Harvest Festival
Two related themes dominate all Harvest celebrations: thanksgiving and joy. It is a time when we sit down to remember the Lord. "Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God. He made water flow for you from flint rock and fed you in the wilderness with manna." In times of plenty we tend to forget; in times of famine, we accuse God of forgetting. The harvest is a symbolic celebration; here we resolve never to take our blessing for granted. Through a fertile, bountiful earth and generous God has blessed us abundantly. This morning we thank him for those blessings. The idea of a Harvest celebration was suggested at one of our parish meetings about eight years ago. As you know, Harvest is very important in other religious tradition, most particularly I suppose among our Anglican or Church of Ireland brethren. After Easter and Christmas, Harvest is their next most important celebration. It is not surprising that the Anglican should place such emphasis on the Harvest, because 'harvest' is a very fertile biblical image. Harvest is the season that merits most attention in the bible. Several times the Lord compares the Word of God to the seed sown. And he carries through the analogy: as the seed is to be watered and carefully cultivated if it is to yield a rich harvest, so too the Word of God. If sown in properly prepared soil and cultivated with great care, the Word of God will yield a great harvest of Good Deeds. But, he reminds us, this will not happen automatically. Labourers are required. "So ask the Lord of the Harvest to send labourers to his harvest" he urges us.
A lot of labour went into the preparations of our Harvest festival here in St. Augustines. As you see, the Church is suitably and beautifully decorated. It was great to see the meitheal of labourers -both men and women- working like beavers in the Church throughout yesterday afternoon. The lesson is the perennial harvest lesson: we reap what we sow. Preparation pays off. If we put nothing into our Sunday Liturgy, we shouldn't be surprised if we get nothing out of it, if it all goes stale on us.
Another important feature of today's festival is that the ideas and the translation of those ideas came from yourselves. It is not a question of the priest saying the Mass, or even the priest making suggestions or proposals to you and you putting those proposals into action. Today's celebration had a different genesis: you yourselves identified the need for this sort of celebration, you explored the possibilities open to you, your tossed ideas around among yourselves, you came together and you worked together to bring those ideas to liturgical expression. This surely is what community is about, what Church is about, what building up the body of Christ is about, what harvest is about in the biblical sense.
Most of us here are no further removed from the land -or in the case of the Claddagh crowd from the sea- than three generations. We are still, in our psyche and our spirits at least, a rural people. The word harvest still rings a bell in our brains. But I don't know how long that is going to last. It was interesting to see mother's explaining to their young children what instruments like that yoke over there is for. If we are celebrating our present harvest, I suppose we are also paying respects to a way of life that has largely passed away.
From a religious point of view, background is important. If we come from fishing or farming backgrounds, we have easy access to the bible and its imagery. Like the biblical people, our own people were either farmers, shepherds or fishermen. They lived by hook or by crook, by hook if they were reapers or fishermen, by crook if they were shepherds. The harvest was a time of fulfilment of the promise, of the renewal of hope, of security in food supply. If the harvest fails, there is no hope. In the Old Testament Jeremiah lamented: "The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved." Successful harvest then was a time of feasting and rejoicing. The shout of victory is like the shout of joy at harvest time. Harvest is symbolic of everything that is productive and fruitful in life. Our ancestors were very conscious of the fact that they were blessed at Harvest time. It was a time for giving thanks and for rejoicing. We thank God for our most important harvest our lives, our own children. We thank him that he has blessed us and them with good health. We are co-creators with the Lord also in the manner in which we earn our daily bread. On this festival, we are mindful of all these blessings we too often take for granted. Today we celebrate bountiful God, we thank the Lord for the health and wealth he has given us.