Tag Archives: worship

Expectancy

I wonder who here has special plans for this coming Friday? I can see that some of you are sat there thinking, “why should we have special plans for this Friday?” Who can enlighten our bemused brethren? It is, of course, Valentine’s Day. An opportunity to celebrate romantic love, particularly poignant perhaps for those in […]

As we have heard

The Psalm we heard this morning begins with a call to praise God. The place where God dwells is declared to have taken on God’s character – Holy – beautiful – elevated. Zion is these things because God abides there in the temple. It is God’s presence that suffuses the mountain and the city with […]

Heaven’s Gate

Last week when we left Jacob, he had just pulled off a bit of a coup. In concert with his mother Rebekah, he had deceived his Father, Isaac, into blessing him rather than his older brother, Esau. Between that episode and today’s reading, things have not gone well. Shortly after Jacob’s exit from his father’s […]

Abandoned

Abandoned. It’s a funny word, isn’t it. It’s one of those words with a range of meanings, all with the same root, but some meanings are very negative and some are really positive. To be abandoned is one of the worst and most lonely experiences that a person can go through. To abandon yourself to […]

Look Again

Today is Vision Sunday at All Saints – it says so on the notice sheet, so it must be. Now I have to be honest and tell you that when I planned this I did not realise that this Sunday was also the first Sunday of Epiphany, it is just one of those serendipities that […]

Vision

I wonder if anybody recognises this gentleman. It is Kevin McCloud. Are there are any other Grand Designs fans in church this morning? For those of you who don’t watch it, the basic idea is that each episode features the building of a Grand Design, a house that is extraordinary, either because of its architecture, […]

Songs of Praise

This morning we’ve heard the songs of two women who share a name in their own language, though separated by the early translators of the Bible. Miriam and Mary, also separated by centuries of history, but singing from the overflow of the same joy in their hearts at the working of the same God in […]

Jumping from 20,000 feet

Do you know the song, “He jumped without a parachute from twenty thousand feet”? Well, I think they’re going to have to rewrite it. I was reading this morning on the BBC News website that yesterday a man called Luke Aikens did exactly this. After 2 years training and preparation, he jumped out of an […]

Referee?

Who’d be a referee? There you are, in the middle of it all, players trying to fool you, see what they can get away with, persuade you. Everybody on the touch line second guessing your decisions, questioning your parenthood, suggesting you should go to Specsavers. If you have a perfect performance no one notices you, […]

In Spirit and Truth

Today we’re thinking about worship, and in particular about worshipping God and what that means. In a minute we’re going to look in more detail at this conversation between Jesus and the woman at the well. Before we do that, though, I thought it might be useful to look at an example of worship that […]