One of the things that the Church has done throughout its history is to Christianise pagan festivals, to take over pagan festivals and supplant them with Christian festivals, and one example of that is the festival we’re celebrating today, Harvest Festival.
We don’t know when or where people first held thanksgiving celebrations for a good harvest, but it’s believed people have been doing this since prehistoric times. But the Harvest Festival as we know it in this country, as a thanksgiving service in church, only dates back to the 1840s and we know that some of the early Harvest Festivals were specifically designed to put an end to the local customs and excesses associated with the end of the harvest. For example, the first Harvest Festival in Norfolk took place in 1854 and it was held because a vicar, the Rev Dr Beal, wanted to,
“…put a stop to the disgraceful scenes which too often characterise the close of harvest, and to the system of largess, which gives rise to cases of the grossest description.”
The largess, in question in this case seems have had nothing to do with generosity in giving, and more to do with the copious amount of alcohol that was consumed on these occasions.
Quite apart from being a very good thing to do from a social point of view, to put an end to mass drunkenness and the gross behaviour that led to, holding Harvest Festivals was a perfectly understandable thing for the Church to do. In those days, people relied on the produce of their own land, not only for their food but also for their livelihood. In the mid-19th Century, well over 60% of the working population of this country worked in agriculture, and so a good harvest was essential; it was something to be prayed for, and something to give great thanks to God for after it was gathered in. But today, we live in a very different country and world. Today only 1% of the working population of this country work in agriculture and even in these days of Brexit, war in Ukraine and supply chain issues, our shops and supermarkets are full of food from all over the world. Even if we do see empty shelves in our shops and supermarkets from time to time these days, we’re not short of food. People may not always be able to afford to buy all that they need, but that’s another issue; there’s always food available and we don’t rely on the produce of our own land for that food.
Regardless of whether we have a good harvest or a bad harvest, food is always available.
And as our country and the world has changed, our understanding of a Harvest Festival has changed with it. Today, whilst we still do give thanks to God for the produce of the land, in tends to be in more general terms, the land, wherever that might be, rather than our land. Our focus in these services is often on those in the world who are short of food, those in countries where the produce of their own land is still so important to both life and livelihoods. And we quite often call these services Harvest Thanksgivings rather than Harvest Festivals and we use them as a time for giving thanks to God not just for the food we eat but for all he gives us and has done for us.
In that, out Harvest Thanksgiving has a lot in common with the Feast of First Fruits we read about in the Book of Deuteronomy. First Fruits, or Shavuot was originally an agricultural festival, a time for the people of Israel to give thanks to God for the first produce of the harvest from the land he’d given them. But in addition to that, it was also a time to give thanks to God for their ancestor, Jacob, and for their nationhood. It was a time to remember their suffering in Egypt and to give thanks to God for hearing and answering their prayers. A time for giving thanks to God by remembering that
‘…the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great deeds of terror, with signs and wonders. And he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.’
Later, and as it is still today, Shavuot also became a celebration of the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai and so what started as an agricultural thanksgiving festival, has become a more general festival of thanksgiving for all that God has done for the people of Israel.
But on this day when we’re encouraged to give thanks to God for all he’s done for us, I do wonder what the Church of today means by thanksgiving. I wonder to what extent do we, and by ‘we’ I mean the Church generally, not necessarily us as individual members of the Church, really give thanks to God for all he’s done for us?
At the Feast of Shavuot, the people of Israel remember their founding father, Jacob, and on Thursday last, at the feast of St Michael and All Angels, the Old Testament reading was that well known story of Jacob’s Ladder. As you’ll no doubt remember, that’s the story of Jacob’s dream of a ladder reaching from earth to heaven on which angels descend and ascend. In the dream, Jacob speaks with the Lord himself and when he awakes, he names the place Bethel, the house of God, because this is a place where God comes down to earth. In fact it’s a place so holy that Jacob anoints the very stones on the ground there.
