by CCW | 7 October 2012 15:32
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[1] 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.
Harvest Thanksgiving, it seems to me, is a profound reminder of what has been forgotten in our world. In our endless manipulation of everything in the natural world, we forget what anything is. There is only the random flux and change, it seems, of molecules and atoms doing their endlessly random thing according to the seemingly inexorable laws of nature. But what and why is there anything? There is only contingency – nothing has to be what it is; it might be altogether otherwise. And from that it is only a small step to the market state, too, where everything is simply a commodity; everything is simply what it is for us. Market is all.
Yet Averroes, a Muslim Theologian, and Aquinas, a Christian theologian, pointed out centuries ago that contingent beings cannot exist without a necessary being, a being who necessarily exists and who is what he is, namely God, echoing the great biblical insight of the Mosaic Revelation where God reveals himself universally as the necessary principle upon which all things depend, the great “I am who I am”. The argument is simple. If everything is contingent, meaning that things randomly came into being, then logically there must be the possibility that there was a time when nothing existed at all. Nothing can come from nothing, so if the world, as some physicists would have it, is merely the chance coming to be of, well, what? That, too, is a question. But, in any event, the world cannot explain itself without recourse to a necessary being, one whose existence is at one with his essence, one who necessarily is and cannot not be. This we call God. This is to speak metaphysically or theologically. It is what is presupposed by science and moral and practical life. Contingency presupposes necessity.
Such reflections provide, perhaps, a way to make sense of the great Harvest Thanksgiving Gospel. Taken from St. John’s Gospel, it is the so-called ‘Bread of Life’ discourse in which Jesus is at pains to teach the disciples that he is “the Bread of Life” and to teach them what that means. An extraordinary passage, it brings the concept of the Word of God in Creation in Isaiah into the New Testament understanding of the Word made flesh. We live “not by bread alone,” itself a product of human ingenuity working with God’s created order, but by “every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God”. In the Christian understanding, Jesus is the Word and Son of the Father, the Divine Word active in Creation and now in Redemption. He speaks and makes, creates, we might say, an identity between himself and bread. Bread, the fruit of human labour in concert with good order of creation, now becomes the means of our participation in the very life of God himself.
This is to think sacramentally. What does that mean? It means to see the things of God in and through the things of the world but without collapsing God into the things of the world. A sophisticated concept, perhaps, nonetheless it lies at the heart of the Christian Faith and connects with the generic theme of Revelation common to Jews, Muslims, and Christians. The distinction between creator and created is maintained, even intensified, in the radical and metaphorical language of John’s Gospel. However much such ideas are repugnant and even anathema to Jew and Muslim alike, they are fundamental and essential for Christians.
What does it signify? God’s will and purpose is signaled in his Word. We hear it so that we can think it and this leads to the redemption of all our senses: sight, touch, taste and smell. Harvest Thanksgiving is about honouring the Creative and Redemptive Word of God.
To do so means discovering of ourselves as more than random, contingent collections of atoms or a mere bundles of desires, as Hume put it. No. It recognizes the Mind of the Maker in the good things of the world, in the fruits of nature and of human labour. Creation is an on-going event; the Creator endlessly sustains and maintains the being of the world. To realize this counters our despairing anxiety about the world by recalling us to God and to his will for us. Only so will we both be able to celebrate the Harvest and to work to conserve and preserve better the world in which we find ourselves, recalling that it is God’s world. His word has gone forth in creation and now goes forth in us. The only thing that stands in the way is ourselves when we are deaf and dead to the ringing and living words of Isaiah.
To be sure, pumpkins don’t speak and zucchinis don’t sing except through our prayers and praises to God. It is humanity’s vocation to be “the secretaries of God’s praises,” as the poet George Herbert puts it, and to give voice to the voiceless things of the world. Pumpkins and zucchinis speak and sing God’s praises through us. And what they say and sing is altogether about the glory of the one who made them and who made us. We find our greatest and truest delight in God’s will and purpose signaled in his Word.
Fr. David Curry
Harvest Thanksgiving 2012
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2012/10/07/sermon-for-harvest-thanksgiving-4/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.