Richard's Ramblings

I had the privilege of baptising a young baby this morning. It never becomes routine. Whatever the promises which parents and godparents make, however we might privately make unsupported, subjective, judgments about those, and we shouldn't, the real promise is from God's word to the child: Luke 18: ' People were also bringing babies to Jesus for him to bless them and pray for them. When the disciples saw this, they rebuked them. But Jesus called the children to him and said, “ Let the little children come to me, and don’t hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these."' This from a promise-keeping God described  in Deuteronomy 7: ' Know therefore that the LORD your God is God, the faithful God who keeps his covenant for a thousand generations.' Baptism is the most generationally witnessing of the church's  sacraments. Sometimes the lectionary readings of the day are as inappropriate as you could possibly imagine, not just for a baptism, b...

A very dear friend is driving “The Lap” around Australia as a rite of retirement passage. In the will of the Lord, and if the creek don’t rise, he’ll be at church with us on Sunday. I don’t know what he uses for satnav, whether a dedicated device or his mobile phone, or even if he uses a satnav at all, and relies on paper maps. Wouldn’t surprise me, he’s a bit of a Luddite 😊 The trouble with satnavs is that you have to know a starting point and then a destination. OK, the start point is easy, it’s where we are. “You are here” as QPWS guides helpfully tell us. But where are we going? The Uniting Church Basis of Union, a most wonderful document, I’ll give a link at the end, puts it in an undefined location but offers a route. Here is what it proclaims: “The Church is a pilgrim people, always on the way towards a promised goal; here the Church does not have a continuing city but seeks one to come. On the way Christ feeds the Church with Word and Sacraments, and it has the gift of the Sp...