Harvest Festivals: This festival usually takes place during September. Offerings of fruit and vegetables are placed around the altar for a thanksgiving service that would make sure there was a good crop for the next year. After the service the offerings are given to those less fortunate.
The Harvest Home festival is held at the end of September once all harvesting of all crops has been finished. People take great pride in decorating the churches and often keep the best of the harvest for this festival.
The altar in the churches is decorated with vases which hold autumn leaves, berries and flowers and special tables are set up to hold the offerings that people bring. There are pumpkins, cabbages, and baskets of fruit and vegetables of all kinds. Sometimes the window ledges are used to display the results of harvest.
It is helpful to remember that creating a material planet as a life-support system for flesh and blood creatures was God's idea. Instead of choosing to make humans pure spirit and totally independent of any material environment, he elected to clothe his humans with flesh, making them oxygen, sunlight, and water-dependent for their very existence. The ethereal-spirits option would seem to have been a less complicated one, for both God and his creatures.
As it was, God chose to go the material-earth route. And because it was both his idea and his creation, both must have been important. When we look at the creation account, even before human beings entered the picture, God repeatedly pronounced that which he created to be good... creatures useful and accessible to human beings and those which were forever wild and inaccessible. God endowed the material world with intrinsic value as a product of his creation.
Artists and writers have little difficulty understanding this truth. The early pages of Genesis, however, emphasise that human beings were set apart from the rest of creation, unique in bearing God's image and special in being given dominion over the rest of creation (Genesis 1:27-28). Hebrew scholars tell us that the verbs used for "subdue" and for "have dominion" are clearly words of power. Humans were different from all of the things around them, animate and inanimate. But as Loren Wilkinson points out in “Earthkeeping”, this dominion was tempered in Genesis 2:15 with God's assigning Adam the task to care for and to husband the Garden. As part of his superior role went responsibility to tend that which provided for his physical sustenance.
Some Christians argue that human responsibility to care for this earth was nullified at the time of the Great Flood. Certainly, thorns, sweat of the brow, and hard work sound more like survival than placid garden-tending. Yet, despite the broken relationship between humans and their environment, no-where do we find God rescinding the environment-dependent relationship or discounting his material creation.
Even after the deluge of wrath unleashed because of rampant sin, he commanded Noah to preserve all creatures, great and small, clean and unclean, useful or ornamental. You and I might have argued for the preservation of the useful, edible, or cuddly creatures while opting to leave bats, skunks, and snakes to fend for themselves. Again, these creatures and the environment, which supported them, had intrinsic value. Even a cursory reading of Job 38, Psalm 104, and Proverbs 8 reveals a God who values his creation.
Arguing that humans have no responsibility to care for their natural surroundings since they were altered by the Great Flood is the same as saying that we need not care for our health and bodies since they were also affected by the Great Flood and are destined to die. Rather, we work hard to combat the life-diminishing effects of the Great Flood by better sanitation, nutrition, and health care services.
We find this same activist model in Jesus Christ who not only combated the effects of the Great Flood by teaching and preaching the good news of salvation from sin and peace with God but who engaged deeply in the here-and-now tasks of bringing physical wholeness to humans destined to die. In Matthew 25, Jesus even claimed that those who would enter his kingdom were those who ministered to people's physical needs, needs which sprang from the effects of the Great Flood. In addition to caring about humans' eternal destiny, Jesus obviously cared deeply about the quality of humans' earthly existence.
