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From Fr Bernard
Hello All, I hope you are all well? If all goes according to plan, by the time you read this I will have been down to the cricket and back. I hope it's a less eventful day than the one on which I got lost in London! Or at least, I hope all the events are on the field of play, and not outside it! Either way, though, I can probably find sermon inspiration somewhere, and since I am preaching on Sunday, you might hear about it all then! However, we are keeping the Feast of the Holy Trinity on Sunday: I'm not sure it's easy to shoehorn cricket into that! Before then, on Saturday morning, there will be NO services at St Mary's, but there will be the usual working party mowing the grass: please come along and help if you can. We really do need volunteers to keep the churchyard as tidy as we can manage. |
The two big reminders for this coming week are that on Thursday the 8th we will give thanks for the institution of Holy Communion, in the celebration known as Corpus Christi (the Body of Christ). There will be a said Eucharist at 10 am (as usual on a Thursday) and a sung Eucharist with Benediction at 7:30 pm. This latter service will be streamed live. Then, on Saturday the 10th we will hold our summer Fair. As I have said before, we need as many volunteers as possible at that to help out during the day. We will need help setting up from around 9 am, help manning the stalls from 11-3, and then help putting everything away from 3 pm. And of course, we also need items to sell, which you can leave at the back of church. The day afterwards, Sunday the 11th, is the feast of St Barnabas, our patronal festival. So June begins in a very busy way!
The Cross and Crown and Service Sheet for Ordinary Time is on this website. Now that Eastertide is over, we are back in what is usually called 'ordinary time', although that always sounds a bit too dismissive for me! What it means is that we are not in a season, like Lent, Advent, or Easter. Instead, we are in our 'everyday routine'. The order of service on this website is the new version of our existing service book that I prepared last year, and am supposed to be finalizing and printing! I keep on forgetting! So, one thing you could do, would be to check the service over, and see if you can find any glaring errors in it! Then maybe I will get round to printing copies off to supplement or replace the copies we use at the minute.
I will leave you with a thought about the ordinary. The Christian writer G K Chesterton spent a lot of time insisting that the 'ordinary' was really nothing of the sort. He insisted that we simply take for granted a lot of amazing things that we call 'ordinary' just because we are used to them. He tried to get people to look with fresh eyes at 'everyday' things, and see new romance in them, because he thought that was his religious duty as a part of God's creation. Being a Christian means that we are in two places at once. On the one hand, we are citizens of heaven, looking ahead with eager eyes at the new Kingdom God is building. But on the other hand we are creatures of the earth that God has made and blessed, rejoicing in the things He has made and given to us. The new Kingdom that is coming is made from the foundations of the old one we are part of, and there is even now a beauty in it, if we can but see it.
God bless
Fr Bernard
The Rev'd Dr B Minton
Team Vicar of Linslade
Ouzel Valley Team
The Cross and Crown and Service Sheet for Ordinary Time is on this website. Now that Eastertide is over, we are back in what is usually called 'ordinary time', although that always sounds a bit too dismissive for me! What it means is that we are not in a season, like Lent, Advent, or Easter. Instead, we are in our 'everyday routine'. The order of service on this website is the new version of our existing service book that I prepared last year, and am supposed to be finalizing and printing! I keep on forgetting! So, one thing you could do, would be to check the service over, and see if you can find any glaring errors in it! Then maybe I will get round to printing copies off to supplement or replace the copies we use at the minute.
I will leave you with a thought about the ordinary. The Christian writer G K Chesterton spent a lot of time insisting that the 'ordinary' was really nothing of the sort. He insisted that we simply take for granted a lot of amazing things that we call 'ordinary' just because we are used to them. He tried to get people to look with fresh eyes at 'everyday' things, and see new romance in them, because he thought that was his religious duty as a part of God's creation. Being a Christian means that we are in two places at once. On the one hand, we are citizens of heaven, looking ahead with eager eyes at the new Kingdom God is building. But on the other hand we are creatures of the earth that God has made and blessed, rejoicing in the things He has made and given to us. The new Kingdom that is coming is made from the foundations of the old one we are part of, and there is even now a beauty in it, if we can but see it.
God bless
Fr Bernard
The Rev'd Dr B Minton
Team Vicar of Linslade
Ouzel Valley Team