Morning Service for the Seventh Sunday of Easter 2024 – The Sunday after the Ascension
This morning’s Gospel reading was the beginning of the end of John’s farewell discourse by Jesus to his disciples, the long soliloquy preparing them for his death and for his glorification, and their future. In the speech Jesus deals with his relationship to God and his relationship to the disciples and their relationship to the world.
Morning Service for the Sixth Sunday of Easter 2024
We celebrate the Ascension on Thursday, so it is logical that we hear some more of Jesus’s parting words to his disciples as written by John in the context of the last Supper. These words are very personal, they are words from a teacher to his pupils, from a master to his disciples, from a Lord to his people. At least that is how they begin.
Morning Service for the Fifth Sunday of Easter 2024
The story of the Ethiopian eunuch meeting with Philip on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza is an extraordinary one. The story reveals a surprising amount of detail concerning the eunuch. It tells us that he is a man held in esteem, he has charge of his nation’s Treasury, but although he has servants, at least a driver for his carriage, he is himself still under authority.
Morning Service for the Fourth Sunday of Easter 2024
The image of the Shepherd is an old one, and perhaps one that’s not terribly relevant to our modern age when the nearest most of us gets to a sheep is leg of lamb with mint source. But the image is a powerful one still – and it was one Jesus made full use of – and it’s hard to beat on a day like today when we have a baptism.
Morning Service for the Third Sunday of Easter 2024
“If a dead man is raised to life, all men spring up in astonishment. Yet every day one that had no being is born, and no man wonders, though it is plain to all, without doubt, that it is a greater thing for that to be created which was without being than for that which had being to be restored. Because the dry rod of Aaron budded, all men were in astonishment; every day a tree is produced from the dry earth, … and no man wonders … Five thousand men were filled with five loaves; every day the grains of seed that are sown are multiplied in a fullness of ears, and no man wonders.
Magazine letter May 2024
May 26th is Trinity Sunday, not a festival many will be marking I fear. It lacks the fairy lights of Christmas or the chocolate of Easter. But in its way it is a significant day, marking the contribution of Christianity to mankind’s understanding of the nature of God; not a topic now of general conversation, but it was not always so.