Greetings ladies and gentlemen. I’m X and I welcome you to the Y Chapel as we gather as an expression of our love, respect and regard for N.
We come to mourn and to honour her/him. To lay to rest her/his mortal body and support one another as we grieve.

This is a non-commercial attempt from http://www.sanctuaryasia.com/ and https://www.facebook.com/sanctuaryasi…, to highlight the fact that world leaders, irresponsible corporates and mindless ‘consumers’ are combining to destroy life on earth. It is dedicated to all who died fighting for …

Our personal journeys through Lent are associated with a symbolic wilderness, but we need not wander there without direction. “The Way” is the title of a poignant painting that hangs during Lent above the altar in the …

Beatitude Six: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”
“No man has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.” (l John 4: 12) It is through the heart that we experience God directly.

We walk in silence while the earth
Quivers and cracks beneath our feet
Swallows our dreams and shatters worth
Solemn, we trudge to hearts’ dull beat.

We come here today to remember a man. A man…
who had dreams,
who had those dreams shattered,…

The Easter Vigil is a rich and beautiful liturgical event. It is adaptable to many different contexts and situations, from larger cathedrals to smaller rural parishes. Like much of Anglican worship, it is a feast for the ear.

On this Easter Sunday,
Let us roll away the stone
The stone that stifles the divine spark within us
That keeps us from being our true selves

Beatitude Seven: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”
Beatitude Eight: “Blessed are those who are persecuted for justice’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Station Twelve: Jesus dies on the cross.

A cuckoo in the holy nest, can I admit to what I see? A Jesus who is rough and hard, a normal bloke like you and me, a Jesus who could moan a bit, a Jesus who …

Eternal Love, your grace we praise
Which shapes and comforts all our days,
Evolves the world we know.

In the beginning was the Word …
It all started with an act of divine self-expression.
and the Word was with God …
It all comes from the center of God.

Paul endorsed the Roman status quo, politically. He made the real issue identification with a descended (divine) savior, spiritually raised and soon to return. The Jerusalem group shared the last point but emphatically not the first two of Jesus’ divinity nor acquiescence to Roman rule. Their expected Messiah (dramatically shifted after his death to a returning one) would establish peace with Jewish centrality and abolish the MILITARY dominance of other kingdoms but not the existence of other nations.

Avowed atheist Susan Jacoby recently created a dust up with a recent article in the New York Times Sunday Review entitled, “The Blessings of Atheism.” She wrote in response to all the god-talk that appeared in the immediate aftermath of the Newtown massacre; with all those unanswerable questions or inadequate answers to human suffering and death so often peddled in popular religious belief.

So too, not long ago author and “non-believer,” Christopher Hitchen’s posthumously published his little book Mortality; recounting his rambling thoughts on his own imminent demise; after a terminal diagnosis left him a sufficient number of days to find himself “deported from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady.”

But what, or where to, after that? What if this really is all there is?

It seems there has always been the human hankering to imagine all kinds of fanciful notions, in our attempts to recapitulate our mortal existence into something more than it is. Many religious traditions, including centuries of “mainline” orthodox Christianity, employ great mythic stories to describe a life subsumed into something greater than we can either know, or grasp, except by “faith.” Heaven knows, some folks try to better themselves, merely in the hope of a remote possibility there something more, after our death, which is a certainty. But in the end, is it all dust and ashes? And is that OK?

This is the liturgical time of year when many in the Christian tradition undergo a seasonal pilgrimage in which the faithful are reminded at the onset we mortals are nothing more than dust. And so we will one day return to that from whence we came. Then the traditional forty days end with the perennial re-enactment of a passion play commemorating the mortal demise of the one whom Christians even these many centuries later would profess to follow.

Many do so in the hope of some kind of immortality for themselves in some indecipherable form or other; attributing to Jesus a “resurrection” that means the same thing to them as god-like immortality; while others of us may find such imaginings to be not only reasonably implausible, but of less importance than what we take to be of greater significance and meaning in this faith tradition.

Otherwise, the vainglorious hope of immortality can become so enshrouded in our mortal fears that we become – like Lazarus in his early grave – so wrapped up in death that we fail to truly acknowledge and appreciate the gift of our mortality for what it is; nothing more, nor less.

With the certain assurance then that we are but dust and ash, we can ask ourselves if the gift of our mortality is not only enough, but more than enough? And if so, as the psalmist says, how then shall we “number our days, that we may apply our hearts to wisdom?” (Psalm 90:12)

Beatitude Five: “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.”
Jesus was merciful, but didn’t receive mercy. He forgave the people who were about to kill him, but they killed him anyway. Yet we are still haunted by his assertion of the possibility of a world in which mercy works both ways.

Palm Sunday and Passion Sunday… a worship service from Soul Link Faith Community, a new church plant in Mansfield PA. The pastor’s story follows the order of worship.

Lent has not been going well for me. One of the downsides to home-churching is that every planned activity falls on my husband and my shoulders, and we didn’t even realize when Easter fell as we made …

Lo! Christ is with us, risen from the tomb;
Love for one another, conquers hopeless doom;
Let the church with gladness, hymns of joy now sing:
For with Christ arisen, death hath lost its sting.