You have to be a certain age to remember this.Clue - do you remember the days when every bus had a conductor as well as a driver?Before the days of ticket machines, the conductor carried a range of bus tickets which were kept in this wooden ticket holder. The strong clips held the tickets in place. Most people either wouldn’t know this or have forgotten this. This object is a piece of history.Some pieces of history die out like the ticket holder and others are created.Interestingly, Harvest Festival has not always been a church festival. The Reverend Robert Hawker, a vicar at Morwenstow, Cornwall, introduced the idea of having a harvest festival in church in 1843, with hymns giving thanks for the bounty of the fields and orchards. Whilst many festivals of the church date back hundreds of years, Harvest has only been around for less than 200 years. Since then the Harvest Festival Service has spread throughout the church.Harvest is a time to give thanks to God for the food we get from the land and from the sea and to give thanks for the pickers, packers and drivers who produce the food we buy in our shops. Harvest is also a time to remember those who are less fortunate than ourselves, so we bring gifts of food which in Sheringham will go to the Food Bank. In addition to this we are being invited to give money to Acts 435, a charity which supports people in need. Please do look at the display at the back of the church.But let us return to the first reason for having a Harvest Festival to give thanks to God for his wonderful creation and let us pray that we may use his creation wisely. Andrew SSL
Lord, direct our thoughts, and teach us to pray. Lift up our hearts to worship you in spirit and in truth, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.‘May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy. Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves.’(Ps. 126:5-6)Hymn: We Plough the Fields and Scatter...Psalm 126The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.Let us pray: Most merciful God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we confess that we have sinned in thought, word and deed. We have not loved you with our whole heart. We have not loved our neighbours as ourselves. In your mercy forgive what we have been, help us to amend what we are, and direct what we shall be; that we may do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with you, our God. Amen.May the God of love bring us back to himself, forgive us our sins, and assure us of his eternal love in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.Prayer for the day: Creator God, you made the goodness of the land, the riches of the sea and the rhythm of the seasons; as we thank you for the harvest, may we cherish and respect this planet and its peoples, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.Matthew 6:25-33‘Consider the lilies of the field, 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.’ (Matthew 6:28b-29)Please see the message from the minister.As we give thanks for God’s good gifts around us, let us join in prayer asking for God’s loving presence to be known to everyone as we live day by day:We pray for the Church, that people will be drawn together by God’s love;We pray for the world, for conflict to cease and for compassion to grow in people’s hearts;We pray for our friends, families and neighbours, for relationships to thrive;We pray for people who are sick or suffering, that they will know God’s healing presence;We pray for the departed, remembering all who mourn.Let us pray for the coming of God’s kingdom in the prayer that Jesus taught us: Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done; on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory for ever and ever. Amen.Hymn: Come, Ye Thankful People, Come...May the love of our Lord Jesus draw us to himself, the power of the Lord Jesus strengthen us in his service, the joy of the Lord Jesus fill our hearts: and may the blessing of God Almighty who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit rest upon us and remain with us always.Let us go in peace to love and serve the Lord, in the name of Christ. Amen.
It’s our Harvest Festival tomorrow!Our Family service at 10am will include harvest hymns. Please bring in donations of food which we can pass on to the Foodbank, and put them on the chancel steps.Our young friends are invited to be a part of the service.You are welcome to join us as we worship in St Peter’s Church, whoever you are.
I believe in AngelsToday is a good day to ask: ‘Do you believe in angels?’ Today is the day that the Church remembers ‘St Michael and all Angels’.On the one hand, there is a voice inside me, a very rational, sophisticated voice, which says that belief in angels is not a good idea. Angels are a throwback to a more superstitious age when religious people felt a need to populate the earth with imaginary beings. Just think of the elaborate speculations by medieval theologians as they classified and codified angels and argued over how many could dance on a pinhead. I hear myself saying, ‘Let’s keep our eyes on Jesus and not clutter our minds, piling up beliefs and added extras that add little to the faith.’However, another voice wants to say, ‘Not so fast’. The idea of angels shows up across all cultures, time periods and religions. Angels are part of Jewish, Christian and Islamic thought. However sceptical we might be about angels in medieval thought, and however trivialised and sentimental angels may seem as portrayed in today’s culture, angels still have a central part to play in in our lives as Christians.The more I think about it, and the more I listen to this inner struggle, the more that second voice makes sense to me. Angels are messengers of God, and the idea of angels is necessary within a belief system that starts with God as a divine mystery. It is the very transcendence of God that makes the idea of angels necessary - these spiritual beings that serve as ‘go-betweens’ between God and humanity, who speak for God and are sent by God to communicate and connect with the human race.Jacob’s dream of a ladder between earth and heaven on which angels descend and ascend gives us a powerful image of this ongoing interchange between the earthly and heavenly realms, between the ordinary world of solid matter, reason and logic, and the divine world that is beyond human perception and thought. Angels symbolise the way that the divine mystery we call ‘God’ is continuously interacting with us, constantly inviting and challenging, protecting and accompanying us. When our eyes are opened to this interplay of worlds, the interweaving of the human and divine, then, like Jacob, we too awaken from sleep and say, ‘surely the Lord is in this place…. This is none other than the house of God and this is the gate of heaven.’Today’s Gospel reading goes even further. Jesus Christ is what we might term our ‘ladder’ to heaven. As he says to Nathaniel, ‘Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.’ In other words, through the incarnation, Jesus has caught up in his very body the fullness of God and the fullness of humanity. He is the meeting place, the point of intersection, the place where earth and heaven, the human and the divine, meet and are woven into one. We live in a sacramental world. So, welcoming angels into our imagination is a way of welcoming Jesus himself, a way of opening ourselves to the infinite ways that we receive messages from God.With that in mind, I wonder how you notice messages from God? Maybe you tend to sense the message internally, from intuition or vision, from a dream or sudden insight that catches your attention and speaks to you a word from God. Maybe a friend shows up on your doorstep at just the right moment or calls you on the phone when you were thinking about that person. Maybe the natural world touches your soul on a cliff-top walk and you are immersed within it?You might call such moments ‘angel moments’. Why not? To the logical, analytical mind such moments may have no particular value, meaning or usefulness, but to the soul they give a glimpse of what it means to live life in a larger way, to be awake and responsive to the holy mystery all around us, and to live with a spirit of love rather than fear.Despite the sophisticated voice of ‘reason’, I know that I do cherish angels. Why? Well, it’s because welcoming angels keeps us attentive to the mysterious ways in which God meets us in the daily moments of our lives; it’s because they keep our imagination alive in a world that tends to squash our sensibilities and makes everything drab, as if the material world is all there is; it’s because, as Howard Thurman, a minister and civil rights leader, once suggested, there is a place in everybody’s life for angels, a beautiful place where despite the difficulties of life, the singing of angels can be found, and transformation is possible. No wonder we can’t keep from singing with ‘angels and archangels and all the company of heaven’.Every blessing,Christian
