This Sunday our theme is one of thanks for the fruits of the earth – our harvest festival.
We’re showing our gratitude to God by giving to others. As we gather round the Lord’s table this morning we do so with produce that will support families in need across Sussex. Our harvest lunch raises funds for a needy part of the church overseas, the Diocese of Guyana in South America.
Anne and I worked there as USPG missionaries twenty years ago and the family have been back three times on extended visits. I served as Theological College Principal in Guyana helping train Amerindian priests for the interior of that land near the Brazilian border. They serve some of the toughest parishes in the whole of the Anglican Communion, with Churches accessible often only after weeks of paddling up creeks and hacking one's way through bush and jungle.
Do not worry about your life says the harvest gospel reading from Matthew 6.25.
This morning on Harvest Festival the Church reminds us that our whole life, past, present and future is in God's hands. To be truly grateful is to believe that God is in control of our lives and the life of the world.
A Christian is someone who is able to see the hand of God behind everything. We have faith to see that we come from God, belong to God, go to God.
At harvest we recall this faith, that helps us rise above worry, and we look outwards to the needy. Anne, James and I are delighted that the PCC agreed to make a new overseas mission focus supporting the mission of the Anglican church in our old home in Guyana’s tropical rainforest. Guyana is one of the poorest countries in the world. Because of our personal links there is an opportunity to make a real difference there. We also hope to arrange visits in years to come to the Amerindian communities we have served and keep in touch with.
This is especially timely with the consecration of a new Bishop, Cornell Moss, in December, which opens up a new chapter in the Anglican mission there.
20 years ago I served as Theological College Principal training up Amerindian priests. In the indigenous communities of Guyana parishioners live 'around the cooking pot'. Money is in use, but much of the economy relies on age-old barter from hunting, fishing and handicraft. Harvest festival was the main source of income for the church.
Anne and I well remember the harvest festivals in the church at Yupukari where we were married in and in which we first worshipped together. I recall one where a sheep was tethered to the altar and was slaughtered afterwards so that the village ate meat afterwards for the first time in weeks.
Do not worry about your life the Lord says.
In the deep rain forest of Guyana the natives may have less possessions but they have few worries. When I was planning a week’s trip up river to a remote mission I could ask my boatman to take me at very short notice. It took him five minutes to pack - a toothbrush, a bar of soap and a spare pair of underpants was all he needed with his hammock. I took far longer to gather my tackle - mosquito net, insect repellent, books to read, torches, toilet paper (they used leaves), tins of food, sun hat, mass kit, vestments, short wave radio for the BBC World Service..the list could go on!
The Indians tell a tale of the Amazon a few hundred miles south of Guyana. There was a shipwreck off the Brazilian Coast and some of the men managed to survive on a life raft. They drifted for two weeks by which time they were pretty well dying of thirst. Eventually they encountered a boat and were hauled aboard. The crew were surprised the men were thirsty. You see they were drifting by then across the mouth of the Amazon River, the largest fresh water source upon the earth.
Sometimes we are literally resting like those sailors upon the answer to our problems.
Do not worry about your life the Lord says.
God’s Spirit is always with us like streams of fresh water welling up within us. When worry dries us up the Holy Spirit is at hand to refresh us and here is the place above all places to welcome the Spirit through God’s word and through the body of Jesus given to us in the sacrament.
Only our unbelief stops us acting as if God were with us, just as the ignorance of those sailors kept them thirsty when they were floating on fresh water.
Let’s keep silence as we prepare at this Eucharist to entrust ourselves, our souls and bodies, as a living sacrifice through Christ to the Father.
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