Sunday 4 October 2020, Harvest and Trinity 17

Readings for Sunday 4 October 2020: Isaiah 5.1–7; Matthew 21.33–46

Reflection

Today in church is our harvest celebration, when we thank God for all of creation but especially for the food we eat. In church we will have an all-age service, still socially distanced of course, and we will be receiving your gifts of food and essentials for the foodbank.

Actually, all our services are all-age because people of all ages are always welcome and the message of God’s love is for absolutely everyone. But every so often we break away from the traditional format, mix things up a bit and make a particular effort to involve children as well as adults. This Sunday if you come you will find the preaching will be less formal and you should come prepared to get a bit more involved in the teaching and prayers yourselves.

But of course lots of people are still not able or ready to come back to church, so in this mailing you will find some things to help you think a bit more about our Bible readings today, about the food we eat and about God’s love for us all.

In our Gospel reading today we hear about a vineyard, a place planted with vines for grapes. But something goes wrong. The people who are working in the vineyard want to keep all the grapes for themselves, so they beat and kill the vineyard owner’s servants and even his son.

The vineyard owner is sad and heartbroken. There were enough grapes for everyone, but the selfish people who worked in the vineyard wanted to keep all the grapes and were willing to hurt and even kill to keep the harvest for themselves.

Today, we remember God’s generosity, the way that God gives and gives and gives to us all. We remember that there is enough for everyone, but that still some people are hungry. We ask ourselves what we can do to help make sure that everyone has enough to eat.

God is generous with us – can we do more to be generous with other people?

Prayers

Eternal God, you crown the year with your goodness and you give us the fruits of the earth in their season: grant that we may use them to your glory, for the relief of those in need and for our own well-being; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen

Close your eyes and think for a moment about meal times in your house.

Think about the person who cooked the meal. The people who went to the shops and bought the food. Now think about the people who work in the shops, who drive the vans and lorries that get the food to the shops. And the people in the factories who got the food ready for the shops, the farmers who grew the food. So many people were involved in getting the food onto your plate.

Do you remember to say thank you to the person who prepared your meal?

Perhaps you can be thankful for all the people who helped get the food to you.

And of course you will want to say thank you to God for all the food on the table, either out loud or silently in your head.

Think about your favourite food and thank God for it! Today I am thanking God for delicious crunchy peanut butter on wholemeal toast – my favourite breakfast!

Craft activity

If you are on the church mailing list you should have received some colouring pages this week. If not, here they are for you to print out.

2020-10-04 Harvest Trinity 17 colouring

2020-10-04 Harvest Trinity 17 colouring 2

Videos

If watching a video of the Gospel reading helps you, then take a look at this animation or at this telling of the story here