Seven Words: A Good Friday Meditation

The First Word
Luke 23.26, 32-34
As they led him away, they seized a man, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming from the country, and they laid the cross on him, and made him carry it behind Jesus… Two others also, who were criminals, were led away to be put to death with him. When they [...]

Read Full Post »

Stations of the Cross

A beautiful Stations of the Cross prayer exercise:

Read Full Post »

Whatever is Christ’s, is ours

Sermon for Advent 3 (14 December 2008)
Isaiah 61.1-4, 8-11
John 1.6-8, 19-28
 
Today, we will celebrate. Brent and Chloe are being baptised—there’s just a few years between them, but that doesn’t matter. And Felicity and Jared are being confirmed—we are confirming their baptism, and rejoicing with them that they are taking on the promises of baptism for [...]

Read Full Post »

I cheated, just for you

Yesterday I downloaded Advent08, an iPhone/iPod Touch app which provides daily devotions for Advent.
Not supposed to open it till Advent starts, which as you all know is 30 November this year.
But I thought I should look at the first day in advance, so I could decide whether it’s worth telling both my readers about.
Well, I [...]

Read Full Post »

A wonderful prayer

From Paul (a)—not me!—at Of course I could be wrong:
Heavenly Father, help us remember that the jerk who cut us off in traffic last night is a single mother who worked nine hours that day and is rushing home to cook dinner, help with homework, do the laundry and spend a few precious moments with [...]

Read Full Post »

A Short Guide for Daily Prayer (3)

Some people have reported difficulty printing A Short Guide with printers that are capable of printing both sides of the booklet automatically—the odd and even pages come out upside down relative to each other. (I didn’t realise the problem earlier, as I have to feed the sheets into my printer twice, even pages first then odd.)
In the Printer settings, [...]

Read Full Post »

A Short Guide for Daily Prayer (2)

I thought it might help to include part of the Introduction to A Short Guide, to help people to ‘get’ the approach we’ve taken (shamelessly borrowed from Celebrating Common Prayer):
When an individual prays, they are never alone. They are surrounded by the ‘cloud of witnesses’ (Hebrews 12:1), and accompanied by the communion of saints. We [...]

Read Full Post »

A Short Guide for Daily Prayer

The Uniting Church Working Group on Worship has been aware for some time that our Church lacks a daily prayer resource. Rev Jenny Tymms and I have produced a draft, which we are offering for use and comment. If you’d like to download a pdf file, which is easily printed into a booklet, go here.
And [...]

Read Full Post »