Since November is the season of Thanksgiving, I want to reflect upon the words of one of our most familiar hymns.  When I was a child, my little Methodist Church sang it faithfully each Thanksgiving.  Before I even tried to understand the words, the melody sang itself into my head, and I would find myself humming it, over and over.  That melody was written by Sir George Elvey, who served as organist at the royal chapel of Windsor Cathedral in England.  The marriage of lyrics and melody has created one of the most memorable hymns in Christian hymnody.

     As an adolescent, I regarded the words as uninspired and uninspiring.  The verses painted a picture of agricultural harvesting.   They described how the crops grow and are subsequently harvested. Well, that hymn might be considered appropriate for an agrarian society but certainly not for urban-dwellers.  I therefore concluded that the words of the hymn, despite its hauntingly beautiful  melody, were largely irrelevant.  They might paraphrase Jesus’ parable in the thirteenth chapter of Matthew, but they didn’t ring my chimes.

     Yet I kept returning to that hymn.  Something about it captivated me.  What was it?  I sensed a deeper meaning.  It was written by Henry Alford in the year 1844.  What  was the harvest? Corn?  Wheat?  Rye?  Barley?  No, the harvest was people; the harvest was human souls; the harvest was you and I.  Listen to those words in verse 1 and then in verse 4: