Advent Calendar Day 1
When the weather man says it’s raining
It was one of those wet mornings when we used the weather conditions to enhance our worship, just like the Celtic saint of old as they sat in their isolated places and saw God in the power of the elements.
Refreshed by the rain
Leader
Lord God the source of all good things we pause in your presence and hold our day before you. Still us, calm us, guide us as we enter this day
Lord in your mercy, hear our prayer
Pause and use your senses to listen, smell, see how the park feels on a wet morning.
(The sound of the bird song was beautiful this morning. The birds were obviously excited by the prospect of worms attracted to the surface of the soil by the rain. YUM!)
Leader – May Jesus the Son inspire you with new energies each day.
May you find his peace to give you rest each night.
May the rain symbolise the cleansing forgiveness of the Father
And the refreshment of the Holy Spirit pouring new strength into your being
So that today we may walk as Jesus through the world and carry the beauty of his
Kingdom.
Puddles – look for a puddle and stand and study it for a few minutes
Puddles show similarities to us all: Light, dark, surface and depths.
Look at the light reflected on the surface of the puddle. Even on the darkest days light shines on the puddle surface.
- Thank Jesus that He is the Light of the World and that his Light can still shine in the darkest of places.
Look on the surface of the puddle – can you see you see your reflection?
- Remember you can reflect the light and love of Jesus.
- Think of ways you have been light in dark places.
- Are there ways you could be light in a dark place now.
Look at the detritus at the bottom of the puddle
- Pray for people we know who may be in a dark place because of illness, bereavement, circumstances or relationships.
- Pray for those in the world who live in a dark place because of disease, strife, hunger, poverty and disasters.
Look again at the light reflected on the surface of the puddle
- Pray for the Light of Christ to be in all the situations you have prayed for.
- Pray that you may be the Light of Christ in the coming week.
- Thank God for His Light in the darkness.
We shared bread and wine
Closing prayer
Lord God the source of all good things may you shelter us wherever we go and whatever we do until we meet again.
May you guide us through challenges, protect us when in need and inspire us with your love.
May we acknowledge you in all the human goodness we will see and may you bring us back rejoicing to our place of rest this night.
Loving God, we now go into this day in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Amen
The Kingdom of God at the bandstand
This past Sunday we focused on the heart of Jesus’ message – that God’s Kingdom is coming and that nothing can stop it! A good message in the light of bad news, internationally, nationally and closer to home. After reading about the mustard seed (Luke 13) – or as The Message has it – the pine nut – we used words from the Wildgoose community of Iona early in our time of reflection:
THE AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:
Among the poor, among the proud,
among the persecuted, among the privileged,
Christ is coming to make all things new.
In the private house, in the public place,
in the wedding feast, in the judgment hall,
Christ is coming to make all things new.
With a gentle touch, with an angry word,
with a clear conscience, with burning love,
Christ is coming to make all things new.
That the kingdom might come, that the world might believe,
that the powerful might stumble, that the hidden might be seen,
Christ is coming to make all things new.
Within us, without us, behind us, before us,
in this place, in every place, for this time, for all time,
Christ is coming to make all things new.
—from Morning Liturgy B: Wild Goose Resources (Iona Community)
After reflecting further on the kingdom, we walked, pondering these questions:
Where have you seen the kingdom of God breaking through into this world in the last 7 days?
What act have you been part of that has contributed to the kingdom growing in the last 7 days?
What could you do this coming week to bring in the kingdom?
We prayed around an evergreen shrub, with tight-knit foliage – a perfect symbol for the kingdom that provides shelter and food for all. We scattered pine nuts in the branches to feed the wildlife as we prayed for those known to us and those not known who need protection and provision at this time – who need the kingdom of God to break into their lives.
We shared bread and wine and closed with the new version of the Lord’s prayer we created a couple of weeks ago.
Let not our will, but your will and purposes be fulfilled in our lives here on Earth.
Amen to that!
Bonfire night at Holly House
It’s taken us five years to do it, but this year we celebrated bonfire night together round a fire, with mulled wine, winter punch and parkin. We had sparklers and plenty of laughs – especially when Jon’s ‘noiseless’ fireworks proved ear-splittingly loud (that salesman really saw you coming Jon!) and we sat around the fire sharing poignant thoughts, images, poems and blessings. We also watched Rob Bell’s Nooma DVD ‘Breathe’ in a brief foray indoors to another real fire – which combines the story of the burning bush with the idea that we are always on holy ground as each of us breathes God’s name YHWH…
Here are some images of our evening together and a couple of the prayers:
I live today Through the strength of heaven; Light of the sun, Splendour of fire, Swiftness of wind, Brightness of the Moon, Firmness of Earth.
I live today Through God’s strength; God’s might to uphold me, God’s wisdom to guide me, God’s hand to guard me.
Afar or near, Alone or in multitudes.
May Christ always light my way.
I live today and everyday Through the mighty strength Of the Lord of Creation. Amen.
