MARYTON CARMEL LIVERPOOL
Blog Post
Harvest Thanksgiving
Maryton Carmel • September 21, 2019
We thank God for the fruits of the earth
Harvest has surely been celebrated ever since human beings first planted seeds, cut the heads of grain and stored them to use through the times of scarcity. When the children of Israel entered the Promised Land and left off their nomadic existence in the wilderness, they adapted the agricultural festivals being kept in the Promised Land and these have come down to us today. Our Harvest Festival corresponds to the Feast of Tabernacles which is described as “the feast of ingathering, at the end of the year” (Exodus 23:16). This was the last and greatest feast of the Jewish year and it was sometimes simply referred to as ‘the feast’. During this time, the men dwelt in green booths or ‘tabernacles’ made out of branches, in commemoration of their time in the wilderness when there were no harvests, and they depended on God for their daily food. So there is much precedent in the Old Testament for a festival thanking God for food and farming. Land and faith in the Old Testament are inseparable, even as the cities of the exilic and post-exilic periods thrived and grew. People understood their dependence on a good harvest blessed by God.
We thank you, Lord of the Harvest, and we pray that your love which created our beautiful world might be expressed through our lives and be a blessing to others now and always. Amen.