Harvest Festival Deuteronomy 8: 7-18; Luke 12: 16-30
Fr James Harris
For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land… a land of vines… of olive trees and honey… [where] you shall eat your fill.’
Sound familiar?!
Just take a moment to look around you – at the sheer beauty, goodness, abundance of this place, this land which the Lord our God has given us, in which, for whatever reason, and for however long now, he has seen fit to have us live.
Ever since we arrived here as a family at the end of August, I have been reminded just how close to the terrain of the Holy Land we are here in Greece, how similar the landscape is in this land where east meets west. Those verses from Deuteronomy could’ve been written about this place as much as about the Promised Land. And, in one sense, of course, they are written about this land and about every piece of land – because as much as they are describing a specific geographical location to which the people of God were being led at that point in history, they are also describing in universal terms the type of relationship, the covenant God has made with his Creation as a whole.