This sermon was preached on Sunday 12th October 2025 for our Harvest Festivals.
Bible Reading – Deuteronomy 26:1-11
Today, we celebrate our Harvest festival. It’s a festival and celebration that we and people across the world and different cultures have been doing for thousands of years. Every year, when the time comes for the farmers to harvest the crops in the field and pick the fruits from the trees, we take the time to celebrate the harvest of food that has come in.
Now, you might be thinking, what’s the big deal about having food? We don’t throw a party every time we do the food shop. No, we don’t (and I wouldn’t expect us too). Talk about being a bit ‘extra’ with your Tesco shop. However, because we can easily get food by wandering to the local shop and picking it off the shelf, we often forget how much of a gift it is that we have this food. The truth is that for many people across the world, having food to put on the table is not a given. Even in Corby, there are many people who struggle to put food on the table.
But putting food on the table is more than just having the money to pay for it; it’s about having the food in the shops in the first place, and that is down to the food that is brought in from the fields and put in the shops. This tends to happen at this time of year, at the end of the summer, moving into autumn.
Each year, farmers bring in the harvest of food. This isn’t just something they decide to do on a whim; it is the end phase of a whole year of planning. The farmers have planted seeds months and months in advance and have watched them grow over the year. Now is the time to see how well they have grown and how much food they have produced. Now, leading up to this point, there are so many factors for growing food that are outside of their control. Farmers are dependent on the right weather and the seasons of the year for the crops to grow. If there is too much or too little sun, rain, moisture, wind, etc., the crops fail to grow, resulting in a small harvest or no harvest at all. If this happened, there would be a food shortage in the shops, and people might go hungry or even starve if it continued. Think back to Covid when shops shelves would be empty.
We need a good harvest to ensure we have enough food to eat. So, for many generations, when it is time for Harvest, we celebrate it with a big festival. We thank God for his provision and celebrate the gifts of harvest. Our Old Testament reading affirms this as well, saying, ‘Be grateful for the good things that the Lord your God has given you and your family; and let the Levites and the foreigners who live among you join in the celebration.’[1]
At Harvest, we come together as a whole community to celebrate the food and gifts that God has given us. For we know that without God bringing the right weather we need, we would be without a harvest and without food. We are dependent on God to bring us a good harvest because we know that having food to bring in at the harvest time is not a given. There is nothing we can do to control the biggest factors in farming: the sun and the rain. Therefore, we are completely dependent on God’s shaping of the weather.
Part of the way in which we give thanks at harvest is to bring food here to church, or school, or the community centre, as part of the harvest celebration, and this goes back all the way to the Old Testament.
In our reading from Deuteronomy, Moses instructed the Israelites, saying, that once they are settled in their land, ‘you must place in a basket the first part of each crop that you harvest and you must take it with you to the one place of worship.’[2] The reason they are doing this is that God is the one who gave them their food.
You see, before this, the Israelites were slaves in Egypt, and they had nothing. You know, the whole Prince of Egypt thing, ‘let my people go.’ They had nothing that was theirs. The Israelites cried out for help to the Lord, and hearing their suffering, hardship and misery, God came to their rescue. He rescued them and brought them to a rich and fertile land. Because of God, the Israelites now had food that was theirs; before that, they were slaves left to the mercy of their masters. ‘So now, Moses says, ‘I bring to the Lord the first part of the harvest that he has given me.’[3]
Without God, we too have nothing. We have food only because God has given us fertile land to sow seeds and the right weather for them to grow. So, as God has given the harvest to us, we give something of it back to him. So, we bring food here to church today. We don’t bring it to become some sort of shrine to God, but we bring it before God in thanks and to share it with God’s children who go without food. All people are God’s children, and so we bring our harvest gifts to share with anyone who is in need of food. Our food will be kept at/(taken to) P&A for the Corby Food Bank, where we share food with those who don’t have any food to eat.
As Jesus said, ‘freely you have received, freely give.’[4] This is the message of Harvest. We thank God for what we have freely received from him, and we freely give to others in need. Harvest is a time to give thanks for the food that God has given to us, but we also remember the other gifts God has given us, which we can share with others. If you are retired, you have more time to give to family, helping others, or volunteering. If you drive a car, you can give lifts to those without access to transport. If you are good at DIY, you could help a neighbour put up shelves. And that’s only a few ideas.
This Harvest, I want you to do three things. If you take nothing else from today, just go and do these three things. First, ask yourself what gifts God has given you. Write it down in a list. Your possessions, your experiences, your skills, your opportunities and so on. Second, think of all the ways you could share what you have. Again, write a list of the ways you can share it. Then, third and last, go and do it. Go and share what you have with others. Harvest reminds us that we have freely received from God, and so let us go and freely give.
Amen.
[1] Deuteronomy 26:11 [GNB].
[2] Deuteronomy 26:2 [GNB].
[3] Deuteronomy 26:10 [GNB].
[4] Matthew 10:8 [NIV].
Shakeel Nurmahi 