises in the prices of bread and rice – millions of people in many countries are facing disaster.
Thousands of people are starving to death at this moment because of drought or flood or crop failure, or are dying of all kinds of diseases which are caused by an inadequate diet. Acute food shortages lead to catastrophic malnutrition and deaths, especially among children. There have been fewer droughts or floods and better harvests in Southern and Eastern Africa this year, which means those areas are no longer Hunger Hotspots. But sadly, famines are often the result of armed conflict and we are seeing that in Palestine, and Gaza, Sudan and Haiti even now.
There is also poverty in this county of course. Very many pensioners are find it increasingly hard to manage. Millions of people are caught in the debt trap, paying so much in interest they can never pay back any of the capital. Others are in the benefits trap, where they struggle on inadequate benefits since their income would be even lower if they did get a job. They would then lose rent rebate and have to pay so much for child care. Some people, including some teenagers, will be sleeping rough on the streets tonight. But in comparison to many countries of the world, even the poorest here are rich. Few in Britan are starving and none need be. We often take for granted the medical care available to everyone here which is so much better than most of the world enjoy. Compared to very many places around the earth, Colchester is a very safe, comfortable, war-free, and wealthy place to live.
Our Harvest celebrations call us to a fresh appreciation of all these blessings which we enjoy which so many peoples and nations do not. And as we give thanks to God for His goodness to us we are challenged to careful stewardship of all that He has entrusted to us, to “learn to live more simply so others might simply live.” In a small way our gifts to the Food Bank can help others less fortunate than ourselves. Churches usually have some kind of minister’s fund or fellowship fund or communion fund available to help members of the fellowship when required. And I am certain many here are quietly giving to support people in different kinds of need. Counting our blessings prompts us to remember others who have so little when we have so much. As we receive God’s love, it stirs us to generous sacrificial giving in return.
And finally, because we are about to celebrate Communion.
3. THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE OF HARVEST
Sowing and reaping. The process of Harvest itself is a parable with a deep spiritual meaning. For there is a principle at work at Harvest-time which is at once simple and profound. We can call it “the seed principle”. It was summarised in some words of Jesus which are often overlooked.
“Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies it produces many seeds.” (John 12:24)
Here is the principle which farmers and gardeners know all too well. It is only through the lifelessness and apparent death of the seed or the bulb through the winter that new life can come in the spring. We must sacrifice the grain this year if we want a crop next year. We see the same pattern in the butterfly, which emerges to new life only through the death of the caterpillar into the chrysalis. In so many ways the world of nature demonstrates this principle, “through death to life”. In it is revealed part of God’s pattern of working in His world and His design for our living too.
For Jesus, the seed principle was expressed in his self-sacrifice on the cross. It was only because of his death that his resurrection life can come to us also. For us the same principle reminds us of Jesus’s teaching that it is only by dying to self that we are born to eternal life. It prompts us to give thanks to God for our Saviour.
This world devalues self-sacrifice and rewards selfishness. Success is measured by how much people can get and not by how much we give. Harvest-time embodies the seed principle, “through death to life”, and challenges us to live by it too.
Give thanks to God. We’re not always very good at saying “Thank you,” are we? I heard about a little boy who came back from a birthday party. His mother asked him, “Bobby, did you thank the lady for the party?” “Well, I was going to,” the boy replied. “But a girl ahead of me said, ‘Thank you,’ and the lady said, “Don’t mention it.” So I didn’t.”
Count your blessings. Give thanks to God. Remember other people less fortunate than we are. Remember our Creator, remember the Seed Principle, and give thanks for the Lord Jesus Christ, our glorious Saviour!
