Harvest
Thanksgiving
Gethin Edward
Holy Communion
West LaHave, Crousetown, Broad Cove –
October 7 AD 2007
Isaiah 55:1f John
6:27f
Eat that which is good, and let your soul
delight itself in fatness. Incline your ear, and come unto me: hear,
and your soul shall live; and I will make an everlasting covenant
with you.
One of the joys of my childhood on Prince Edward
Island was our family’s vegetable garden. It was a big one, planted
partly out of my mother’s love of watching things grow, but mostly
because the food that it produced was needed to fill our larder.
The bond of the gardener with the garden is a wonderful way for us
to meet creation, and perhaps particularly for children; I remember
the feeling almost of awe that the tiny seeds we planted and watered
were the beginning of the harvest that would soon grow to feed us so
well. Carrot seeds seemed especially unlikely to succeed, but not
long after the tiny specks were buried in the earth we would be
thinning the carrot patch, and by August there were roots too great
for our young teeth to bite through. One of the most comforting
memories of my life is the vision of my mother in the kitchen at the
end of a long day in late summer, blanching beans for the freezer,
storing away the summer’s bounty against the cold and lean days of
winter. And so we grew up knowing to be thankful for the humble and
humbling miracle of creation’s annual pageant of life and death and
rebirth.
Today we are called, both by the church and by
the movement of the seasons, to offer before God our yearly thanks
for the fulfillment of nature’s promise in the harvest. For anyone
whose life or livelihood is tied to that promise, from the smallest
kitchen garden to the largest field of grain, it is among the most
natural of acts, to give thanks for the earth’s bounty. And yet,
for Christians, who begin their redeemed life with a special kind of
dying to the world in the waters of baptism, this festival bears
with it a kind of dilemma. Just how and in what way are we to be
thankful for the material gifts of this life? How are we to possess
them, and how are they rightly celebrated, what is their proper
place and use in our lives?
In our inheritance as fallen creatures we begin
life unable to see what is the proper goodness of creation. Our
hearts are confused and disordered, since we have lost that original
paradise of a pure and simple communion with our creator—and in our
sinful confusion we turn to the world, endlessly and slavishly to
seek in the fleeting things that are made the goodness that is God’s
own. Our Christian pilgrimage begins with a turning away from that
worldly mindedness, in a kind of thwarted sadness, and with a turn
toward Jesus in hope as the redemption, the rebirth and the return
of the soul to the love of God as our one true and perfect goodness
and happiness. All that was once embraced and held dear as the
gratifying of our proud desire is crucified with Christ on the
Cross, so that we might rise again with Him in the new light of the
resurrection to know only the perfect satisfying of our longing in
His love for us. Only there do we discover the infinite peace of
our souls made present to God, without which we are all restless and
heartsick.
And this discovery, and its recollection, forms
the whole basis of our Christian lives. Constantly we must be
reminded of the fruitlessness of seeking our happiness in the world,
and of Christ as the one true object of heart’s longing. “Wherefore,
writes Isaiah, do ye spend money for that which is not bread?
and your labour for that which satisfieth not? hearken diligently
unto me, and eat that which is good, and let your soul delight
itself in fatness,” in the fullness of Christ’s self-offering to
us and for us. “Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he
that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me
shall never thirst.” The world is to much with us, and we must
constantly renounce all its vain pomps and glories if we are to
taste the true bread from heaven. Think of the first weeks of this
Trinity season. It is entirely concerned with the discipline, the
instruction of our souls to turn away from earthly lusts and
deceits, and not to be led by them. “ … My brethren, we are
debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the manner of the flesh;
for if you live after the manner of the flesh, you will die; but if
through the Spirit you mortify the deeds of the body, you will live.”
But that is not the end of the story. In our
redemption, creation is not simply lost to us, but renewed and
perfected in our newly restored vision of the eternal goodness of
God. Think of Job, who after all his suffering and confusion of
heart repented of his pride, and after he turned back to God in dust
and ashes, all that he had lost was not only restored, but restored
more abundantly, perfected in the new light of redeeming grace that
was his by repentance and faith. And think too of Mary Magdalene
finding Jesus outside the empty tomb, and thinking Him to be the
gardener. Because from God’s point of view our redemption is not
simply a matter of our own circumstances, but in the fullest sense
involves the whole created order: “for the creation itself shall
be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious
liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation
groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.” (Rom.
8:19) Creation awaits the liberation from our proud spirit of
domination, and a rebirth of the holy dominion that was ours in the
beginning.
It is one of the paradoxes of our faith that the
way toward that right relation with the world is our spiritual
communion with God in Christ. As we grow in our discipline and in
the strength of prayer, the reality of creation does not fade away,
but appears to us more and more vividly. But that is not such a
strange thing; it is just a matter of knowing things in their proper
order, knowing all things in their divinely ordered courses.
Nothing that is made falls outside the motion of Love, since, as we
discover in our redemption, there is nothing else that moves the
world. That has been the refrain of this entire Trinity season, “God
is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in
him.” As we grow in the knowledge of that love, we grow to see
how each element of life, from the humblest to the highest, belongs
to the working of Providence, and we grow to see how to us each
thing that is made has a right use as the agent and vessel of the
love of God. This is part of our calling, and part of the fullness
of God’s work in the redemption of the world, “For ye shall go
out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the
hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees
of the field shall clap their hands.” All creation longs after
its place in the praises of its Creator, and it is our privilege in
the world to commend all things to God in just this way.
It is for this that we have come to this place
today; to draw near with faith to the offering of Christ’s love for
us in word and sacrament, and to know in the delight of that
heavenly manna how that all things rightly participate in the
operation of grace. So we present them here, all the things of
creation that belong to our lives, with thanksgiving that to us they
are no more the seeds of temptation, but in the eternal goodness of
providence they belong to the shape of our praises and the offering
of ourselves unto God.
Amen.