(attr. St. Patrick)
May the blessing of light be on you – light without and light within. May the blessed sunlight shine on you like a great peat fire, so that stranger and friend may come and warm themselves at it. And may light shine out of your two eyes, like a candle set in the window of a house, bidding the wanderer come in out of the storm. And may the blessing of the rain be on you, may it beat upon your Spirit and wash it fair and clean, and leave there a shining pool where the blue of Heaven shines, and sometimes a star. And may the blessing of the earth be on you, soft under your feet as you journey along life’s road. And may the Lord of Creation bless you, and bless you kindly. Amen.
A great evening! Thanks everyone!
Third Space Lord’s Prayer
I was listening to a service on the radio a couple of weeks ago and the congregation recited the Lord’s Prayer.
Colours in the park on a sunny November morning.
So on a beautiful autumn morning we spent time in prayer using the Lord’s prayer as our model.
Christians seem to use this prayer in a variety of ways. Some us it as a template for the way to put prayers into words, others who prefer a daily ritual type of prayer see it as an important way of staying close to God by using the familiar words, others still like the communal act of praying the same words together as an act of unity.
To put the prayer in context, it was the way Jesus taught his disciples to pray in the middle of all the important teaching in the Sermon on the Mount about the way we should live. So I guess it is an important prayer.
We read six different versions of the Lords Prayer to each other in pairs.
Including a paraphrase by Sarah Dylan Breuer, The Lord’s prayer from the New Zealand Prayer Book, Eugene H. Peterson’s version from The Message, the 1662 Prayer Book version and the Anglican Alternative service book. Plus these two that raised a smile:
Following that we used the version of the Lord’s Prayer we are most familiar with to pray as we went on a slow walk. Taking each part and using it as a prompt for worship, confession, and praying for issues and people.
We were all given a part of the prayer and we were asked to come up with a short paraphrase of it, which we put together at the end and then read it aloud.
This is what we came up with:
The Lord’s Prayer by Third Space
God, who cares for us,
The wonder of your presence fills us with awe.
Your name, your very nature, is holy.
All creation resonates with it!
Let all people come to proclaim it!
May we move into your presence and unimpeded love.
Let not our will, but your will and purposes be fulfilled in our lives here on Earth.
Give us the material things you know we need to survive.
Release us – as indeed we release others – from the debt of wrong doing.
Strengthen us for difficult times.
Liberate us from all that is evil.
For You reign in majesty, in love,
Power and glory from the beginning of time and forever more.
Amen
The meal
Reflections on the meal last Wednesday…
Lavish food and drink – a symbol of God’s generosity, a sense of a foretaste of the heavenly banquet…
Welcoming and welcoming back new and old friends…
Sending Peter and Uta with our blessing as they embark on the next part of their journey, moving away, starting afresh…
Good conversation, laughter, sharing bread and wine, knowing Jesus in our midst…
Feasting in every sense!
Dates for further meals to be released soon! Thank you to everyone for coming – I, for one, enjoyed your company tremendously!
Wrestling with God at the bandstand
The park was bathed in sunshine and full of falling leaves today – and it was glorious!
Our focus was based on the brilliant book of meditations ‘Touching the Sacred’ by Chris Thorpe, based around paintings by Jake Lever. Today the image was of the hand of Jacob, held by the hand of the wrestler. Here’s our order of service, with the odd explanation thrown in:
Opening prayer
O God who wrestles with us,
circle our hearts,
centre our minds,
still our bodies
be present to us now.
Amen.
Reading Genesis 32: 24-28
24 Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. 25 When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. 26 Then he said, “Let me go, for the day is breaking.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” 27 So he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” 28 Then the man said, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.”
Footnotes: Israel probably means ‘he struggles with God’.
Reflection. There is something so mysterious, unclear and intriguing about this ancient story. We thought of why Jacob might have been wrestling with the man / angel /God and how the Jews have struggled, how Jesus struggled, how we struggle in various ways… God calls us to engage with him, to wrestle with him in our doubts and frustrations and in what we pray for. We are called to keep holding on, not to let go – for even if the fight cannot be won, God will bless us and those we wrestle in prayer for.
And so we wrote names of individuals, of situations and of world crises and took these to inform our prayers as we walked around the park. For each prayer we were invited to tell God that we were not going to let him go – we were going to keep asking. And in using those words ‘I will not let you go’ we were invited to hear God echo his promise ‘I will not let you go’. These individual prayers finished with the words of invocation below.
O Wrestler
contending with us until daybreak,
holding us in the grip of your argument,
grappling with our questions and doubts,
You who strive to deepen us through struggle,
and strengthen us through adversity: Hold on to us now
in that fierce love that will never let us go.
Bless us, as you name us, as those who have prevailed.
Back together at the bandstand, now joined by some visitors who had stumbled across us, we prayed together these words:
God has stricken us And will bind up our wounds
We bring to God all that is comfortable and self-satisfied in us, and we let it go.
God has stricken us And will bind up our wounds
We bring to God the times we have avoided the struggle, taken the line of least resistance, colluded, and let them go.
God has stricken us And will bind up our wounds
And because we believe that God does bless us, we bring to god our questions and doubts and uncertainties, and we offer them.
