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Give Thanks to the Lord, for He is Gracious, and His Mercies Endure Forever

Harvest and Thanksgiving Sunday : 6 October 2013  : Joel 2: 21-24, 26-27 , 1 Timothy 6: 6-11, 17-19 , Luke 12: 15-21

I have often thought that Americans are on to a good idea with their Thanksgiving Day that falls in late November. It brackets family get together occasions within a month of each other, so if families chose to, they could stay together until Christmas. And it is a celebration of an important date of national origin that isn’t surrounded with the controversy and difficulties we have with Waitangi day. Maybe we should go and do likewise, choosing another national holiday date, and de-emphasising Waitangi day.

At another level Thanksgiving also gives Americans an opportunity to be grateful for all the good things that have come their way in the past year, and in a culture still very much permeated by Christianity that includes expressing gratitude to God as the source of these good things. Indeed, gratitude is a vital ingredient in a healthy prayer life. Whenever I get depressed about things I start counting my blessings and recalling all the good things in my life in my Morning Prayer time, and soon a new perspective on things begins to develop. And whenever occasions of happiness and good fortune come my way I often turn to the General Thanksgiving in the Prayer book, because it says it all in better words than I could find. You will notice that I have included it on the front cover of the Pebble this morning because we are going to pray it together at the end of this Service.

Harvest festival is a time to be grateful for the renewing powers of the natural world whose fertility is the source of our food supply. It is also an occasion to be aware of the beauty of the creation whose flowers and flora are artfully combined to decorate this Church and adorn our homes in tasteful combination.

This Church is keen on praying for animals. While we are acknowledging our kinship with and appreciation of the animal kingdom we might also care to widen our appreciation to include the many other life forms that make up our natural world, and on which we depend. The trees and forests that we love to look at, and which function as the lungs of the planet purifying the carbon monoxide we produce. The bacteria that is so crucial to the chain of being, and whose internal background operations keep our bodies functioning as they were intended to. The insects we may not be so keen on, but which nevertheless are crucial to the web of life on this planet. And the birds whose avian manoeuvrers over our heads we so enjoy, and who speak to us of a transport of delight and a world of freedom.

We might also note that the creation itself unites to praise God, a chorus of praise which would continue even if the human race forgot it’s spiritual responsibilities and failed to honour the God who is the source of its life. Poets have often been quick to point out this worshipping and glorifying dimension to the natural world. The Scriptures themselves are not slow to mention it also, particularly that remarkable beginning to the first reading from Joel today, "O soil, do not be afraid, be glad, rejoice, for the Lord has done great things."

As for the imagery of harvest, that was used by Jesus most often to talk about gathering in the inhabitants of the world, past, present and future into the barns of eternity. The harvest he had in mind was the one that will occur at the end of the world when Jesus will return to gather together those who love him, and who recognised him in all the pathways of human history, and in the details of their daily lives. They also are the ones he speaks of as labourers who help him to gather in the harvest, the agrarian work force he recruits as crucial helpers in his mission of cropping and storing all that he has made, especially the sentient beings on this planet.

It is this perspective which prevents harvest festival degenerating into a semi-pagan celebration of the spiritual forces of fecundity and fertility, the kind of gone wrong religion that the prophets of Israel railed against. And it is this end time perspective of God having the last word on the human story, and on the lives of each one of us, that reminds us that God is lord of our lives, that he holds sovereign sway over the details of our lives. He gave us the gift of life, and he is the giver of all the gifts that have come our way. And so one of the details of our lives that interests him is what we do with our money and our possessions.

Part of our spiritual responsibilities are giving back to God some of what he gave us in the first place, and so enabling his body the Church to go on its life with confidence and sure purpose. It is also an expression of how we feel about God, and how we delight to be generous in acknowledging his claims over our lives.

But it is that theme of our responsibilities that I want to conclude with because it is very much what today’s gospel reading is about. John Nolland writes these wise words about the farmer who thought he had it all:

The farmer of our story was already rich before his claim to economic sufficiency is sealed by the bounty of one of those very special years when everything has gone right. His barns have no capacity to contain all the produce of this bountiful year, so with clear-sightedness and practical wisdom he upgrades his storage capability so that all his stores can be maintained most efficiently. When the work is done, he will be in a position to relax and enjoy his good fortune. All his responsibilities in life will have now been met, and all the needs of his life will have been satisfied, or so he thinks–But God bursts in upon the self-satisfaction of his life. At this point, with so much wealth at his disposal, this person should rightly have seen that his responsibilities had only begun.

In a world such as ours, with our heightened awareness of all that is happening around the planet we cannot but be aware that we are very fortunate, even those of us in modest circumstances, compared to so many in the human family. New Zealand is blessed in so many ways compared to the situation of those who struggle for existence in the vast continents to the north of us. We have some things in common with the fortunate farmer in today’s parable. He speaks to our situation.