Richard's Ramblings

Every Christmas, folk who wouldn’t otherwise go to church take themselves off to a cathedral or their village church or their parents’ or partner’s church for a carol service. Some feel a teeny bit guilty that they don’t attend the place more frequently. And their parents and partners wish that they did, too. But where were the principal actors at Christ’s actual birth? And who were they?  Were they respectable, upstanding regular church goers? First, the shepherds. They were “abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night”. They weren’t goody two shoes in the temple, they were agricultural tradies getting on with their job.  Yet it was to the shepherds, not to the clergy or temple-goers, that the angel announced good news of great joy. Then the wise men. They weren’t even Jewish. They were foreigners, and probably they believed in or kept an open mind about other religious faiths of the region. But like good scientists, they made an observation - the...

If you were at Kirwan Uniting last Sunday, the first Sunday in Advent, you’d have seen the miracle of a plain white LED candle being turned Advent purple by a simple button press on a remote.  A day or two before, I had changed the handle LED on my electric toothbrush from Ordinary Time green to purple, just because I could, and I’m a geek, I effected this transformation by the Oral B app on my iPhone. It was meant light-heartedly so that I could tease my more earnest liturgist mates on Facebook.  This isn’t the place to discuss liturgical colours or their meaning, they come well toward the bottom of what’s really important in our corporate worship. My toothbrush, on the other hand … A lovely little book was published only a couple of days ago, Liturgy of the Ordinary (sacred practices in everyday life), Tish Harrison Warren, IVP Books 2019. Tish is an Episcopalian (Anglican)  priest whose book looks at ordinary things we do each day, waking up, making the bed, argui...