In my sermon on Thursday, I said that our churches are also Bethels, they’re also places where God comes to earth because didn’t Jesus say that where two or three gather in his name he is there with them? Jacob called Bethel “an awesome place” which was “none other than the house of God” and “the gate of heaven.” But how do we treat our churches, our Bethels? We make them holy by dedicating them to the worship of God and then we’re told to use them for anything and everything but the worship of God, in fact, we can even be rewarding for making the worship of God secondary to any other use we want to put our churches to. The Church itself can exert pressure on people to agree to close a church down altogether and then praise them for agreeing to do so. And why? For money. I ask you, is this any way to treat these awesome places, these houses of God, these gates of heaven? Is this any way to give thanks to God for all he’s done for us? Is this any way to give thanks to God for giving us that greatest Bethel of all, the coming to earth of his Son in the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ, by turning his house into a den of thieves? I’m afraid that far from seeing thanksgiving in this, I’m more reminded of those prophetic words of Isaiah,
“This people honours me with their lips, but their heart is far from me;
in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.”
As I’ve said in the past, there’s probably not much we can do to influence what the Church as an institution and as the business it seems intent on becoming, does. But that doesn’t mean we, as individual members of the Church, have to follow suit in our own lives. We can give thanks to God and show thanks to God as individuals and as parish congregations. And there are so many ways we can do that.
For example, today we’re giving thanks to God for the produce of the land and for our food, but we can do that each and every day, simply by saying grace before we eat. It’s so simple, but how many of us remember to do that?
As Christians we’re called to be a people of prayer. I’m sure we all do pray on a daily basis but how do we pray? Do we simply pray for things, the things we’d like or would like God to do? Or do we remember to give thanks to God in our prayers for what we have and for what God has already done for us? One way of doing this is to practice what’s called ACTS of prayer. ACTS is an acronym that stands for Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving and Supplication. In other words, when we pray we praise God, we confess our faults and sins to God, we thank God for what we have and what he’s done for us and only then do we offer our supplication, only then do we ask things of God.
One of the things the Church seems to be doing today, rather than giving God the first fruits of all it has, is giving God what’s left over after it’s done whatever else it wants to do. How else can we interpret the Church’s preoccupation with closing churches and cutting the number of full-time clergy to save money, whilst at the same time employing people to deal with secular issues and whilst at the same time too, the Church’s fortune grows ever larger? Again, we don’t have to be like that, but what we do need to do is to ask whether or not we are giving God our first fruits, the very best that we have to offer.
When it come to our giving to our parish church, for example, could we give more? I’m not saying that to give proper thanks to God we have to leave ourselves in need because whilst it’s true that Jesus spoke on many occasions about the danger of riches, he also said,
“If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell.”
So the underlying teaching is that we’re called to give up whatever holds us back from truly following him. Scripture doesn’t say that money is the root of all evil but that the love of money is the root of all evil. So, when it comes to our giving, are we being realistic, or could we give more?
And when it comes to our time and talents, could we give more of these? I’m not saying that anyone has to spend every spare minute of their lives, 24/7, in church, or on Church business, so that they have no time for anything else, but to make those things a priority in our lives. So when it comes to worship, to make it a priority to be in church every Sunday and on Feast days of the Church. And to give a fair share of our time and talents to the Church and to the life of the parish rather than fitting those things in, if we’ve got time and if we can be bothered, after we’ve done everything else we want to do.
When it comes to giving thanks to God, we have a lot to give thanks for, not least for our salvation and the promise of eternal life he’s given us through his son, our Lord Jesus Christ. So let’s give God proper thanks for all we have, and all he’s done for us. That doesn’t mean giving so much we drive ourselves into poverty and it doesn’t mean spending every waking moment either in church or on Church business, but it does mean giving to God the very best of what we have. So let’s give thanks to God, and let’s make sure that when we do, we’re offering him our first fruits and not our leftovers.
Amen.
The Propers for Harvest Thanksgiving can be viewed here.
Parish Church of St Mark Chadderton 