Daylight saving time.

I just had to share these quotes from this article because they are so silly.  The call is for BST to start in Feb rather than March.

Dr Mike Cantlay, convener of Loch Lomond and The Trossachs National Park, said the move would provide an hour’s extra daylight throughout March.

Erm…. no it wont….

Farmer and National Park board member Janet Beveridge, who runs a sheep farm in Gartocharn, insisted: “An earlier start to spring would give farmers more time to work with their stock in the evenings.”

I vote for an earlier start to spring too.  Can we place some jet engines on Ben Nevis to tilt the axis of the Earth please!!  😆

This’ll keep me laughing until summer!!

😆

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Worship idea – Harvest Communion Service

I know it is the wrong time of year but I was asked to be involved in a family Eucharist service and it got me thinking of different ways of celebrating the eucharist.  I came up with a good worship idea for harvest.

Harvest is a traditional service that has lost a lot of its real meaning because in the modern world, food comes in cans.  However if you are making the point that food comes from the farming industry why not do something that really symbolises that.  Get rid of the communion table and build an altar out of hay bales.  Buy a cheap piece of wood to put on the top and then dress it with the altar linen.

One highly symbolic communion experience.

Life is a Journey

Apologies for my apparent absence during the last week.  My journey has been a long one but it involved some good times with good friends and an interlude with Velvet Revolver in Brixton Academy to bring me to this point.  And it is here at this point that I turn to the final leg of my dissertation and discover the blindingly obvious part of our worship life – Life is a Journey. 

It sounds too obvious doesn’t it.  I can’t have been missing this the whole time can I?  I have spent years talking about how the liturgy of the church is supposed to be a journey.  We should come in to worship and be changed by our encounter with God.  We should be inspired to continue our walk with God.  And yet I seem to have missed the point.  It is all a journey!

I am reading Creating Uncommon Worship by Richard Giles and he has this notion that The Church would look completely different if Jesus followers had not been referred to as Christians  but instead continued to be followers of “The Way” (Acts 24:14).  We have subsequently put down roots and laid foundations for Church.

No matter how glorious or inspirational they can be, we pay a heavy price for our sacred buildings.  In many of them the lack of ‘living stones’ has become and irrelevance beside the new-found craze to ‘preserve’ at all costs these dead stones redolent of a God who has (apparently) departed.

Robert Louis Stevenson, in Travels with a Donkey, wrote ‘For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go.  I travel for travels sake.  The great affair is to move.’  That says it perfectly.  This too has been the insight of the Judeo-Christian tradition, an insight that history teaches us is all too easily buried beneath stability, success and worldly influence.

Dorothy L. Sayers

I just stumbled upon a blog with a quote that made me laugh out loud by Dorothy L Sayers…

Good Friday

The Incarnation

This is the last time I saw Jesus in a sermon...

Jesus Heals!

So as we wandered  around Borders contemplating how none of the sections had quite the book we were looking for we came across this – a perfect metaphor!

Personal Safety

It is with a heavy heart that I read the news of Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho’s kidnap and death.  We rather glibly talk about how hard it is to be a Christian in the UK and yet cannot deny the relative safety that we enjoy.

Credentials

One thing I hardly ever mention online is what qualifications I have.  I don’t really think it is relevant.  People have the ultimate freedom with the internet – you are either talking rubbish or you aren’t.  By this point you may well have clicked that little cross at the top right hand corner of the browser.

 One thing I have noticed as I wander the internet and interact with people is that in many ways there is no personality to it.  People don’t know anything about you and don’t often really care about who you are.  There are so many flame wars between people that say things that they would never dream of doing in real life.  There is however, a strange Christian version of this in which people play a game of virtual Top Trumps.  Whenever a theological debate starts people often try to bolster their argument by claiming their qualifications.  I guess this is very much in keeping with the reformation tradition of wearing an academic gown and hood to preach from the pulpit.  I guess I notice it most when a really contentious issue is approached and hackles get raised.  As soon as someone approaches the question of sexuality or gender for example, the more tightly people claim their pieces of paper.  I just find it all a little strange…

They Call me Mr Different

I just came across this post at Nomadic Faith.  It made me smile!