This year I warmly welcome you to our Harvest Thanksgiving. It's in the tradition of giving thanks for the harvest, the fruits of creation and of God's love of providence for humanity. I come from a tradition where Harvest Thanksgiving is celebrated either in June or early July where the first harvest of Millet, Groundnuts, Sweet Potatoes, Sweet Corn, and fresh Beans... are brought to Church for prayers and celebration.

However, I am very much aware that at St. Matthew's Church, the tradition is quite different. Every year we celebrate Harvest Thanksgiving naturally in Autumn (Fall) being commonly in the months of September or October. I am including special readings for such a celebration at this point in accordance with St. Matthew's vision and objectives 2009, for it is important that we should "always and everywhere give thanks."

The Harvest Thanksgiving is the Christian tradition of thanksgiving for the fruits of the earth.

Our tradition of the Harvest Thanksgiving services is rooted in the ancient practice of Jewish worship, of offering the first fruits as a sign of our thankfulness. Deuteronomy 8:7-9 and You shall eat your fill and bless the LORD your God for the good land that he has given you.


It was carried over from the Jews to Christian worship in various ways. It is there in the general idea that anything offered to God has to be of the very best quality so that it can be a genuine sacrifice of something of real value to the one who gave it.

During the Middle Ages in England there a tradition of having a loaf of bread made from the first of the wheat to be harvested brought to the church on the 1st of August each year to be dedicated in the mass. So 1 August was called Lammas Day, from the old English words for 'loaf' and 'mass'. This special loaf would then have been shared with the people in communion. It signified thanksgiving for the harvest, recalling the ancient practice of sacrificing the first fruits, and it was offered in the great thanksgiving of the eucharist, then called the sacrifice of the mass, giving thanks for the new covenant established by Christ.

The Medieval tradition does not appear to have had much significance in later centuries, and the harvest thanksgiving, as we have known it is a relatively modern practice. It can be dated quite precisely to 1843 in the village of Morwenstowe in Cornwall when the Rev. R. S. Hawker revived the Lammas Day custom. By the middle of the last century the parish celebration of the harvest thanksgiving was being practised widely. It replaced the old Harvest Home, which was not a church ceremony in itself although it too undoubtedly once had a religious element.

There is a quiet description of a village ceremony at harvest time in the novel Lorna Doon by R. D. Blackmore, supposedly set about 1685, and also in Cornwall and Somerset.

On the day the harvest was to begin, the old village parson preceded the reapers into the field and with a few strong strokes of the sickle cut wheat for the first sheaf, obviously recalling the ancient offerings honouring God with the first fruits. In about the same period Thanksgiving Day became established as a major holiday and family celebration in America.

So across the centuries many generations have had reason in their different ways to honour God in thanksgiving for the fruits of the earth. In this 21st century we too give thanks. As we offer our prayers of thanksgiving on Sunday 27th with the aid of Bruce Prewer's poem 'Good to be Alive!' we will think of more than the produce and farms, orchards and gardens. We will celebrate our enjoyment of life in the whole of God's creation. It is good to enjoy the gifts of life. It is right for Christians to say 'It is good to be alive!' Our relationship to God is not intended to be one of guilt, gloom and fear. After all Jesus did say


The key sentiment of the Christian life is intended to be one of thanksgiving, just as the Eucharist is the central act of Christian worship. The thanks we give extends to all the various ways in which we are blessed, including our relationships with people and life in community which are gifts he intends us to enjoy.

The Credit Crunch and when things go wrong.

You might say, 'What about the bad things that have happened to me. It has not all been good.' And it is quite true that we live in an imperfect world, when the Bankers pay themselves with enormous bonuses but the tax payers cries foul with disasters and uncertainties, and one in which evil influences are at work. As we were thinking a few weeks ago about Jesus' beatitudes, "Blessed are the poor in spirit..." about being citizens of heaven, this world is not our true and permanent homeland. Heaven is.

Just the same even if things that are bad, it is part of our Christian experience that God can bring good out of the Credit Crunch. Indeed it is the message of the Gospel. I have known people who have been marvelously enriched and liberated in their recovery from personal and family disasters. Not that the old hurts completely disappear. They are still there, but healing takes place and we are then better able to serve God in a broken world; so there are benefits even in what has gone wrong in the Credit crunch. Indeed one of the greatest causes for thanksgiving is the making of a new beginning.

We have so much for which to be thankful even when our own effort contributes to their production. Yet so many people live as if there is no God, acting as if all they enjoy is due to themselves alone. It is a common disease today, in fact it is the very essence of modernity and belief in progress for people to put themselves at the centre and to imagine that their whole lives are under their control; or, if they cannot make things work out the way they think they should, then they feel they have been cheated and that they ought to have complete control. The idea that we depend upon ourselves, either as individuals or in society, and not upon God, is the great illusion. Self-sufficiency, self-reliance and self-fulfilment are often thought to be modern and progressive, but there is nothing new in such attitudes. People have always been tempted to put themselves in the place of God. So the ancient Israelites were told:


It is a matter of being in the right relationship with the Creator. In the long run human society works best and people live better when they know the one whose creation it is and when they enjoy it the way God intends it to be.

When we are out of harmony with God's intentions for us things will not work, as they should. When we do work in harmony with God we have much for which to be thankful.

Thanksgiving for the new relationship with God in Christ.

Even when things go wrong, God has provided a way for us to be put into a right relationship with him. It is the way of Jesus Christ. When the people of the old covenant, the old relationship with God, became separated from him, he reached out to them through his Son to restore them again to the family. He made a new covenant: so it was that Jesus at the Last Supper took the cup and called it the cup of the new covenant, and that is a new relationship for which we give special thanks in the great thanksgiving, the Eucharist, when we recall the thanks he gave:


So when Jesus recalled the gifts of God to the people of Israel he put himself in the place of the bread they received as a gift when they were starving, the manna which fell from heaven to feed the people in the wilderness before they reached the promised land. Before they eventually enjoyed the riches of the good land they had learned of their dependence on God through their experience in the desert. So in later years people learned again of how, when they were restored to him, he would feed them with the bread of life. Jesus said,



So our harvest thanksgiving is repeated every time we come to offer the great thanksgiving at the Lord's Table. Then we have communion with the very source of the life for which we are thankful; the bread, which is the fruit of our co-operation with God in creation, is transformed and given back to us in communion, and so we praise him who gives us the food of our pilgrimage for eternal life. All praise and thanksgiving to God our Father through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Please remember that your Harvest Thanksgiving is a demonstration of your love for God and his Church here at St Matthew's. You are free to give all kinds of gifts of food-stuff and money too. However, we advice that any food-staff that you bring on that day should be none perishable like tin Beans, Powerdered - dry milk, Rice, Tin Beef, fish, etc.

Every year we share our Harvest Thanksgiving gifts with the Aspire Community and the homeless. We also keep some here for our use at St Matthew's to help those in crisis who call on us for emergency hand out.

Give and give generously.

Modicum


St Matthew's encouraging a healthy Church filled with the power of the Holy Spirit and our five biblical purposes are:

1. Knowing Christ
2. Growing in Christ
3. Serving Christ
4. Sharing Christ
5. Worshipping Christ