On this page you will find some Bible Readings, prayers and a reflection based on the Bible Readings. These are often from a recent Sunday in one of our churches, for those who can’t attend on the day, but also to give you a taste of what happens in our worship and teaching on Sundays.
Sunday 4th October – Harvest Sunday
Deuteronomy 8. 7-18
For the LORD your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land where you may eat bread without scarcity, where you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron and from whose hills you may mine copper. You shall eat your fill and bless the LORD your God for the good land that he has given you.
Take care that you do not forget the LORD your God, by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances, and his statutes, which I am commanding you today. When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, who led you through the great and terrible wilderness, an arid waste-land with poisonous snakes and scorpions. He made water flow for you from flint rock, and fed you in the wilderness with manna that your ancestors did not know, to humble you and to test you, and in the end to do you good. Do not say to yourself, ‘My power and the might of my own hand have gained me this wealth.’ But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, so that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your ancestors, as he is doing today.
Luke 12. 16-30
Then he told them a parable: ‘The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, “What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?” Then he said, “I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” But God said to him, “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich towards God.’ He said to his disciples, ‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds! And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? If then you are not able to do so small a thing as that, why do you worry about the rest? Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you—you of little faith! And do not keep striving for what you are to eat and what you are to drink, and do not keep worrying. For it is the nations of the world that strive after all these things, and your Father knows that you need them.
Reflections from Canon Tim Hewitt
A few months ago, while showing some Primary School children around one of our churches, a child in an Infants Class asked me, ‘what’s special about God?’ When I recount this story to adults a look of terror usually comes across their faces as they wonder how on earth they would answer a question like that. It reminds me of the story in the Gospel According to St Matthew where people brought children to Jesus to bless them, but the disciples tried to stop this happening. I wonder if the disciples saw themselves as the gatekeepers whose job it was to stop any awkward situations with the boss. The response of Jesus was to welcome the children, no matter what happened next, because he said, the kingdom of God is made up of such people. ‘What’s special about God?’ is a challenging question, and one which, upon reflection, could form the basis of a series of school assemblies, I told the class teacher. Apart from that, seeking to ask the question, ‘what’s special about God?’ might bring us closer to the kingdom of God.
I was able to answer the question of the Infant Class child, and there are lots of answers we can give to the question when we stop and think about it. In one sense, the Church Year seeks to answer the question for us by talking about all the things that God has done for us in Jesus. What’s special about God? God shares our human experience in Jesus in the Incarnation. In the Epiphany, we are taught that God is for everyone. In Lent and Passiontide, we are taught that God has given us minds and souls and how these help us to live fulfilled lived in unexpected ways when we live for others and not ourselves alone. At Easter we see how God gives us the gift of eternal life through Jesus and at Pentecost we see how God gives us gifts to reflect his image within us. Then, during the Trinity Season, God leads us on a journey of learning and discovery about how we share in the work of God in the world.
Just as we have different seasons of the Church Year which take ideas a step further with each season, such as Advent, Christmas and Epiphany, and then Lent and Passiontide, during the Trinity Season, we have a development of ideas shown through giving emphasis to different Christian beliefs. At the end of the Sundays after Trinity, there are the Kingdom Sundays, helping us learn about what believing in Jesus as King means. Within some Christian Traditions, during the months associated with Harvest, there is the Season of Creation. This phrase, Season of Creation, and the beliefs and ideas around it, are things about which we will hear more and more as churches. Some mark it by specific calendar dates, beginning on September 1st and ending on October 4th – today – because October 4th is the Feast Day of St Francis, whose devotional writings teach us much about our relatedness to the world which God has created.
Increasingly, many Christian Churches are giving more emphasis to this period of the year because if the ever-increasing need for us to be alive to, and aware of, issues to do with the sustainability of our planet. It’s not just about the well-known phrase, ‘think globally, act locally,’ but wider issues surrounding these things. One such issue would be the issue of justice, because much of Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom of God is about justice. Increasingly, we are failing to see that concerns about the cost of living crisis cannot be reasons or excuses for justifying not giving those who produce our food a fair return for their work. That would simply increase poverty and inequality of resources.
All of this brings us back to the question of the Infant Class pupil who asked, ‘what’s special about God?’ There are a few answers which we could give as we focus on Festivals such as Harvest and Seasons such as Creationtide, and perhaps a good place to start is to say that God is generous. This is the implicit message of the parable Jesus tells about the rich landowner. Here are details that are true to life. Some people have a great deal; they have done well for themselves; they have been given much. Not only that, the world around us can be a place of abundance. The land owned by the rich man has produced abundantly, the parable tells us. We can see with our own eyes that God is generous. This is more than an implicit message. In some places in the Bible it is spelt out for us: The Book of Deuteronomy spelt these things out for us, as we heard in the reading from the Old Testament. While it is the land of Canaan that is literally described in our Old Testament Reading, it is a description of many other countries in the world. The reading from the Book of Deuteronomy almost describes our own land, with its natural produce and resources, even to the extent of what can be mined from underground. We give thanks today for the generosity of God in so many ways.
To believe and say that God is generous, when considered within the belief that I mentioned earlier, namely, that God shares our human experience in Jesus, leads to another challenging question: Why is there so much inequality in our world? One answer to this is to ask a question that demands from us that we dig down, almost as if we are going in search of the iron and copper mentioned in Deuteronomy. To whom is God generous? It is often the case that we think that God has been generous to individuals, like the rich landowner, but the truth of the matter is that God is not generous to individuals, but to whole peoples. God gave the Israelites a good land, and as we heard, from the reading from Deuteronomy, the people were warned about making the mistake that success was the result of individual effort. As we read in the Gospel Reading, the man would have had nothing without the land. His efforts were not enough. Jesus asks us to learn from the experience of life. Even the birds of the air, which possess nothing, seem to have enough. When we dig down, we come across how we might define generosity. Generosity does not lie in those with plenty giving a little of what they have. Rather, generosity lies in the recognition that everyone has been given enough so that something may be shared with others. Those who have enough and who share are the truly generous rather than those who have a great deal and having shared, still have much left over. When we say that God is generous, we are declaring a belief that God has given us enough so that all may have something.
Collect
Lord of all creation, you give us the fruits of the earth in their season and crown the year with your goodness: help us so to receive your gifts with thankful hearts that we may use them to your glory, for the relief of those in want and to meet our daily needs; through Jesus Christ the Bread of life, who is alive and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
