Priors Dean Harvest Festival

Sunday 21^st September – 9.30 a.m.

Readings: I Tim 6:6-10
Mt 6:25-33

In September 1973, I was getting ready to witness my first Harvest Festival as a newly-ordained deacon. It was in St Wulfram’s, Grantham, with a large market town congregation, proud of their long history, and the close links with many aspects of local life, including its light industry. At the Sunday Evensong, it was the custom for all the parish organisations and groups to offer up different kinds of harvest produce at the altar at the conclusion. They had been doing this for a number of years, and the cunning, experienced Rector decided to ask the new Curate to change things a bit. In my over-enthusiastic way, I thought it would be a good idea to relate what was being offered to the people who were actually offering it. For example, why should the men’s group bring up dairy produce, when most of them worked for Aveling-Barfords, a firm that made machinery.  After much soul-searching, a bright orange scale-model of one of their dumpers was duly presented. It may have screamed at the colour scheme of the sanctuary surroundings, but it made its own point.

There was, of course, a bit of a flurry. People wondered what on earth was going on. Why change? And much else besides. I learnt a great deal about how congregations function. I also learnt a sobering lesson in what historians sometimes call ‘Baumstark’s Law – which tells us that forms of worship are most resistant to change on special occasions. You can try something new here and there, but alter a carol service, or a wedding, or what we do on Remembrance Sunday, and there’s bound to be trouble.

Looking back on it all, I know I got it wrong – for very worthy reasons, not just the old Rector putting me on the spot. Of course the folk probably did need to sit up rather than indulge in what seemed a lot of romanticism. To have all that produce offered by people whose daily lives had nothing to do with them was open to challenge. I was brought up in a seaside congregation, where we didn’t just decorate the Church with farm produce but with lobster-pots – empty, by the way! But harvest is harvest, especially when it is held after the ingathering of the fruits of the soil, as it has been for centuries. Once you extend that ‘harvest’ to other things, a much more general picture emerges. You end up by being able to offer anything – a filing cabinet, a computer, some emails – or even (horror of horrors) the agenda for a Bishops’ Meeting!

The fact of the matter is that the harvest festival is a way of celebrating our closeness to the soil, which is obviously much easier and more direct in Prior’s Dean than it is in inner city Portsmouth – where the same hymns and sentiments will probably dominate Sunday worship at this season. There may be more tins than baskets, but there will be the same rhythm of decoration, offering, and subsequent distribution to the needy.

Our closeness to the soil…..That’s the clue. My worthy experiment all those years ago looks very dated now, particularly as the ecology brigade, keen to alert the rest of us to the consequences of global warming, will exhort us to keep things as they are, in order to let these gifts speak yet more loudly than they did before. Yes, let’s give thanks for them, but let’s also realise in the process that the earth’s resources are not unlimited, and that they need to be loved and conserved.

All this can be taken for granted, but it needs to be celebrated. And celebration is the key-word, even after a miserable harvest like the one we’ve just had. In this morning’s epistle, we are warned against greed, (I wonder how they are celebrating harvest in Holy Trinity, Wall Street, this morning!) and in the gospel, Jesus warns us not to worry about tomorrow; we should  take the lead from the rest of the created order, that gives no thought (apparently) for anything other than the present moment. I suppose that’s one of the reasons why we love our domestic pets so much! But, more seriously, it is that basking in the present moment, what some writers have called ‘the sacrament of the present moment’, which is worth cultivating, and certainly something in which I found of great comfort during my recent spells in hospital.

So what did happen at the next year’s Harvest Festival in Grantham those years ago. Well, after the ballyhoo I unwittingly caused, they all came back and asked for a good Anglican compromise, mixing the old with the new. What apparently got up their noses was not so much the great Aveling-Barfords dumper, but the superficial prayers that accompanied those more relevant offerings. I’ll leave you to smile wryly at the earnest, clod-hopping Curate I once was, and to draw your own conclusions – in the spirit of thankfulness to God for life, for breath, for the gifts and fruits of the earth, for our part in nurturing and manufacturing from them – and above all, for each other.   

+  Kenneth Portsmouth