Sermon for Harvest Thanksgiving
“I am the bread of life”
Images of paradise abound in the festivals of harvest thanksgiving. Here we are in a corn field, it seems, surrounded by the rich bounty of the harvest, the fruits of nature and human labour. And yet, we are in the Church. Somehow what belongs to our human engagement with the created order also belongs to our worship of God.
Harvest Thanksgiving is actually a movable feast. It can take place anytime during the season of the Fall harvest. After all, the patterns of seed-time and harvest vary from place to place, from north to south, as it were, depending on climate and landscape. Not every year is the same as the previous in terms of the richness of the harvest. This year we have been blessed in the Valley, it seems, with a bountiful harvest. It is a bumper year for apples.
The Prayer Book readings often signal thanksgiving themes in the early Fall of the year that reflect the movable nature of harvest thanksgiving. The older medieval tradition of “the labours of the months,” depicted in sculpture and painting and in the decorated Books of Hours, the prayer books of the rich, illustrate that the labours of each month of the year varied according to place throughout Europe.
Tomorrow in Canada is designated as National Thanksgiving Day. It marks our thankful commemoration for the rational and spiritual freedoms which we are privileged to enjoy in this nation of Canada. That is important to remember. We should no more take our rational and spiritual freedoms for granted any more than we should assume that the harvest will always be good and plentiful, let alone that we are entitled to the good things of the land.
