Harvest Thanksgiving, Sunday 7 October 2007

How deliciously ironic that something so inoffensive, so nostalgic, so quintessentially English as the parish Harvest Thanksgiving should provide irrefutable evidence that there’s something in historical materialism. Marx’s doctrine was first propounded to me over twenty years ago at an undergraduate party, by someone who had had too much to drink. ‘You see’ he declaimed ‘the worker may have a vocation to make a chair. But under capitalism he will only ever screw legs onto chairs on a production line’. Those words came back to haunt me this week as I watched schoolchildren (and their parents and grandparents) depositing dried pasta, muesli and disposable razor blades around the altar steps. All of them were undoubtedly alienated from the means of production, distribution and exchange – although, it has to be said, they evinced little sign of despair at their plight.

Harvest in London in 2007 is a rite in search of a meaning. Its origin is often traced to Robert Hawker, the splendidly eccentric Victorian vicar of a Cornish village. On one occasion Father Hawker dressed up as a mermaid (history records neither the occasion nor the excuse); on another he excommunicated his cat for catching mice on Sunday. A more lasting innovation was his Harvest Thanksgiving, instituted in 1843. Hawker and his contemporaries served a largely rural and agrarian community. There was a sporting chance that those who came to the chancel steps came bearing the crops that they had grown themselves. The Mosaic injunction to the Israelites to bring sheaves of the first fruits of the harvest to offer to God had a meaningful resonance, which changing patterns of residence, employment and consumption have stifled. Thanksgiving to the Creator for the harvest was a response to God from those whose lives and livelihoods were intimately bound up with the vagaries of the weather and the health of the soil.

Those bonds have disappeared, and so contemporary celebrations of Harvest have sought to invest it with contemporary relevance. There is nothing objectionable in that. Hawker himself established the Harvest Thanksgiving in a deliberate attempt to capitalize on the thoroughly secular (and I suspect rather bibulous) harvest home celebrations that occupied his farmer parishioners in the autumn. Over the years the Church has been skilled at appropriating existing celebrations and putting them to her (or rather, to God’s use). So in parishes around the country Harvest will be used as a season to ponder the environmental crisis with which many believe we are threatened. In others it will be used to draw attention to the inequities of global trade and to make the case for international exchange that is freer and fairer. And in others it will be used to comment upon the costs and risks of modern food mass-production: indeed, our school’s celebration on Friday included a re-telling of the story of the Enormous Turnip, no doubt a chilling allegorical warning against the menace of genetically-modified root vegetables.

There’s nothing wrong with any of those emphases. Each is a valid, indeed inescapable Christian concern. But perhaps we might remind ourselves why it is that on this of all Sundays we bring bars of soap and tubes of toothpaste into Church. Surely they are not the first fruits of our lives, the first fruits that we are asked to offer to God: surely those first fruits are more than bags of rice and tins of baked beans. How are we tending the acreage of our souls – what are we bringing to the altar and offering to God in prayer, in worship, and in the nurture of our faith? How are we ploughing the furrow of work and relationships that is set before us – what are we bringing to the altar and offering to God in changed behaviour, in new honesty, humility and transparency to one another? How are we disbursing the produce of our fields, the resources at our disposal – what are we bringing to the altar and offering to God in time spent with and for others, skills given to and for others, help given to and for others? In short, what harvest is God set to reap in you and in me?

Of course we today give God thanks for the harvest and for the goodness with which he crowns the year; of course we pledge ourselves to be good stewards of the earth and to safeguard the inheritance of our children; of course we affirm our longing to see hunger and thirst banished from this planet. But we recognize too that our bringing of gifts is at risk of becoming what therapists call displacement activity, a sop to tender conscience or a nod to quaint tradition. Our bringing of gifts is instead a tangible and sacramental symbol of the transformation that the Lord of the Harvest is bringing about in us, and of our consequent determination to transform the lives of others. Today our efforts will feed the hungry. But what will we do tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that? Let there be no end to our thanksgiving for the harvest. Amen.