Category: church resources

Hymns for Mothering Sunday

church resources, hymns

Ages ago I wrote two hymns for Mothering Sunday – if you’re sick of the same old hymns every year and want to try something different, you’re welcome to help yourself to these.

All our blessings
Tune: All things bright and beautiful

All our blessings, all our joys
With thankful hearts we sing,
Lord of life and Lord of love,
Accept the praise we bring.

For parents and for children,
For husbands, wives, and friends,
For those whose care enfolds us
With love that never ends.

For fellowship and friendship
We both receive and give,
For those who’ve shared our journey
And taught us how to live.

For all who’ve shared our sorrow,
Walked with us in our pain,
Who’ve held our hand through darkness
And showed us light again.

In sacrifice and service
Your love is clearly shown,
Your outstretched arms embrace us
to bring us safely home.

For those who give us life and breath
Tune: O Waly Waly

For those who gave us life and breath,
For love that’s stronger far than death,
Today we bring our thankful hearts,
For all a mothering love imparts.

For kindness, patience, warmth and care,
For each embrace, each smile, each tear,
Each word of peace, each healing touch,
These simple gifts which mean so much.

We look to you, our mothering Lord,
Who shows love’s cost, and love’s reward,
Your passion fiercer than the grave,
Nailed to the world you came to save.

So teach your people how to live,
How to endure, how to forgive,
Teach us to trust, to sacrifice,
To share the love that has no price.

Ash Wednesday

church resources, sermons

What is it that we are actually doing when we mark the cross in ash on our heads?

For want of a better way of putting it, I think we turn ourselves inside out. For one day, we show each other and ourselves what we’re really like. We put a messy cross on our foreheads to say, publicly, ‘I have mess. I have sin. I am not right. I need help.’

Today is about honesty. About admitting that we’re not perfect. Admitting that there is much in us which, left unchecked, will prove destructive for us, for those around us, and perhaps beyond, too.

Ash Wednesday can be seen as a service that condemns, that concentrates on what is wrong.  But as some of you may have noticed from what I tend to preach, I have this unrelenting urge to find good news in things, and I want to find good news in the ash, too.   When you start looking, there’s lots of it.

The first bit is that this service doesn’t work so well if only one person comes.  If I turned up to preside and nobody else was there, it just wouldn’t work. Why? Because the ash cross is a great leveller. It says, my sin is my own, but I am not alone in being a sinner.  It’s precisely what we see in today’s gospel reading: the woman taken in adultery is not alone. Her sin is her own, but she is not alone in having sinned. That’s the first bit of good news.

The second bit of good news is that although this is the day when we tell ourselves and each other than we are messy people, full of dirt and sin and shame, the fact is that God already knew.  The fact that we are sinful, that humanity as a whole is sinful, is not news to God. He sees us for who we are – perhaps God is the only one in the universe who truly sees us as we really are, inside – and he still loves us. Infinitely. That’s the second bit of good news.

The third bit of good news is that when we receive the ash on our foreheads we are told ‘remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.’  We hear these words and we might remember the second account of creation in Genesis, in which God lovingly puts his hands in the earth and shapes a human being out of the dirt, breathing life into its nostrils.  The fact that we are dust is testament to God’s creativity, and God’s ability to bring life out of that which seems dead.  God has done it once. He can do it again. And again.  That’s the third bit of good news.

The fourth bit of good news is that the ash cross is tangible, and visible. It feels real.  It’s an action which changes us on the inside – the church would call what we do on Ash Wednesday ‘sacramental’.  The classic definition of a sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inward invisible grace, whereas the ash cross is almost the opposite: an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible lack of grace!  It means that our ‘sorry’ isn’t empty, but feels real.  And that reality is something that needs to be carried forward into our thoughts and words and actions beyond our repentance in the service. The ash reminds us that what we do, our action, the things that people see when they look at us, and what they hear when we speak – these things shape who we are inside as well as changing the world around us. We have a lent’s worth of actions ahead of us that can help us become more who God created us to be.  We may not be able to make good on all our past sins, but our actions and words can bring us closer to being who we are meant to be.  That’s the fourth bit of good news.

And finally, the fifth bit of good news is that we can wipe the ash off our forehead.  It’s not a brand, there for ever as a reminder that we are sinners. It’s a temporary mark, which rubs off to remind us that we sinners who can be forgiven.  Whether you keep your ash on for the rest of the day, or wipe it off later in the service, there comes that moment when you remove the sign of your sin.  At school, on ascension day, we draw a cross in glitter on our foreheads – to remind ourselves and each other that we are called to ‘shine as a light in the world to the glory of God the Father’.  It’s a long way to go till Ascension Day, but that commission, to be the body of Christ, to witness to the peace which can, against all the odds, exist between earth and heaven, and to reveal the glory of God, starts now.  That’s definitely good news.

A Hymn for Candlemas

church resources, hymns

A Hymn for Candlemas (aka the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple)  Tune: Repton. 

Dear Father God, we gather here
In this great house of prayer.
We come just as we are to you
as one who knows us through and through,
and keeps us in your care,
in love beyond compare.

Dear Father God, we praise the name
of Jesus Christ your Son,
The light for all the nations shines,
we see how your salvation binds
all people into one,
and brings your children home.

