with food and gladness.
—Acts 14:17 (St. Paul at Lystra)
Why is it that harvest festivals are so popular? I found myself asking this question after a year’s ministry among you. Christmas is popular, Easter is popular, Whitsuntide fairly popular. But the peak periods seem to be the Junior Church Anniversary and the harvest festival. Either is a red-letter-day in the Christian year, when we give God thanks for his revelation in the life, death or Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Why should we give thanks more readily at Harvest or at the Junior Church Anniversary?
We shall find the answer in the kind of festival we hold. The Junior Church Anniversary is the festival of the Child; the Harvest is the festival of the Earth. The first reason for their popularity is surely their very obviousness. The drab, grey world in which we live would be immeasurably colder without the warm gaiety of children and their irrepressible good spirits. The aging become Peter Pans in their company. And, whilst we are profoundly grateful for our salvation, we are more obviously grateful for our food. Salvation for most of us is a very abstract thing; food is a substantial need. As Dr. Johnson put it: “The state of the country never yet put any man off his victuals.” So we hold a Harvest festival to thank God for the obvious gift of sustenance.
Then a second reason is surely that the Harvest Festival has come to mean so much more to us in war-time. To use St. Paul’s phrase we are members one of another.
War-time, because it has made food scarce, has brought home to us its value. We cannot eat the simplest meal of bread and butter or usually margarine without reflecting on the risks that have been taken to bring the wheat across the seas. Our daily bread has come to as not only through the grace of God and the labor of the farmer, but through the gauntlet of submarines and four-engine bombers. Just as our Savior broke the bread of sacrifice at the Last Supper, we are eating the bread of sacrifice at every meal. Yes, and as we think of the hungry pinched faces of starving children in Europe, ransacking dust-bins for the veriest morsel of bread in Belgium or in Greece, we, like the Lord of Life, give thanks before we eat.
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