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Mission News

Feasts & Festivals: A Lent Gathering

So if Lent is a fast, why is our Lent Theme all about Feasts and Festivals?” Well, partly because the United Reformed Church is following that theme in various guises throughout the year, but also because Lent is as much about feasting as it is about fasting. Each Sunday is a feast day, and not counted in the 40 fast days of Lent. Our Lent Gatherings will be a time to reflect on the way our journeys can take various turns, that some are feasts and others fasts but all take us towards the greatest festival of all … Easter.

The sessions have been inspired by the wonderful prayers in this years Prayer Handbook, for example

We pick up the stones

of the hurts of the world

violence and poverty,

disaster, and starvation

wanting you to turn them into bread;

Carol Dixon, URC Prayer Handbook 2017

God so loved …

this home for humanity,

rich varieties of shape, colour, language, identity, story

that God sent his son not to condemn but to save.

May we value all of humanity with the same love,

share the same willingness for sacrifice

and make the same risks

that God makes for us

                  Vaughan Jones,  URC Prayer Handbook 2017

In the midst of a fast, we will enjoy a feast of poetry, song, prayer and discovery. We will touch, look, taste and imagine. We will roam from wilderness to garden, pausing at a well as darkness falls and we catch our breath. Come and join in

be blessed, Craig

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Sermon

Choose Life

Inspired by Deuteronomy 30, Matthew 5 and the Trainspotting advert

Choose life.

Choose justice.

Choose mercy.

Choose welcome.

Choose to resolve conflict;

Choose agreement over anger;

Choose peace and understanding;

Choose to greet your enemy in friendship;

Choose to listen,

to share,

to resolve,

to walk together through life’s trials

and reconciliation’s.

 

Choose a partner;

be faithful in what you think and in what you do.

Choose commitment.

Choose wholeness,

Choose two eyes and two hands,

Choose a life well lived.

Choose honesty;

Choose truthfulness where Yes is Yes

and No means No.

Be known for speaking the truth

for sharing God’s foolish wisdom.

Choose fellowship and seeking God,

finding who you are

and where you stand in all creation.

 

Choose creative living,

full of possibilities and opportunities;

Live a life that others can look back on and declare.

“It is good.”

Choose a community transformed

by love and grace and justice and mercy.

Choose your future.

Choose our future.

Choose a future for the world you inhabit,

Choose life ….

the life that God holds out before you

this day and every day.