Family Communion for Harvest: celebrant the Revd Adetola Badejo.
First reading: 1 Timothy 2. 1-7
Gospel: Matthew 6. 25-33

At this service we shall collect donations for the Manna Centre, a day centre in Southwark for homeless people. Please follow the link below for a list of their main requirements. Afterwards there will be a traditional Harvest Lunch, to which all are welcome.

The image above is a detail of a very famous painting, Vincent van Gogh's 'The Sower at Sunset'. Although he turned away from the institutional church, van Gogh was a profoundly religious man who spent two years as a lay pastor in a deprived mining area of Belgium, and this experience is reflected in the way his later paintings depict not only the dignity of manual labour but also its unrelenting physical demands. 'The sower' isn't a realistic scene: the foreground shows seed being scattered on bare earth and the background a field of ripe corn, thus representing the entire cycle of seedtime and harvest. In a similar way, the painting reflects the relationship between human and superhuman agency: for grain to grow, at least in quantities that will sustain us, the sun has to shine, the rain has to fall, and men and women have to work in all weathers to make it happen.

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