Thanksgiving Comes Early

By Ken Rummer

The wheat harvest rolls like a slow wave, heading north out of Texas and on through the Plains. In late July, the crest reached the shores of Lake Huron and a mile-long field where my wife’s family farms.

Flake-sharpened stone teeth embedded in a short arc of wood, that was the technology of grain harvest 10,000 years ago. A satellite-guided combine with a  40-foot head, cutting and gathering the stalks, whacking kernels from husks, screening the wheat from the chaff, dropping the straw in windrows for baling, offloading to a grain cart on the fly, grain cart to semi to steel bin, that is the technology of grain harvest I witnessed in Michigan.

One great-nephew driving the combine. Another operating the baler, dropping big rectangular bundles of straw, each on the strong side of 900 pounds. Nephew and friends shuttling semi loads to the bin. Cover-crop clover peeking out of the stubble. The combine wearing a veil of harvest dust over an outfit of red paint.

(I know farm machinery also comes in other colors and folk are partial, even tribal, about particular hues. I’m not advertising, just reporting.)

Civilization began here, well, not here on this farm, but with farming. The transition, from gathering wild grain to planting it, resulted in a more dependable and abundant food supply and gave rise to villages and then to cities. And it all began with the wild and ancient ancestors of the wheat standing in this field, and with the wild and ancient ancestors of the people bringing in this harvest.

There are challenges. Morning dampness. Breakdowns. Wrong parts. Storms of wind and rain. If it’s not one thing ….

But by the end of the week the field is finished, the bales are under cover or on a truck to somewhere, and the bin is filled with wheat.

A full granary seems to call for some kind of ceremony. A shout of victory from the middle of the field? A celebratory toast at the close of day?

Leviticus, a book of the Bible long on how-to and short on what-happened-next, suggests lifting up a sheaf, a bundle of headed stalks, at the beginning of the grain harvest as an offering to God. And at the completion of the harvest, two loaves of bread (Leviticus 23: 9-11,15-17).

If you are a sheaf waver or a loaf baker, go for it. As neither, I’m leaning toward a prayer of thanks as my offering:

For soil and rain and sun.

For seed that multiplies when planted.

For sowers and reapers and those who gather in.

For food brought forth from the earth.

Thank you and Amen.