Sermon for Harvest Thanksgiving
“So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth…”
Harvest Thanksgiving is a sensual delight for all of our senses: sight, touch, smell, and taste. All our senses, it seems, except one. Hearing. Pumpkins don’t speak and zucchinis don’t sing! And yet, Isaiah’s wonderful words open us out to the logic of Harvest Thanksgiving without which all of its symbolic and spiritual significance is utterly lost.
“For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: so shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return to me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.”
A wonderful passage, it locates the celebrations of Harvest in God’s Word in creation. For post-moderns, the first thing to note is that there is creation or to put it in non-biblical language, there is nature; an ordered world where one thing is what it is distinct from other things. Creation and nature are not just human constructs; mere words bandied about to amuse ourselves but really only sound signifying nothing. Zucchini are zucchini and not on their way to becoming, becoming what? This is the great irony. If you can’t say what it is, neither does it make any sense to talk about what it is evolving into. Things have their own vital and dynamic principle of identity because of the dynamic of the Creator without whom nothing is what it is.
Harvest Thanksgiving is a celebration of two things. First, there is the celebration of the good order of Creation with the great and distinctive diversity of the things of the created or natural world; and secondly, there is the celebration of human labour working with the order of creation that brings forth a further kind of abundance both through cultivation and agriculture, a kind of civilizing of the natural world, we might say. The second depends upon the first. Bread and wine, symbolic of both our material needs and our sensual pleasures, are the result of human mind and human labour that effects a transformation of the created world; it becomes something more, though not less, than what it is when left untouched. Bread and wine are not found in fields and orchards! They are the products of the human spirit but only through working with the Divine Maker, the Creator of all that is that is.