Sermon for Harvest Thanksgiving
“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. (more…)