Harvest Meditation

Harvest of what?

We plough the fields and scatter

The good seed on the land

Well, not us. Not for some time either.

We don’t get our hands dirty,

preferring instead to buy pre packaged,

pre- washed, pre- prepared everything,

from sliced white bread to

ready chopped carrots .

Never mind that our choices

are flown half way across the world.

We like quality.

And, on occasion, we’ll even pay for it.

Harvest is something we’re prepared to leave to others.

The physical harvest –

Is someone else’s worry.

If the weather’s bad.

If crops fail.

We’ll simply shop elsewhere,

Move on, pay more.

We certainly won’t starve.

We’ve not been that close to the land for a long time now.

It’s nothing new.

To reflect modern life,

contemporary culture.

Perhaps our harvest celebration

needs revamped.

Needs to reflect our experience.

Of work and toil.

Our experince

Of sweat and tears.

Isn’t harvest about celebrating our gift,

our skills,

All that God has given us

To make life good?

Isn’t it about

giving thanks for the comparative luxury we know.

And that we protect at all costs.

That’s so far removed from work on the land

So can’t we find another way to celebrate?

We plough the fields and scatter?

Not us, not any more.

Come, ye thankful people come

Raise the strain of harvest home

Oh yes.

It’s good to give thanks once a year.

Thanks for all those little luxuries.

Thanks for God’s blessings.

Once a year

It’s good to give thanks.

For the Lord our God shall come

And shall take his harvest home

Now that’s sounding a different note.

God harvesting people.

But we won’t worry too much about that.

We’re simply here to give our thanks for now.

Don’t need to worry about the future at harvest.

We’ll just celebrate the present.

And leave the future to God.

That’s part of harvest too, isn’t it

That God takes care of the future.

Come, ye thankful people come

Raise the strain of harvest home

Moving on:

For the fruits of all creation

Thanks be to God

We’ll celebrate all that we can see around us

We’ll congratulate ourselves on being so well off

That we can sing heartily the words:

In our world wide task of caring

God’s will is done

In the harvest we are sharing

God’s will is done

Yet, to make our words ring true today

We have to see beyond our shiny colourful display of fruit

To the responsibility that God places

on each of us

To make the kind of harvest we celebrate

Alive with meaning for the world

Alive with meaning

for those who’ll sleep rough tonight

alive with meaning

for those who will go to bed hungry

alive with meaning

for the poor all around us

and, yes alive with meaning

in Iraq and Afghanistan

in Sumatra and Zimbabwe

in all the hovels where God’s children are to be found

to know that our world is not as God intended

that in creation there is more than enough to go around

if we could only share.

And so, in our plenty,

it’s not that we should waste time on feeling guilty

but that we should turn God’s goodness to us

into a call to serve the world

by our sharing

Our God, who stretched out the heavens

and created everything in wisdom

relies on us

to care

and gives us what we need

to do just that

and so we will take our fruit this morning

symbol of all the goodness of God

we will take our fruit,

symbol of the power of God

we will take our fruit

symbol of the call of God

we will give thanks

and we will share

from our place of plenty

we will give thanks to the God of the harvest

and we will share God’s food for God’s world.