Tonight we celebrated our Harvest Festival. Thanks to Clare Leeding for the philosophy and her evidential communication from spirit and thanks to Ela for chairing. And sincere thanks to everyone who attended tonight with special thanks for all your food donations.
Together we remember how blessed we are to follow the tradition of giving thanks for all that has been provided for us. God our creator and Dear Mother Earth have been the source of our food growth for centuries. Blessed with our sunshine and rain, we have enjoyed the fruits of nature. The hard work of many individuals have provided us with an increasing variety of food.
There are those we would like to remember with our service tonight. Those that cannot afford the basic needs as food for their family. So all the food donated will be taken to a local food bank as we did last year. So once again, thank you all so much.
Ela read a delightful harvest poem when she chaired our harvest service tonight. Thanks Ela. We thought it would be nice to capture it here…
HARVEST POEM BY REVEREND ALLY
We bring our gifts:
The first-fruits of our labour,
or perhaps the spare we do not need,
(an offering to mitigate against our greed).
To the church we bring them,
and into the hands of Christ we place them,
and we say, ‘Take this,
and do with it some miracle:
Turn water into wine again,
or multiply my loaves and fish
to feed a crowd again.’
And Jesus takes them from our hand,
this fruit of the ocean, this product of the land,
and blesses them, accepting back
what always was the Lord’s.
Our gifts will fill the lack
of hungry people,
putting flesh on words
of charity, and making folk
in our small corner of the world
more equal.
We know there is enough for everyone.
But once the leftovers are gone –
taken to the homeless, hungry poor –
what of those twelve empty baskets standing idly by?
Can there yet be more
that we can ask our Lord to multiply?
Into those baskets therefore let us place ourselves,
those parts of us that need transforming,
grace and strength and healing,
the gifts in us that need to be increased and shared
with a greater generosity than we may be prepared
to offer on our own account.
For we are God’s rich and splendid bounty,
seeds, sown and scattered by the Lord in every place.
the human race:
the crowning glory
of the ever-evolving creation story.
We thank the Lord
that he does not just separate wheat from tare,
but takes our very best
then turns us into far more than we are
