Address given at the National Harvest Service

One needs to be a little careful in Harvest pulpits, I have learned, adorned with produce, as they often are... One careless sweep of the hand can launch a marrow into the congregation!

Well good afternoon and what a privilege for me to address you in this most evocative season – the crown of the year – recalling, for many of us, harvest festivals past. Tinned produce and Bramley apples crammed around church pillars, as a reminder of the inherent bond between soil, soul and society – whether we live in the stone-clad city or the ploughed and scattered fields of folk memory. Its traditions affirm that we are bound together in an ecology of shared life and mutual dependence. And that - despite everything serving to distance those who consume from those who grow, rear and produce (and all that encourages the fantasy of their disconnection) this bond is primal, it’s vital. It feeds us.

The harvest offering taps into the meaning of that deep word culture, which in English combines two ancient roots: coulter (the first and cutting blade of the plough, from which comes agriculture, horticulture – our delving of the land) and cultus as in cult or worship. Soil and soul combined – married within a word.

And we find this understanding, this compact, at the heart of today’s readings - seeded into the scriptures: that the health and abundance of the land is to some extent an index of the human heart, a measure of our social and spiritual health. 

In the Old Testament, the promise of the land is also a moral warning, for it teaches that the long-term fruitfulness of each place, the yield of each season, depends on what kind of people we are, and whether or not we remember that life is first of all something received (not taken) - a divine gift.  

‘When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses’, Moses warns the children of Israel (from the mists of pre-history) ‘do not exalt yourself … do not say to yourself my own might and my own hand have gotten me this wealth…’. 

Underwriting all this is a conviction that the illusion of human self-sufficiency is just that – a powerful but deluded myth, with disastrous consequences for the earth that become more apparent with every Harvest we celebrate. Yet, while the global warnings of scripture are stark, the vision offered by Christ in the Gospel remains one of what we might call local gratitude: in which his audience is invited to focus their gaze on sparrows and lilies as signs of providence in the everyday. With Jesus, the better way for the world always begins with what is under our nose and the generosity or otherwise of our response to this. As if to say, ‘look about you! Learn to find in things as they are the clue to things as they might be’.

Consider the lilies of the field… he teaches ...how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. 

‘Therefore, do not worry…’ As we know, fear brings withdrawal: stifles action, and frets away our faith. And friends, there is more than enough in our short to long-range forecast to make us profoundly anxious in these days: so God bless those who bring consolation and fresh confidence (not least in our farming community) to those this overwhelms. 

Loving recognition of the gift before us – or, as the poet Denise Levertov put it, ‘the wonder that there is anything, anything at all’ – can, by contrast, open us up to hopeful change. This, then, is the keynote of our thanksgiving today: gratitude for you who, despite the odds, heroically enable our harvest; for you who support them with charitable care; and thanks that the land can still be a place of promise, when our lives are tuned with praise. Amen.