Dear Father God, we sing your praise
for promises come true.
As young and old our voices raise
and joyfully proclaim, “God’s ways
are heaven breaking through
to make the earth anew.

So Father God, may each of us
go out into the night
to share the joy you give to us,
to praise, to sing, to teach, to bless
all people with your light,
and make the darkness bright.

We praise you, Father, for you own
our future and our past.
Your promised kingdom soon shall come,
and then, when earthly life is done
your love will hold us fast,
in heaven’s peace at last.

The call of Nathaniel

church resources, sermons

I love the story of the calling of Nathaniel. I love his sense of humour, and his honesty, wondering aloud whether anything good could ever come out of Nazareth (and we can substitute whatever place is the equivalent now!) but also his openness – he does, after all, come and see for himself.

But mostly I love the fact that Jesus picks him out, and seems to know him, perhaps even better than he knows himself.  There’s a painting of Nathaniel by a contemporary artist, in fact, which depicts Nathaniel under the fig tree  naked – a symbol that he has nothing to hide, that Jesus sees him simply for who he is, without pretense.

Undoubtedly, Nathaniel’s call by Jesus is very personal. And because being called is something that happens to us, personally, we might think of vocation as being a very personal thing in the sense of being about us as individuals, even a private matter.

But actually God doesn’t call Nathaniel in isolation.  One of the jobs I have done in the church is to be a vocations advisor – accompanying people as they reflect on their understanding of God’s purpose for them, so Nathaniel was helped by others to hear Jesus’ call.

Think for a moment about your own understanding of God’s call on your life – the purposes that he has for you. Now think about those who led you to be able to listen to what God was saying to you.  If you were Nathaniel, remember who was your Philip.  Remember those who were around you when you first heard the voice of the Lord speaking to you.  Give thanks for them, and give thanks for those who are alongside you as you hear his voice today.  Pray for them, and pray that you might be a Philip for those who have yet to hear, who have yet to follow.

This is true for us as individuals, and it’s true for us as churches.  It is when we listen together that we stand the best chance of hearing what God is calling us to do, and when we act together that we stand the most chance of being able to fulfil our vocation as God’s holy people for God’s needy world.  Often God calls us into something that we can do only when we do so together – and often that we can only work out we need to do when we do our working out together.

When churches work together (locally or nationally or internationally)  each church, through that church’s own life and witness and ministry, reveals something slightly different about what God’s mission is in this place, and how we as his churches might be part of that mission.  Just as Jesus’ disciples in their individual gifts and foibles each brought something unique to Christ’s earthly mission and ministry.

So one of the other things I love about this story of calling is the way that it (I think along with pretty much every calling story in the bible) illustrates that God calls unexpected and ordinary people – the fisherman, the tax collector…

I was once asked by someone if God called everyone, or if he only called special people.  I said, ‘God only calls special people, but everybody is special’.   There is a poem that I often use with my vocations people, which goes like this:

God sends each person into the world
With a special message to deliver,
With a special song to sing for others,
With a special act of love to bestow.
No-one else can speak my message,
Or sing my song, or offer my act of love,
For these are entrusted only to me.

If any of us fails to speak our message or sing our song or offer our act of love, then the world is a poorer place.  Each church also has its song, its message, its act of love – just as God graciously uses our uniqueness as human beings, and even our foibles and our weaknesses, as witnesses to his love and glory, so he also is willing to use the unique and special attributes of his many churches to reveal his love, if we will only let him!  Complete unity between all Christians may well be only a dream this side of heaven, but unity of purpose could be a reality, if each church is to fulfill what God is calling us to do in and for the world.

We – all of us together – are the body of Christ, and in the words of Teresa of Avila, Christ has no body on earth now but ours.  Ours are the hands by which he is to bless, ours are the feet by which he is to go about doing good, ours are the eyes through which he looks with compassion on the world.

We can be those hands, those feet, those eyes, in the places where we find ourselves, and we can do it, through the grace of God, if we really are diverse in gifts, but one in purpose.  Amen.

Christian Unity – a fruitful approach?

children's ministry, church resources, sermons

This is something I’ve done in all age worship and in schools, to talk about what working together as churches can feel like. If you use it, you might have to find your own local examples of each kind of working together.  You can also act it out with real fruit – for number 3 you’ll need a hand-held food mixer thingy – the one with the whizzy blades that you would use for getting lumps out of soup.

1. When you go to a supermarket, each fruit has its own compartment – the oranges are with other oranges, the apples are with other apples, and so on. But when you buy some and take them home, you probably put them in a fruit bowl, all mixed together.  Sometimes working together as churches is like that. We collaborate, but we don’t have to sacrifice much.  But bear in mind that fruit ripens at different rates – and bananas are often ahead of the game and may make the rest of you change a little more quickly than you’re used to!

2. But sometimes working together feels more like a fruit salad, Everyone’s had to give a bit – we lose something of our shape, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and if you need to, you can probably still tell which bit each of us contributed – the banana still tastes like banana, the apple still tastes like apple.

3. But sometimes working together as churches feels more like a smoothie. Everyone has to sacrifice a lot – and there’s no way you can tell what all the original flavours were; what matters is the the combination is more wonderful than any of the individual flavours, and that it’s the variety that went in that produces something new and exciting.

So, the question is, what are we willing to give, what are we willing to forgo?  And how will the fruits of our togetherness quench the thirst of those around us?