“So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth”
There is something quite pleasing and aesthetically delightful about Harvest Thanksgiving. In our rural farming communities, Harvest Thanksgiving serves as a kind of testament to the hard work and labour of those who work on the land. It speaks to a sense of identity and vocation. The fruits of creation and human labour are gathered into the Church in a kind of celebration. How wonderful it is to see the things of the natural world, transformed by human labour and industry, brought into the holy places! We are taught by pumpkins and, perhaps, even by zucchini, that the natural world, and that world as transformed by human endeavour and enterprise, exists for God. Harvest Thanksgiving reminds us of the profoundly spiritual nature of our very existence.
Harvest Thanksgiving is a wonderful counter to our contemporary confusions about our world and day and about ourselves. Are we really supposed to believe, as some evolutionary biologists and physicists (though certainly not all nor many) would have it, that the world and all the things in it are just the result of the random coming together of various bits of matter? In other words, that there is no purpose to nature, just blind chance? And therefore no goodness to nature either? There can be no morality in any meaningful sense in such a view. Each thing just happens to be in the way in which it has come to be. But, then, how to speak of one thing as distinct from another? How does one know what and when something is anything as opposed to being on the way to becoming something else or to mere nothingness? These fruits which you see before you have an extraordinary elusive character to their nature, it seems!
Thanksgiving is a fundamental feature of the great religions of the world, particularly of the religions of the revealed word such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Through the Word revealed, nature and human life are understood to have a purpose, a destiny and a direction. We have an end with God. Harvest Thanksgiving reminds us that pumpkins and squash, cucumbers and gourds, apples and pears, are all part of that spiritual end and purpose that belongs to creation itself. Creation exists for something beyond itself. And our western secular cultures, too, (the idolatry of instrumental reason notwithstanding), retain a strong sense of purpose and direction critical to ideas of the self, even if God has been long forgotten and dismissed.
The proper term is Providence. There can be no Harvest Thanksgiving without the idea of the Providence of God written for us to read in nature and in human lives but, much more clearly and fully, in the Holy Scriptures. God’s Word goes forth in creation and in human redemption. We are reminded that the natural world exists by the Word of God and for the Word of God. That word goes forth, as Isaiah says, to “accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.” That sense of purpose gives rise to a delight in the natural world and in our transformation of it that results in the possibility of the fruits of the harvest. Harvest Thanksgiving teaches us that the world is a gift and not an entitlement.
To see the world around us in this way is incredibly freeing. We are freed to the practical without becoming its slaves and the slaves of nature, too.
Thanksgiving lies at the heart of the Christian religion especially. The central act of worship for Christians is actually the Thanksgiving. Eucharist is a Greek word which means thanksgiving. Jesus in the Gospel for Harvest Thanksgiving gives us a sense of how significant the idea of Harvest Thanksgiving really is. It is one of the seven so-called “I am” sayings of Jesus, sayings in John’s Gospel which gather up the vast images of God’s relation to our humanity in Scripture, tradition and human experience and concentrate them for us quite wonderfully and powerfully. Jesus makes known his divine identity and the nature of his relationship with us. Here he is, simply and profoundly, the “bread of life.”
It is a rich and wonderful image, an image of gathering, really, an image of our being gathered into the life of God, the God who is our life and our salvation. “All things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee”, we will say at the Offertory, once again reminding ourselves of the spiritual origins of the things which we are given to enjoy. We are reminded that it is all a gift.
Given for a purpose, the created order is to be used for a purpose. It exists for the praise of God. Nowhere is that more clearly presented than in the image of Christ as “the bread of life”. The image takes up the providential theme of God’s providing for his people in the wilderness journey of the exodus and in the times of exile and despair. We can only find the purpose of our lives in his purpose for us, the very thing for which we pray in the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread.”
Wheat from a thousand hills and grapes from a thousand vineyards become bread and wine through human art and skill. Bread and wine, in turn, become the body and blood of Christ by his Word. We are returned to him in whom all things have their beginning and end, Jesus, “the bread of life”. And all through the “word that goeth forth out of the mouth of God” in creation and in redemption. The gifts of nature, the gifts of human talent, and the divine gift of the sacrament of the altar remind us of the grace-shaped world of our Christian witness.
For in Harvest Thanksgiving, too, we find our human vocation, namely to be “the secretaries of God’s Praises”, as George Herbert puts it; in short, to be the voice of the voiceless creation in its praise of God. We gather the fruits of the earth and the fruits of human labour into the Church for no other purpose than to praise God and thank him that things are what they are and not otherwise. It‘s more than chance that in planting a pumpkin seed you might get a pumpkin and not something else! Paddling a pumpkin? Perhaps, in Windsor, but paddling a zucchini? Hardly conceivable, even in Windsor!
Harvest Thanksgiving recalls us to the humbling and yet dignifying business of working with the good order of God’s creation. It is the exact opposite of supposing that we can do whatever we want with nature, as if the world were just dead stuff for us to manipulate and destroy as we please, or as if the created order had no integrity to its being whatsoever. We are, perhaps, just beginning to learn these lessons again the hard way, but let us hope that we are learning them!
Harvest Thanksgiving recalls us to the goodliness of the land and to our vocation in the world. It recalls us to the Word who is “the bread of life, in whom we find the purpose and meaning of our lives.
“So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth”
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church
Harvest Thanksgiving, ‘09