TRINITY · 1 AUGUST · THE LOAF MASS
Lammas Day
The Feast of the First Fruits of Harvest · Hlaf-maesse · The Loaf Offered from the New Wheat
Lammas — LAM-as (from Old English hlaf-maesse, loaf-mass) · first fruits — Leviticus 23:10 · hlaf — HLAF (Old English: loaf; root of lord: hlaf-weard, loaf-guardian)
O Lord of harvest, who by the labour of human hands dost bring forth bread from the earth and offer to us the bread of life in thy Son; Grant that we, offering thee the first fruits of all that we have and are, may find in every loaf broken an echo of the one Loaf broken for us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, the bread that came down from heaven.
On the first day of August — LAM-as, from the Old English hlaf-maesse, the Loaf Mass — the English Church has kept for at least a thousand years the feast of the first fruits of harvest, when loaves baked from the new wheat were brought to church and offered at the altar in thanksgiving for the grain that had grown through the summer and was now ready for the reaping. It is one of the oldest observances in the English Calendar, pre-Conquest in its roots, and it connects the ancient Israelite offering of the first sheaf at the Feast of Weeks (Leviticus 23:10 — When ye be come into the land which I give unto you, and shall reap the harvest thereof, then ye shall bring a sheaf of the firstfruits of your harvest unto the priest) with the Christian offering of the bread that has become, at the altar, the Body of the Lord who said I am the bread of life. The word lord itself preserves this theology in its etymology: from the Old English hlaf-weard, the loaf-guardian, the one who keeps and distributes the bread. To call Christ Lord is, in the deepest etymology, to call him the one who keeps the bread of life.
Lammas Day falls in Trinity-tide — in the long green season whose colour is itself the colour of the growing grain in the weeks before it ripens to gold — and its theological richness is entirely appropriate to the season of ordinary faithful time. Trinity-tide is the season in which the Church lives out, week by week, the implications of the faith it professed at Christmas and Easter and Pentecost; and Lammas Day is the feast that asks: what have you done with the summer? The grain has grown through the long weeks of July; the harvest is coming; what can you bring to the altar from what has grown in you? The offering of the first loaf is the offering of the first fruits of the soul’s summer labour — the acknowledgment that what has grown in us has grown by God’s gift, and that the offering of the first fruits is both thanksgiving and dedication: thanksgiving for what has come up from the ground, and dedication of the whole harvest to come.
The theological depth of the feast lies in the connection it makes between the most ordinary thing in the world — bread — and the most extraordinary — the Body of Christ. In the Anglican tradition, as in the whole of the Western liturgical inheritance, the bread of the Eucharist is made from wheat: the same grain that grows in the field and is reaped and ground and baked and brought to the altar. Lammas Day makes that connection explicit and unavoidable: the loaf from the new harvest that is offered at the altar on 1 August is the same material — wheat flour, water, labour, fire — from which the altar bread is made. The distance between the Lammas loaf and the consecrated host is the distance between the natural and the sacramental, between the gift of creation and the gift of redemption, between what God gives us in the field and what God gives us in the liturgy. But it is not an absolute distance: the whole of the Anglican sacramental tradition insists that the natural and the sacramental are not opposed but related.
Lammas Day belongs at the heart of the English Calendar because England is a country formed by its fields — by the great parishes that cover the landscape, by the agricultural rhythms that determined the shape of village life for a thousand years, by the tradition of the tithe barn and the harvest supper and the gleaning of the edges of the field for the poor, all of which find their theological root in the Levitical commandment to bring the first fruits to the Lord and to leave the edges of the field for the stranger and the widow. The feast is essentially incarnational: it refuses the dualism that would separate the spiritual from the material, the sacred from the secular, the bread on the altar from the bread on the table. The God who took on flesh in Bethlehem is the God who takes up wheat in the fields of August, and the Church that carries a loaf to the altar on Lammas morning is doing what the whole of the archive has been doing since the first meditation: finding the sacred in the ordinary, the eternal in the temporal, the Word in the flesh and the flesh in the bread and the bread in the Lord.
O God our Father, Lord of the harvest and Bread of life, who in the fields of August dost ripen the grain and in the liturgy dost transform the loaf into thy Son’s Body; Grant that we may bring to thee the first fruits of all that we have grown through the summer of our lives, knowing that thou dost receive every offering made in love and return it multiplied beyond all counting; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.