Deuteronomy 26.1-11; John 6.25-35

Harvest Festival has a very long tradition. In pre-Christian times, the Jewish people celebrated a harvest festival, known as Succoth, or the Feast of Tabernacles, also known as the Feast of Booths. In fact, Jewish people still celebrate this festival today.

Succoth was one of the three great pilgrimage festivals for ancient Jews. It was one of three festivals at which every Jewish male was bound by law to make an appearance. It came at the end of the year, when all the produce of the fields had been gathered in. Its name originates from the booths or tabernacles which were built for this festival and then decorated with branches from trees and fruit and so on. The people lived in these booths for a week, as a reminder of their exodus from Egypt.

These early Jewish people had a real connection with the land. If they didn’t sow and reap, they wouldn’t eat, as simple as that.

The first Jewish Christians probably continued to celebrate Succoth. But by Anglo-Saxon times, the harvest was mainly celebrated at Lammas-tide on 1st August. Lammas derives from the words loaf and mass.

Farmers would each cut their first sheaf and turn them into flour which was used to make a large loaf of bread used in the eucharist. It was an offering to God of the first-fruit, an idea that we meet a fair bit in the Old Testament, such as in tonight’s reading from Deuteronomy. The end of Harvest was usually celebrated with a party but no religious ceremony.

In the agrarian culture of those times, again people were directly connected with the land.
In most places Lammas-tide died out in the time of Henry VIII, and Harvest Festival was not re-instated until 1843, when the Revd Robert Stephen Hawker of Morwenstow in Cornwall introduced a harvest-festival service along the lines of what we know today.

It’s no coincidence that the harvest hymns we sing today often originated in the 20 years after 1843. We plough the fields and scatter was translated from German in 1861; Come ye thankful people, come, written in 1844; Fair Waved the golden corn in 1851.

Hawker was very struck by Psalm 116, particularly the verse that reads: “What shall I return to the Lord for all his bounty to me? I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord.”

It was his reflections on this Psalm that helped him towards the idea that there should be some kind of Christian acknowledgement of the harvest. At this time, in Cornwall, most people again would have been highly dependent on the harvest of land or sea; their well-being dictated by how good the harvest was. His parishioners were extremely poor.

Hawker was a colourful character. As a student at Oxford, he enjoyed playing practical jokes on people. He wrote poetry and hymns, and owned a pet pig, and a large number of cats. There is a story that he excommunicated one of his cats after it caught a mouse in the church - to do such a thing, thought Hawker, showed that the cat was clearly not a Christian.

Hawker would wear a flamboyant hat, fisherman’s jersey and wading boots, which reminded him of his calling to be a fisher of men. He talked to the birds, and collected bodies of shipwrecked sailors and gave them Christian burials, marking their graves with the words unknown yet known, a reminder that though these were anonymous people, they were all precious in God’s sight.

Hawker had a favourite hut with a view across the sea, in which he would sit and pray while smoking opium from a pipe. Though an Anglican all his life, and vicar of Morwenstow for 40 years, on his death-bed he converted to Roman Catholicism.

We remember Hawker particularly for his institution of harvest festival, but he was very clear himself that there was more than one type of harvest. He had constantly before him the idea that God would harvest his people at the end of time, and that this had a bearing on how he and his people should live their lives.

He was aware that we are dependent on God. Harvest is about thanking God for the gifts of creation, it’s about remembering those who provide for us, but it’s also about recognising our dependence on God and acknowledging that.

It’s so easy in this day and age where most of us go to the supermarket and pick our food up from a shelf or out of a freezer to forget our dependency on God and on those who grow our food. There’s an out-of-sight, out-of-mind mentality that is all too easy to get into.

The rise of things like farmers’ markets and the awareness of food miles is doing something to help us begin to realise anew the role that our farmers’ play in providing for us, and also, sadly, the misfortunes that affect the farming community raise the profiles of farmers too. This year we’ve had flooded fields, rain at the wrong time, foot-and-mouth disease and more recently bluetongue.

The rise in grain prices is good news for arable farmers but not for those who keep livestock. The consumer demands cheap food accessible all year round.

So these days our harvest festivals need to include prayers and thanks for not just our farmers at home but also across the world, many of whom live in far poorer conditions than we do.

Farming is not an easy business. We tend to take our farmers for granted, both in the way that they provide for us, but also forgetting that much of our countryside is it is, because of the care and attention they give it. Farming has become a much more solitary business than in the past. I’ve taken many funerals for people in their 80s who worked on the land, at a time when most rural people were connected to farming in some way.

But with the rise of machinery, farming has become much more isolated. Big machines can do in a fraction of the time the work that people did in the past - just think of the size of some of the combine harvesters we see around at harvest time. And most big machines need only one or two operators rather than a group of people. So, our farmers very much need our support and prayers.

But our Gospel reading today reminds us that physical food is not all we need. It’s something of which Robert Hawker was all too aware. We need earthly food to keep our physical bodies going, but listen again to the words of Jesus from that Gospel reading: “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the son of man will give you.”

He reminds us that, if we want true life, a life that goes beyond the bounds of our physical earthly life, we need to recognise that we find that in him. Jesus said: “I am the bread of life.” We eat each day because we know that our physical bodies need feeding. Our spiritual lives are the same, but it is all too easy to forget that. It’s all too easy to forget that we do need to go to God daily, to spend time with God, to acknowledge before God our dependence on God.

Hawker lived his life always aware that God’s harvest was about the harvest of souls as well as of produce. We need to remember that, important as food is, our spiritual lives need attention too, for we will be part of God’s harvest of souls at some point in the future.

It’s important to take time to look at our relationship with God, at whatever stage it is at, and to think about our relationship with God.

It’s all too easy to reach the end of one’s life and realise that we haven’t paid attention to our spiritual life in the same way as we have to our physical well-being.

The great harvest hymn, which we’re not singing tonight, but I’m sure you can recall/with which we opened our service this evening “Come, ye thankful people, come” links together very well the idea of the harvest of grain and the harvest of souls, so I’m going to end this evening by reading one version - there are several - of it to you.

Come, ye thankful people, come,
raise the song of harvest home!
All is safely gathered in,
ere the winter storms begin.
God, our maker, doth provide
for our wants to be supplied;
come to God’s own temple, come;
raise the song of harvest home.

We ourselves are God’s own field,
fruit unto his praise to yield;
wheat and tares together sown,
unto joy or sorrow grown;
first the blade and then the ear,
then the full corn shall appear;
grant, O harvest Lord, that we
wholesome grain and pure may be.

For the Lord our God shall come,
and shall take his harvest home;
from his field shall purge away
all that doth offend that day;
give his angels charge at last
in the fire the tares to cast;
but the fruitful ears to store
in His garner evermore.

Then, thou Church triumphant, come,
Raise the song of harvest home;
all be safely gathered in,
free from sorrow, free from sin,
there, forever purified,
in God’s garner to abide:
come, ten thousand angels come,
raise the glorious harvest home.