I don’t think it’s any secret that Harvest Festivals are not universally liked. Some people absolutely love them and for those people, their parish’s Harvest Festival is something to really look forward to and also to spend a lot of time and effort on. Other people though, loathe Harvest Festivals and for them, the parish’s Harvest Festival is something to be left to others in preparation, and to be suffered on the day itself. I don’t want to go into the reasons people have these very different opinions of Harvest Festivals, but what I will say is that, personally, my problem with Harvest Festivals is with how completely OTT some people can go with them. I’ve known churches where people have acted as though the annual Harvest Festival is more important than Christmas and Easter rolled into one. That’s quite preposterous in itself but has been made all the worse by the petty rivalries and jealousies and arguments that have been caused because of people’s over inflated opinion of the Harvest Festival, and very often of themselves too, it must be said! But that’s a problem with people and their behaviour, not with Harvest Festivals per se.
These days we seem to have largely moved away from speaking of Harvest Festivals and instead, we call them Harvest Thanksgiving services. And I think that’s a much better name for them because it’s a name that reminds us of what these services are really supposed to be about. They’re not about who gives the most or gets the most, they’re not about who has the best or most prominent display in church on the day, they’re about giving thanks to God for the food we eat. And it can’t ever be wrong for us to be reminded of our need to give thanks to God, whatever the reason.
But as we think about our Harvest Thanksgiving, we’re also reminded that it takes a lot of hard work to produce the food we eat. It takes people to sow the seed, raise the crops to fruition, harvest the crops when they’re ripe, process them so that they can be eaten, and transport them to shops and markets for us to buy. And this reminds us that, as well as our need to give thanks to God for all his good gifts to us, we have to work with God and use what God has given us if it’s going to be of any benefit to us, or to anyone else either. And this applies whatever the gifts we’ve been given and every particular gift we’ve been blessed with.
We all know, I’m sure, that to be given a gift and not to thank the one who’s given us that gift, is to be ungrateful. But showing ingratitude is not simply a matter of failing to say ‘Thank you’ to the one who gave us the gift. To be given a gift and not use it can also be seen as showing ingratitude because by not using the gift we’ve been given we can show that we don’t appreciate it, didn’t really want it and don’t see that we have any need for it. We can also show our ingratitude for a gift by wasting it. And we can show our ingratitude to God too by not using the gifts he gives us, by wasting them or, perhaps especially, by misusing them.
God gives us gifts for a reason. We might speak about having gifts in order to build up the Church or to bring the love of Christ to other people, but we could simply say that our gifts are given to us so that we can fulfil that great commandment to love God and love our neighbour as ourselves. And so, if we use our gifts to do these things, as God intends us to use them, we show our gratitude to God for the gifts he’s given us. And by using them in the way he intended us to, we also give glory to God because in the process of using our gifts we show something of God and say something about God to the world. But there’s a flip side to this. If we waste our gifts by not using them, then we show our ingratitude to God, we also fail to fulfil the great commandment, and we give no glory to anyone. But misusing our gifts is just as bad, if not worse than not using them at all.
If we do good works to show our love of our neighbour but don’t give thanks to God for the gifts that have enabled us to do that, who are we really glorifying, God or ourselves? And if we use our God given gifts for selfish purposes, then whether we thank God for them or not, we’re glorifying no one but ourselves. For example, if we rise to the top in our work or profession, there’s no point in thanking God for the gifts that have enabled us to be successful, if we’ve used, abused and trampled underfoot anyone and everyone who’s stood in our way, along the way. And if our success has enabled us to have a very high standard of living, there’s no point in thanking God for the gifts that have given us that, if we couldn’t care less about people who are struggling to make ends meet, especially if our success has come at their expense.
Doing these things is glorifying ourselves at God’s expense, patting ourselves on the back for something we should be thanking God for. And this is the lesson, the warning, of the parable of the Rich Fool. This man was successful, and his success had made him rich. I think we can assume from that that he was a gifted man, who’d used his gifts. Being gifted though doesn’t guarantee success unless you’re prepared to work hard at what you’re doing. So we can probably also assume that he was a hard-working man. So, gifted, hard-working and successful. But also very ungrateful and very selfish. A man who patted himself on the back for what he’d achieved rather than thanking God for the gifts that had enabled him to achieve it. A man who used what God had given him for his own selfish purposes, so that he could sit back, relax, take it easy and have a good time, whilst other less fortunate people worked his land, harvested his crops, pulled down his old barns and built bigger ones, and gathered his crops into them. Perhaps a measure of this man’s selfishness can be seen in his words. Have you ever noticed how self-centred they are? His monologue is all about ‘I’ and ‘me’. Do we really think this man pulled down and built barns and gathered crips into them personally? Surely someone else would have done this for him. But this a very common way of speaking isn’t it. Rich, powerful people saying ‘I’ have done this when what they really mean is someone else has done this for me. In effect, taking the glory for someone else’s toil and sweat and then keeping the lion’s share of the benefits for themselves.
Such was the Rich Fool in the parable. A man who was richly blessed by God, and richly rewarded in earthly terms, but who was poor in God’s sight because he was ungrateful and selfish. A man who had a great deal to thank God for and who could have given great glory to God because of that by using his gifts in the service of God and his neighbour. But a man who, instead, chose to glorify himself. And that did make him poor, and foolish, because, in the end, self-glorification can only last as long as our earthly lives last. In the end, all out pride and boasting about how great we are and how well we’ve done, all that ends. And when it ends, all we have is the hope that God will glorify us by raising us to eternal life with him. And if we want that hope to be a sure hope, then we’d best make sure that we’ve not been the kind of fools whom Jesus spoke and warned us about in this morning’s Gospel.
To use some harvest imagery taken from the hymn, Come, ye thankful people, come, we have been planted in God’s field and we have been given all that we need to ripen into fruitfulness in God’s service. Our hope is that , when the Lord himself comes to gather his harvest, we may be among the wholesome, pure and fruitful grain that will be gathered into God’s store. So let’s be thankful for what God has given us. Let’s show our thanks, not only in praise, but by using all his gifts in the way he intends then to be used, to give him glory by showing our love for him and our love of our neighbour through the thankful, unselfish way we use his gifts. If we can do that then, by God’s grace and mercy, we can relax in the knowledge that we’ve stored up many good things for ourselves, not just for many years, but for eternity.
Amen.
Propers for Harvest Thanksgiving 1st October 2023
Entrance Antiphon
The earth has yielded its fruit, the Lord our God has blessed us.
The Collect
Eternal God,
you crown the year with your goodness,
and you give us the fruits of the earth in their season:
grant that we may use them to your glory,
for the relief of those in need and for our own well-being;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
The Readings
Missal (St Mark’s)
Joel 2:21-24, 26-27
Psalm 67:2-3, 5, 7-8
1 Timothy 6:6-11, 17-19
Luke 12:15-21
RCL (St Gabriel’s)
Deuteronomy 8:7-18
Psalm 65
2 Corinthians 9:6-15
Luke 12:16-30
Parish Church of St Mark Chadderton 