A couple of repeated Harvest quips in the pipeline as I start the annual shindig.
I am unable to introduce the hymn 289 (in A&MNS) 'Come, ye thankful people, come' without mentioning F's dad. The hymn contains the line 'all is safely gathered in', and as he would usually still have some crops out waiting to be harvested (silly choice of week for a Harvest service) then he would refuse to sing the line.
I also always say something about sitting down to try and write a Harvest talk different from last year, but I can't because Harvest has to be about gratitude. Well, it doesn't have to be, but our lifestyles have insulated us from a dependence on the Harvest, which bizarrely has succeeded in making us a set of most ungrateful whingers...
"I couldn't make the guacamole dip because there were simply no avocados worth having in Waitrose"
But Harvest in the readings set for this year is not just about crops. I am still trying to work out how I can make the Joel reading mean anything. People without gratitude have little inclination for the hope that makes a reading about God changing the world so that the crops never fail so powerful.
The Matthew reading is more clearly pertinent in terms of a direct call to those who are comfortable already, and hence more concerned with the anxieties of losing what we have.
This is one of the struggles with Harvest, having sat through enough Village Harvests to know the impatience when anything non-agricultural is mentioned (I would want to recognise the debt we have to our farmers, but it isn't just that) and yet reading in Scripture where Harvest is a metaphor for much more; justice and a calling to account, for example.
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