Rev’d Caroline - [email protected], 01285 712467
Readings for Sunday: Deuteronomy 8.7-18; 1 Corinthians 9.6-end; Luke 17.11-19
This Sunday we will be celebrating Harvest: giving thanks for food and supplies safely gathered away, and offering thanks as well for those who work so hard to grow and gather all that we need.
It’s an ancient celebration, going back to the ancient Hebrews and beyond. We know how fragile we are, how vulnerable to a lack of any of the things we need to survive: food, water, warmth, shelter; and Harvest is an expression of our great relief to know that for a while at least, we don’t need to worry. Our needs are provided for.
Harvest is also the time when we offer and reflect on the value of gratitude – or ‘thankfulness’ as it is expressed in one of the six core Christian Values taught by our super Primary School here in Fairford. It would be possible for gratitude to be nothing more than a warm satisfaction. ‘We have what we need – now we can relax’ might be all the thought that such a gratitude might hold. ‘Counting our blessings’ could indeed look like that – enumerating all the good things we have without ever digging deeper – why do we have them? Where did they come from? Or from whom?
True gratitude is much more than that. At Harvest-time, we reflect on the source of the goodness we recognise around us. We remember that if we have good things to notice, we cannot imagine that we have them purely out of our own effort. God speaks to his people through Moses in our reading from Deuteronomy to remind them of this vital truth: “Do not say to yourself, ‘My power and the might of my own hand have gained me this wealth.’ But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, so that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your ancestors, as he is doing today.”
Our blessings have a source – God himself, who loves and provides for his creatures. Our thankfulness is not a generalised feeling of satisfaction, but a directed message and recognition. We give thanks to God. The temptation to think of the human race as great and untouchable, the ones who bend the world around us to our will… That is something shattered by our Harvest thanks. We are not so great.
But perhaps recognising and expressing our thankfulness gives us something much better than a misplaced sense of our own importance. As we give voice to our thanks, just like the healed leper returning to Jesus’ side, we recognise that we are loved, that we are seen, that our needs are known and met. We are reminded that we stand not by ourselves, but in relationship with our Creator God. And honestly, what could be better than that?
This week, let’s take time both to count our blessings, and to remember from whom they come. And then let’s offer our thanks, to God, and to all who have blessed us.
Rev’d Caroline
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