“And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.” (Philippians 1:9-11)

On Wednesday, we wrapped up our second online, multi-week iteration of the Harvest Fair. On Sunday, we’ll hear St. Paul’s prayer for the Philippians that they may “produce the harvest of righteousness.” Last Thursday, of course, most of us sat down to eat meals that originate in a day of thanksgiving for the fall harvest. For a modern, urban, post-industrial, way-too-online society to spend so much energy celebrating the harvest is about as ironic as the New York Times headline I read last week: “The Best Pumpkin Pie: Skip the Actual Pumpkin.”

But there’s something beautiful in this tradition of harvest celebrations as well. However far our fingers may be from the dirt, however different our desks or cash registers or brooms may be from a plough or a tractor or a scythe, we’re all harvesting something in our lives. “Harvest” comes from an Old English cognate with the ancient Greek word karpos, which means “harvest” in Paul’s “harvest of thanksgiving” but usually means something more like “fruit.” Paul’s writing to a church in Philippi that’s almost as urban as ours in Charlestown. Few of the Philippians were working in the fields, but the image of the harvest was as poignant for them as it is for us, because they, too, were praying to bear good fruit in their lives; not the “fruit” of a field of wheat, but the “fruit” of a life powered by love.

It’s worth saying that this is not an individual prayer. It’s not an exhortation to each of you to “produce the harvest of righteousness” in your own life, to bear good fruit in your own life. The quality of the harvest never falls on a single worker; it’s a communal event. In the days before the combine harvester, the harvest took every hand in the village, and the people’s fortunes rose or fell together.

So let’s celebrate the harvest we’ve produced this past year, the fruit that God has brought forth in our community and in our lives in the midst of difficult times. Let’s give thanks for the seven children we’ve baptized and the many loved ones we’ve lost. Let’s give thanks for the hundreds of people we’ve fed, near and far, through St. Stephen’s and through our own Harvest Fair. Let’s give thanks for the new friends who’ve joined us and for the old friends whose faith has long carried this church. And let’s give thanks to God for the fruit that’s growing in our lives even now, however brown our garden plots may seem to be.