Harvest: The Lord has blessed the work of our hands
Sermon given at Old Saint Paul’s, September 22, 2024
May the words of my mouth, and the meditation of our hearts, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our strength, and our redeemer. Amen.
Some of the Church’s annual festivals have their roots in the Old Testament. Today’s Harvest Festival traces back to the Feast of Tabernacles. In the Book of Deuteronomy, we read:
Celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles for seven days after you have gathered the produce of your threshing-floor and your winepress. Be joyful at your festival … For the Lord your God will bless you in all your harvest and in all the work of your hands, and your joy will be complete. (Deut. 16:13-16 NIV)
Interestingly, the reason given for the Israelites to rejoice has two parts. The first is that God has blessed them in all their harvest – that the Earth God has created and has produced food for the people. But there is a second part to the reason for rejoicing at harvest: “For the Lord your god will bless you in all your harvest and in all the work of your hands.”
This second part of the reason marks a transition for God’s people. Hitherto, God has miraculously fed them by raining mana from heaven every day, without them having to lift a finger except for harvesting the miracle food every morning. Now, however, as they enter the Promised Land, they will have to work for their food; but God will bless the work of their hands so that their work will yield food for them. That will become the new normal.
And that is how God normally provides food for us, too. When we pray ‘give us this day our daily bread’, God ordinarily answers this prayer by blessing the work of our hands, the hands that ploughed and planted and watered and weeded and threshed and gathered in, and the hands that have milled and kneaded and baked.
The words that Father John will be saying over the bread later when we’re singing the offertory hymn deliberately echo this passage in Deuteronomy: “Blessed are you, Lord, God of all creation; through your goodness we have this bread to offer which earth has given and human hands have made: it will become for us the bread of life.”
Those words said over the bread, and the very similar words said over the wine, again tell us that there are two reasons for blessing God for the bread that we eat every day and that we offer at every Eucharist – (1) because the Earth has given us the raw materials for bread, and (2) because human hands have taken these raw materials and made them into bread. The echo of Deuteronomy is loud and clear – “For the Lord your God will bless you in all your harvest – what the Earth has given – and in all the work of your hands – which human hands have made.”
So, our daily bread ordinarily comes from divine-human collaboration. On the one hand, in the words of Genesis (1:11), God has created the Earth with “plants yielding seed and fruit trees of every kind of earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” On the other hand, God means us to work to produce bread from this created fruitfulness. Why? Because we are made in God’s image.
A good way to see that is to recall the answer Jesus gave to those who challenged him for healing someone on the Sabbath. In John 5 (v. 17) we read: “Jesus answered them, “My Father is still working, and I also am working.” In other words, God the Father is still working since the day creation was finished, so the Son has no reason to stop. If that is the case, then we who are created in God’s images can also expect to be workers. “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.” (Gen. 2:15) “To till and to keep.” Work for Adam and Eve was part of God’s creational intent, and it was part of God’s creational intent that the work of human hands should be blessed, that their work should yield bread and wine not only to sustain us, but to gladden our hearts. It is a divine-human partnership.
Interestingly, the Prophet Isaiah (28:23-29) gives us a fascinating cameo of what such partnership looks like. Let me read you the first half of the passage:
Listen and hear my voice;
Pay attention and hear my speech.
Do those who plough for sowing plough continually?
Do they continually open and harrow their ground?
When they have levelled its surface,
do they not scatter dill, sow cumin,
and plant wheat in rows
and barley in its proper place
and spelt as the border?
The questions are, of course, rhetorical – Isaiah is giving us a farming manual on how to plough and sow, and where to plant wheat and barley and spelt each in its proer place. If you don’t do that right, you ruin your harvest. Then comes the punch line, which answers the real, but unspoken, question in Isaiah’s mind, ‘How do farmers know how to do all of that?’
For they are well instructed;
their God teaches them.
That is how God goes about blessing the work of the farmer’s hands, by instructing the farmer how to farm in such a way that respects the way the world is created – how to plough in a way that respects the soil, and how to sow in a way that respects the seed. In each case, it is God who has instructed the farmer.
Isaiah does not tell us explicitly how God instructs the farmer. But he surely does not imagine a scene like the one at Belshazzar’s Feast (see Daniel 5), where a miraculous hand comes out of nowhere and holds the farmer’s hand to plough and to sow. Instead, farmers are expected to discern God’s will for ploughing and for sowing using all the ordinary means available to men and women created in God’s image. In today’s world, this may typically involve going to agricultural college to be trained, it may involve going beyond basic training and doing research on the soil microbiome, etc., etc. For Christians, of course, it will also involve following Solomon’s example (1 Kings 3:1-14) and praying for wisdom to discern God’s creational intent. Through all that, farmers collaborate with God in order for God to bless their work of their hands.
There is a beautiful Caravaggio painting in the Church of St Louis the French in Rome that illustrates such divine-human partnership perfectly outside the realm of farming. It is a fortuitously appropriate picture for today, because it is called The Inspiration of Matthew – yesterday being the feast day of St Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist. The version you can see today in Rome shows a scholarly figure sitting at a desk writing, and in the process of turning to notice an angel hovering above him. This is in fact a second attempt – the cardinal who commissioned the picture rejected a first version, which showed an angel standing alongside Matthew and holding his hand to write his gospel. The cardinal rightly rejected this version, which would be equivalent to God holding the farmer’s hand to plough and to sow. No, that is not how it works Matthew’s work as a Gospel writer was really and distinctively his work, coloured by all of Matthew’s training and life experience up to that point. But it is work that God has chosen to bless – a wonderful partnership that is 100% human and 100% divine.
So, on this Harvest Sunday, let us cast our minds back over the past year, and consider what we may want to give thanks for in the way God has partnered with us and blessed us in the work of our hands.
If you’re a farmer, then of course, your answer may well take a very traditional harvest festival form. But if you’re a full-time parent, then your answer may well be to do with how your children have thrived under your care. For me, it could be new insights from my research into how to make batteries more efficiently. If you have a ministry of reconciliation, you may thank God, in the words of the reading from James (3:18, NIV), for a ‘harvest of righteousness’. But whatever it is that we have been doing over the last year, paid or unpaid, let us consider how we should be giving thanks for the way God has blessed the work of our hands. ANd let that thankfulness be gathered up into the great Eucharistic thanksgiving that we are about to engage in as the bread and wine are offered. Then, at the end, as Father John dismisses us from the Mass, let us all look forward and pray in the words of Psalm 90:
Let the favour of the Lord our God be upon us
and prosper for us the work of our hands [in the coming year]-
So that, come Harvest next September, our joy may again be complete. Amen.
Wilson Poon