“Come to God’s own temple! Come, raise the song of harvest home.”

Hymn: “Come, Ye Thankful People, Come” – Henry Alford
Tune: ST. GEORGE’S WINDSOR

This gathering hymn will be sung in many churches this coming Sunday as Americans head into the Thanksgiving holidays. As visions of turkey legs dance in their heads, worshipers will lift this once-per-year choice of worship-planners. Appropriately so, this is a song about the bringing in of the literal sheaves.

The “harvest home” concept is foreign to those of us who grew up in this country. We generally get the idea, but in England they had a big festival to celebrate the end of the harvesting process; they called THEIR autumn celebration the “Harvest Home.” Attached to this celebration were songs, so “raise the song of harvest home” is significant.

On this side of the pond, the farmers developed their own Harvest Home celebration calling it “Thanksgiving” instead. Beginning as a simple fete, it has evolved into a major break-in-the-action of the fall schedule; it has become the portal into the Christmas season… a la Macy’s parade.

Around this, we have adopted some harvest home songs from other nations: “We Gather Together” (Dutch), “Now Thank We All Our God” (German), “Let All Things Now Living” (Welch), and so on. “Count Your Blessings” and “Give Thanks with a Grateful Heart” sprang from American minds!

My point here pretty straight-forward: when you come to the house of God this Sunday, if they sing this hymn, realize that the “song of harvest home” is one that praises God for all his blessings of the past year, symbolized by the completion of the field-gleaning. Though many of us come from the bucolic lineage, few are still farming – planting, tending, harvesting. We can, however, join our ancestry to raise a song of great appreciation to our provisional God.

If you can’t attend a barn-raising this next week, at least you can participate in a song-raising!

Here is a gorgeous setting of this text to a fresh tune.
Thanks, Billy Coburn, for sending it to me.