It was Harvest time at a small village church in rural Scotland and the priest was organising the annual harvest service where people would bring their home-grown plants and vegetables to the service.

But this year was a little bit different. The local village cricket team has just won their league and the village was in a celebratory mood so the priest decided to do something special – they would combine the normal harvest service with a cricket theme.

Now, the day of the service arrived and the church was filled with flowers. People were bringing in their offerings of vegetables, and in the middle of the display was a cricket wicket, a strip of turf with a set of wooden stumps at each end, and people were laying their offerings on the wicket. Everything was going fine until one lady went up to the front of the church and placed a bag of frozen peas among the other vegetables. She was stopped by the priest who quietly asked her to return to her seat still clutching her peas.

“What happened?” asked the lady she was sitting next to.

She shrugged her shoulders and said wearily, “There’s just no peas for the wicket.”

(No peace for the wicked – get it? – I can hear you groan from here)!

Celebrating harvest goes very deep in us – it seems to stir in us a sense of our country roots, memories of a land that lived by agriculture before the Industrial revolution turned most of us into townies. Some of us don’t have to go very far back to find our farming connections. Although very few of us have probably actually done it, we sing “We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land”, and it doesn’t seem in the least odd, even though farmers are much more efficient in their methods now. Harvest marks the end of a sequence in the church and country calendar. Plough Sunday in January, when the farm implements were blessed; Rogation days, just before Ascension Day in May, when prayers were made for favourable weather for the growing crops; Lammas Day at the beginning of August, when the first loaf made with flour from the new crop was offered in token thanks, and coming full circle (though it was introduced much later on the liturgical scene, in the nineteenth century) Harvest. Time for a pause before it all starts again. Time to be thankful, to remember God’s mercy and goodness, enjoying the sight of full storehouses and barns, pantry shelves and freezers. Time to feel secure against the coming winter. It is good to be thankful and we come gladly, enjoying the colour and smells, the readings and hymns that we have so long associated with this time of year.

But there’s something uncomfortable about Harvest too, especially now that we can see on our television screens that there are people who haven’t got a harvest to celebrate – in fact some who haven’t had a harvest for years, perhaps because the rains have failed, perhaps because war and conflict have made it impossible to cultivate the land.

Way back in time, God’s people faced the same situation on a smaller scale. Reading the instructions in Deuteronomy we are reminded that God’s people have always been told to be generous and help the poor to share our fortune. Deuteronomy speaks of very different farming methods than we use nowadays, but the message is clear: don’t keep it all to yourself.

And the New Testament warns us against taking things for granted, being pleased with out achievement. Remember that man who pulled down his barn and built a bigger one, who stuffed it full and sat back feeling pleased with himself – Remember that he got a sharp reminder – “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” That ‘s the question that Harvest asks us too.

In the Bible, harvest and judgement often go together – the parable of the wheat and the tares puts the point very starkly (Matthew 13.24-30). So, it’s right and good to be thankful, but we have to ask ourselves how our thankfulness can find expression in making it possible for all humankind to be thankful. We can’t ever sit back and say we’ve done enough – not while there are still all those children stick thin limbs and swollen tummies looking at us hopelessly from our screens.

It we are going to be on the side of the angels, we have to work for the elimination of hunger, and the inhumanity which locks most of the world’s food away from those who need it most. We have to support the agencies who work to improve farming methods, but we also need to put our political will behind the removal of world debt, an issue which keeps on being pushed  down the agenda by scandals and atrocities across the world. We must keep asking the questions and seeking action. Harvest is the point where, far from sitting back and thinking how fortunate we are, we have to prepare to sow the seeds and encourage the growth for the harvest to come, when the will of God will be done on earth as it is in heaven.