The view I had each morning as I left by hosts home in Seattle to walk to COTA.
Entered for this weeks Photo Friday
You can see a bigger version over at Shiny Photos
photo Friday: Suburbia
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journey of discovery
Today is Epiphany …
Lord Jesus
may your light reveal our path
as in the past when it guided magi on a journey
of discovery.
May your light lead us
so that we too can discover the miracle
and worship you …
word
child
saviour
King
a cautious step into the veil
I’m feeling quite excited after the gathering meal and discussion about the way forward this evening. We shared a lot about the things we value about the gathering, as well as asking hard questions about what we are doing and what we hope to be doing.
We seem to value the inclusivity, the creativity and the opportunity presented to engage with God. We enjoy the freedom to create and the ability to be different each time we gather with a loose structure that we have developed to create within.
Tonight we made a decision to share the curation of our worship gatherings. Up until now it has been down to me to ensure things happen and I’m looking forward to being able to share this with others as we move forward and discover together some new things.
One particular concern of mine over the last few months has been the whole question of whether we have started to fall in to the trap of simply putting on a monthly worship event rather than birthing and growing a church. Creating takes energy and time and, actually, we all know it is a lot easier to create a worship event than it is to develop a new way of being church.
Tonight we chatted about this and asked ourselves the question … ‘how do we move from creating an event to growing a church?’ I’m not sure we came up with any great answers, but we are, again, more conscious of what we feel we are called to do.
So … the gathering cautiously treads into the unrevealed and unresolved veil of possibilities and opportunities that will make up the year of 2011
‘I knew where I was!’
I love listening to children and some of the things they can say quite innocently can make you laugh, cry or contemplate some deep issue. One such occurrence happened in Cornwall. One of the boys did not tell his dad where he was going. I don’t know but I guess the dad would have been annoyed and this annoyance would have come directly from this fathers love and concern for the well being of his son.
I overheard the boy say …
‘He didn’t know where I was … but I knew where I was!’
Although that was an amusing thing to say, it has got me thinking about my relationship with God. Although I am not always sure where I am going, I always know where I am. I may be surprised to find my self in places … but, nevertheless, I know where I am. I wonder whether, with that personal knowledge of my own whereabouts, comes an assumption that others, including God, know where I am.
Often we speak of ourselves as the children of God and yet we want to know all the answers. Essentially this means we want to be treated by God as equals as only God can really have all the answers.
If we are children we ask questions but a lot of the time we trust. I wonder whether with this trust comes a personal responsibility to tell God where I am. I know God knows … but my telling him reminds me not only that I am cared for, but that God is interested and looking out for my well being.
new year family style
Christmas and New Year have been excellent friend and family times.
We celebrated the New Year in style …. twice. We started with an amazing meal at Viners Restaurant who did amazingly at serving us all as one large party. The video gives a taste of the joy we were experiencing. (there are other more incriminating videos of celebrations but you will need to look into facebook for them!)
Following this we celebrated the New Year early so that the younger children could stay involved with sky lanterns and fireworks. The lanterns looked amazing as they floated above our heads before being caught on the breeze. A good way to let go of one year and welcome in another.
Later in the evening a fewer of us returned to the cliff top at midnight to release a couple more lanterns and welcome in the New Year.
The next morning we celebrated together again at the Beach Hut for lunch before we had to reluctantly pull ourselves away from Cornwall and return to Kent.
Thanks to everyone – my family and friends for making this a very special time!
Merry Christmas
the time was right …
Some amazingly beautiful words from Abbotsford:
When the time was right
God spoke
And the light slipped through
When the time was right
God drew breath
And the word was delivered
When the time was right
God hesitated
As the son fell from heaven to earth
When the time was right
God cried
As the saviour was given to redeem the world
When the time was right
God knew
This was the moment of birth
And when there was no more time
God laboured
And God knew the time had come
Sing your own song!
One of the real privileges of my role is that I get to mix traditional with pioneering and so experience many different aspects of life and worship that I may not otherwise experience. A cathedral, of all places, is a great place to experience the best of what we would call traditional, although I could well argue that some of the what our musicians do is pretty pioneering and innovative so that it cause you to pause and be struck afresh by some aspect of God.
Earlier this week I attended the cathedral carol service. Our choirs always produce a beautifully amazing sound but during thee carol service I experienced something new and different. At one point during the service the choir were standing very close to me which enabled me to hear each individual voice as well as the ‘one sound’. Each voice was unique, beautiful and noticeably different from each other. Together they were fantastic, but on this evening it was the individual voices that got me thinking and through which God challenged me.
As I walked home that evening from the station (skating / flying part of the way but that’s a story for another time) I reflected on this and thought each of us has our own distinct voice. The bible talks of the sheep following the shepherd because they know his voice. Our voice is probably as distinct and unique to us as our fingerprints are.
Our task, in our lives, is to find our own voice, to sing our own song .. to make our own individual contribution. Too foten we are guilty of trying to copy others, or wish to be like others. Sometimes we spend so much time envying others that we miss out totally on the beauty that we personally have.
What we have is distinct and unique to us … and no matter what we may think of it, God can take and join with it to make something we think ordinary simply stunning!
We simply need to find our voice and sing our song …. and see what happens.
Emmanuel again
Following from my thoughts yesterday I was reminded of these words from Bono that express things much more poetically (thanks Graham for posting and so reminding me of this)
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‘It dawned on me for the first time, really. It had dawned on me before, but it really sank in: the Christmas story. The idea that God, if there is a force of Love and Logic in the universe, that it would seek to explain itself is amazing enough. That it would seek to explain and describe itself by becoming a child in straw poverty, in shit and straw…. a child… I just thought: ‘Wow!’ Just the poetry….Unknowable love, unknowable power, describes itself as the most vulnerable.’
The quote comes from Bono on Bono – a book which my eldest son very discerningly bought me a little while back.
god with us
It’s been a week since I last blogged so I guess it has been a pretty busy time, a large part of the week thinking about preaching yesterday and thinking about Emmanuel and what that means for us today. The lectionary gospel for yesterday was Matthew 1:18-25. It was tempting to look at the character of Joseph here but I was particularly struck by Matthew’s use of the Isaiah prophecy which talks of waiting for a child born to a virgin, called Emmanuel. But … as we all know this child was called Jesus!
I’m not going to preach here, if you really want to know what I said … you will be able to read the sermon here on the cathedral website in the next couple of days.
I talked about Emmanuel being more of a title than an actual name … and a title that describes what Jesus was actually about. Emmanuel means ‘God with us’ and I suggested that the whole point of this gospel was to show that Jesus is God with us … all the time. The very last words of the gospel are words from Jesus promising to be with us for ever …. that would be Emmanuel then!
Jesus came to be God with us, and that is a pretty amazing thing to think about.
I guess that simple fact challenges me as I try to get my head around what that means.
The Shiny Headed Prophet 