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Monday, 19 January 2009 11:44 |
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At the end of this month we enter the season of Lent, a period of forty days (plus Sundays) when we prepare ourselves to celebrate the great Easter story and Christ’s resurrection. Lent, replicating the forty days Jesus spent in the wilderness, has traditionally been a time for Christians to give up things and spend time focussing more fully on their faith. But the problem is that we often spend so much time trying to give up things that, if we’re not careful, we can make the thing we’re giving up the focus of much of our attention. And of course, if we don’t succeed in giving it up then we feel even worse about ourselves. It is good to try to simplify our lives and use the season to focus on God more fully. But Lent, for me, should be about so much more than just fasting, and it can be a time of great gain and spiritual richness. There is a Benedictine litany for Lent that suggests we should fast from certain things, and yet feast on others. That might sound like a contradiction but it soon becomes clear and is rather inspiring:
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Last Updated on Thursday, 16 April 2009 21:37 |
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Glory to God in the Highest |
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Tuesday, 16 December 2008 13:24 |
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Glory to God in the Highest, and peace to his people on earth This is the message which the Christ Child came to bring and to teach and demonstrate in his adult life and it is the message we have sung over and over again in our Christmas carols in the past couple of weeks. But looking back on this past year, this message seems a long way off and world events might seem to have taken a turn for the worse: continuing wars and casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq, deteriorating conditions in Zimbabwe, terrorist bombing in India and across the globe... The list seems particularly long this year. In our hearts we know that war, terrorism, fundamentalism, persecution, aggression, reprisals, cannot possibly be the will of an all-loving God. Each tragedy has involved individual families, individual people. So together we pray for a New Year of Peace. |
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Sermon for Trinity 21 - 12 September 2008 |
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Wednesday, 15 October 2008 07:20 |
May I speak in the name of the living God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen
Last night we enjoyed a splendid concert here in church – six organists playing a wonderfully varied programme to delight and entertain as only music can. But we’re having something of a musical weekend. Today is the birthday of Ralph Vaughan Williams he was born on this day 136 years ago and this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of his death. We are being encouraged to mark this significant anniversary in church and we do so by singing hymns at this service and at Evensong – hymns that are set to tunes by Vaughan Williams.
So what of the man? Well, thankfully, unlike some very early composers we know a fair amount about his life. He was born the son of a Vicar (poor man!) in Down Ampney in Gloucestershire and after the death of his father when he was only 3 Ralph moved with his mother to the North Downs in Surrey to live with her family. She was the granddaughter of Josiah Wedgwood, part of the Wedgwood pottery family and another distant relative, a great uncle to Ralph, was Charles Darwin.
After an education at Charterhouse, Ralph attended the Royal College of Music and studied under Charles Villiers Stanford before reading history and music at Trinity College, Cambridge. He returned to the RCM to study composition with Hubert Parry but his work of composition took time to bear fruit and he didn’t publish his first piece until he was 30. Later he was to compose, amongst other things, nine symphonies in a surprising range of different styles and yet, despite these variations, he has often been said to be characteristically English, in the same way as that of Holst, Butterworth, Delius and Walton.
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Last Updated on Thursday, 20 November 2008 14:09 |
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Tuesday, 14 October 2008 20:29 |
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Just as Nature’s seasons each have their own characteristics, so the seasons of the Church’s year have their own ‘feel’. This month – November – begins with All Saints’ Tide and will end with Advent Sunday. Yes, Advent is less than a month away!
All Saints’ Tide encourages us to an awareness of the lives of others. We remember those men and women whom the Church has specifically declared to be ‘saints’. We celebrate the lives of these people in whom the Holy Spirit was at work in so many different ways. People who can inspire and encourage us on our Christian journey. Real men and women in whose lives, it is said, ‘we can glimpse heaven in our midst’. We rejoice to be surrounded by ‘so great a cloud of witnesses’, spurring us on as we join our worship with theirs.
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Last Updated on Thursday, 20 November 2008 14:09 |
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