Common Ground Song 34 ‘For the fruits of all Creation’
Words: Fred Pratt Green © Stainer & Bell Ltd / Music: © Francis Jackson
YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YAvyk2IQho
Featured image: Harvest Festival at St Mary Brook, Isle of Wight © ‘Basher’ Eyre cc-by-sa-2.0

The second of four blog posts on harvest songs this week.

Harvest Festival (or Thanksgiving) is such a well-established tradition among English-speaking communities on both sides of the Atlantic that there is a wealth of songs to sing, and of photos online to choose from. This modern hymn also has a number of variants of tune and words. I have chosen to go with the tune that Francis Jackson wrote for it, rather than the Welsh tune ‘ar hyd y nos’ that seems to be more popular nowadays.

I also chose from the many images online one that shows the first fruits of harvest placed around a font. That spoke to me, because it’s all too easy for harvest to become a purely secular event. Look at the online images returned by a search, and most of them focus on beautiful arrangements of cut flowers, or competitions for the largest marrow (UK) or pumpkin (USA). But it’s not about cutting flowers to look pretty, or about outdoing your rival down at the allotments.

Giving thanks to the god(s) for food successfully grown pre-dates any specifically Christian ritual, probably to the earliest days of settled agriculture and religion many thousands of years ago. The Jewish-Christian idea of tithing is that the ‘first fruits’ (typically a tenth) of the crop are given to the priest or local church, originally to help pay them in kind but also to strengthen the idea of sharing among the community. More recently, churches have asked people to bring tinned and dried foods to be donated to a foodbank or other local charity, rather than fresh vegetables and fruits from the field and orchard.

The traditions and hymns associated with it in the Anglican and Reformed churches of England mostly date back to the 1840s. The focus in these services has usually been on offering to God not only thanks for the crops (the ‘daily bread’ for which we ask in the Lord’s Prayer) but also our own lives. In return for his blessings of soil, rail, sunshine and pollinators (most of which are now under threat from the climate and nature crisis) and for his gift of himself in Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, we offer ourselves, cleansed by the waters of baptism, in the service of God and our local community. That’s why I chose the image of the font.

The words of Fred Pratt Green’s hymn cover all bases. The first verse is traditional thanks for God’s gifts in the ‘ploughing, sowing, reaping’. The second refers to the ‘just reward of labour’, the ‘help we give our neighbour’ and our ‘world-wide task of caring for the hungry and despairing’. The last verse is more spiritual, thanking God for the ‘wonders that astound us, the truths that confound us, that love has found us’. It is, ultimately, in response to God’s astounding love and generosity that we offer ourselves back to him and his people. Baptised into Christ, spiritually and physically nourished by him, we go back out into the world to reap the harvest of our good works for him.