Rural festivals

Last week we celebrated the beginning of the great Christian Rural Festival of Lammas/Lammastide.

One of the most important Christian Rural festivals, with the word Lammas suggesting that it should be celebrated within a setting of Holy Communion, using the Lammas Loaf or part of it. Using the Lammas Loaf presentation prayer:

‘Brothers and Sisters in Christ, the people of God in ancient times presented to the Lord an offering of the first fruits as a sign of their dependence upon God for their daily bread. At this Lammastide, we bring a newly baked loaf as our offering in thanksgiving to God for his faithfulness.’

As Jesus said “I am the bread of life; those who come to me shall never be hungry and those who believe in me shall never thirst”

I would suggest then as we Christians present ourselves to Jesus Christ during this time, we need to understand what this means for us , that we need everyday to present ourselves afresh to open ourselves to receive physically and spiritually the Daily bread that Jesus gives us. So we will never be without .

This then moves on to my final prayer, we are also starting a season where the schools and colleges are closed, and this leaves children and adults who will not have any bread, food and money to live on. Unfortunately we live in a world where poverty is a fact of life, with so so many children and families simply having to do without. Over 4.5 million children at the latest counts.

So please as we pray, let us consider helping those who don’t have, we as Christians need to make a change to our world to make sure this isn’t the case. We cant simply ride along, we are charged by our lord and Saviour to make changes.

So let us do that. Amen.