Easter Tree

 


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Do you love me?

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I saw a suggestion online for some different clerical wear for this Sunday. However if I had turned up wearing a dark robe with a black helmet and black mask and breathing stertorously, some of you might have got the Star wars reference and perhaps one or two might have linked it to “May the 4th.” A play on that star wars blessing “May the force be with you”. It would have suggested who I followed and something about my discipleship. However, being a disciple of Christ and a priest in His church, I elected instead to wear my alb, my white baptismal robe and the stole, the yoke of service; the chasuble symbolising charity, the yoke of Christ, and the seamless garment Christ wore, reflecting the unity of the Church and Christ's sacrifice.  How does your discipleship of the risen Christ express itself? How does our discipleship as a church affect how we behave and the choices we make? What is discipleship? We can find some of the answers to this in both the Acts and the Gospel story t...
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Peace Sunday - Dream, Pray, Act

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Micah 4:1-5 1 Tim 2:1-6 Matt 5:43-48 Nigh on a decade ago I was over in San Francisco and I attended Grace Cathedral for Sunday worship. In the basement of that Cathedral was a shop. It was there I purchased something I am wearing today. It is a small pendant and it is made from the metal of decommissioned nuclear missiles. This for me embodied that phrase “you shall beat your swords into ploughshares” for us in the 21st century.   We read today from the prophet Micah. The exact same passage is found in the prophet Isaiah’s book. Later in Isaiah we read the famous passage sometimes called the Peaceable Kingdom. It is linked with Israel’s hopes and dreams for a messiah and then goes on “The wolf shall live with the lamb;     the leopard shall lie down with the kid; the calf and the lion will feed together,     and a little child shall lead them.” It pictures an ideal world where there is no harm to any creature. One of the titles of the h...
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Season of Creation - Partners with God

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Isaiah 43:14–44:5 The situation in which the Hebrew people found themselves is a timeless one, most of us have no experience of exile—but we all have experienced times where our vision is clouded, preventing us from seeing anything but darkness and despair.  Sometimes this is on a personal level where everything seems to be going wrong - tragedy, broken relationships, illness, bad news … sometimes on more of a community level, in the midst of disaster and sometimes these days on more of a global level when we see the effects of climate change, when we watch helplessly while politicians just seem not to care, when we see only war, war and more war.  All these things linger about us and hinder our ability both to see the future and to move into it. They also raise for us the most serious of theological questions, as they cause us to doubt the promises we have received in Jesus Christ: divine forgiveness, new life, and the love of God. Jesus said the Kingdom of God was at hand...
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