Bless us as you name us As those who have prevailed
We bring to God all that we find hard to deal with, tasks, relationships, feelings, and we offer them
Bless us as you name us As those who have prevailed
We bring to God all the messy, unwinnable struggles and adversities that we face, and offer them
Bless us as you name us As those who have prevailed
We shared bread and wine as usual – focussing on the bread as the bread of struggle and the wine as the cup of blessing – God’s promise never to let us go. We closed with these words:
Closing prayer O God of Jacob, struggle with us
Through the dark nights of our questioning,
Hang on to us when we lose hold of you.
Cripple our false certainties,
Disable our selfishness,
That though we come stumbling and limping
We may come to see you face to face. Amen.
It was a beautiful morning and one on which we all had time to pray about those things that most concern us. At Cool River café we shared news of those who continue to need those prayers and planned for Wednesday evening. Looking forward to that!
Bonkers about Conkers
We arrived at the bandstand on this first cold misty autumn morning to be greeted with the sight of a table groaning under the weight of hundreds of conkers.
So what is it all about?
We had been asked to bring along something that represented harvest to each one of us. To Paul conkers said it all. The wonderful shiny harvest of conkers reminded him of his childhood. This was the time of year when as a child he would find a huge shiny conker and take it into school imagining he was going to be a conker champion. As an adult seeing conkers each year reminds him of God’s good and wonderful provision.
Home grown vegetables, flowers, apples, cider, Fairtrade Coffee and a special watercolour painting were added to the table by others at the bandstand. Each of us saying how these things remind us of what God provides and blesses us with.
Paul then talked about the goodness of God on the one hand and the darkness of the human spirit on the other. We were challenged by his authentic look at our real natures and we thought about strife, challenges and down right evil things happening in our world. Spending time walking or sitting in the park we went away to pray.
To aid is in our prayers and to illustrate how God can cleanse and heal situations that we pray for Paul gave us two containers of liquid. One containing red fluid and another clear fluid. *
As we prayed we added the clear fluid drop by drop, prayer by prayer, to the red fluid and watched it change to a clear fluid.
Sharing our Companions Liturgy for bread and wine brought our time at the bandstand to an end.
Coffee and a warm café awaited us
* PAUL ASKED US TO WEAR GLOVES FOR PROTECTION.
Paul used a popular chemistry demonstration that is often called turning water into wine or water into blood. It’s really a simple example of a pH indicator. A few drops of Phenolphthalein was added to a glass bottle containing an alkali. This resulted in the solution turning pink/cerise. When hydrochloric acid was added to the pink solution it turned colourless once more.
Inspired!
We met on another lovely late summer morning and started our time of worship by listening to “He was Despised” from the Young Messiah by the New London Chorale.
We were asked to think about the times of difficulty that Jesus experienced in his life and how that correlates with our lives. Whatever we experience during our lifetimes we can take comfort from knowing that Jesus will have experienced just what we have and much more.
“Rejection, betrayal, bereavement, laughter, pain, ridicule, hunger, thirst, fun, death, sickness, hurt, fear, anger and tiredness are just some of the things Jesus would have known.”
Grayden then led by telling us of an inspirational character he had read about over the summer, Shusaku Endo
“For the past decade and a half I have been on a journey of re-thinking my evangelical Christian faith. During that time my image of Jesus has changed from a very triumphalistic one to the Jesus who is the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53. I felt very inspired by reading about Endo’s journey, my image of Jesus had changed just as his had done. The Jesus I need is the Jesus who touched lepers, engaged with the marginalised , the failures and the not-good-enoughs, who forgave tax collectors and prostitutes and chatted with divorcees. I need the Jesus who shows us what God is really like, the Jesus who is always for us, and will never desert us or reject us. And I need this Jesus because I am a sinner!”
We were then sent off into the sunshine with the following questions to consider:
Endo challenges us to see “the Jesus who suffers with us and who allows for our weakness.”
Have you encountered this Jesus? Is this the Jesus you need and identify with?
If Jesus really was “wounded for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities”, then Endo asks us to turn our imagination away from what he sees as the predominant Western image of Jesus, based on Roman images of glory and power, and to see the Jesus who “was despised and rejected, a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering.”
Endo believed that how we picture Jesus really matters. He is critical of Western Christianity for failing to depict the terrible rejection, sorrow and suffering that was so much part of God’s incarnation. Is that fair? Is Endo’s image of Jesus too skewed in the direction of suffering and rejection?
If we share Endo’s emphasis that focuses on Jesus as one who “was despised and rejected, a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering.” Does that image of Jesus help us to view other people differently, perhaps more compassionately?
Prayers
- Thanksgiving about our relationship with Jesus
We were invited to write either a word or sentence of thanksgiving, these were our prayers;
Accompanied, New Beginnings, Forgiven, Always there, whole, Confiding in God, Believed in and Liked! Accepted, Unconditional, Jesus has shown me his amazing love through his people.
- We prayed for those we knew who were grieving or sick or in need in any way
- We prayed about areas of the world where there is conflict and suffering
Sharing bread and wine
We used “It would not have been God’s table” from Jonny Baker’s worship tricks as it seemed very appropriate.
In closing we were reminded that we can approach God’s throne of Grace with confidence as Jesus, who understands us is there speaking for us.
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