Thoughts from The Vicarage with looking ahead
Greetings on a chilly Boxing Day – please find Pews News attached! It’s been such a joy to welcome so many to worship in all our Valley churches over the last week. Thank you to all those who dressed each church with such care and attention.
Please remember, a single service on Sun 28th BCP @ St Michael’s & All Angels.
We then approach the visit of the Wise Men at Epiphany Sunday Jan 4th and wonderfully, I will be baptising Eddi on the 11th as we celebrate the Baptism of Christ. Epiphany sees three Gentiles who have intuited that his birth is good news for them too. Malcolm Guite, priest & poet writes “This is an Epiphany, a revelation, that the birth of Christ is not one small step for a local religion but a great leap for all humanity.”
The Magi
It might have been just someone else’s story;
Some chosen people get a special king,
We leave them to their own peculiar glory,
We don’t belong, it doesn’t mean a thing.
But when these three arrive they bring us with them,
Gentiles like us, their wisdom might be ours;
A steady step that finds an inner rhythm,
A pilgrim’s eye that sees beyond the stars.
They did not know his name but still they sought him
They came from otherwhere but still they found;
In palaces they found those who sold and bought him,
But in the filthy stable, hallowed ground.
Their courage gives our questing hearts a voice
To seek, to find, to worship, to rejoice.
The Baptism Of Christ, another Epiphany is Jan 11th. Malcolm Guite writes: “here we glimpse the whole Trinity: The Father blesses the Son, and the Spirit descends as a dove. This is not only a revelation about God, but also about us, for our own baptism draws us into the Son, so that the Spirit falls on us, and the Father says of us too ‘this is my beloved child.”
The Baptism of Christ
Beginning here we glimpse the Three-in-one;
The river runs, the clouds are torn apart,
The Father speaks, the Spirit and the Son
Reveal to us the single loving heart
That beats behind the being of all things
And calls and keeps and kindles us to light.
The dove descends, the spirit soars and sings
‘You are belovèd, you are my delight!’
In that swift light and life, as water spills
And streams around the Man like quickening rain,
The voice that made the universe reveals
The God in Man who makes it new again.
He calls us too, to step into that river,
To die and rise and live and love forever.
Thoughts from The Vicarage now takes a break.
God bless you all over the season of Epiphany and a Very Happy New Year as I take leave from Monday December 29th to Saturday January 3rd.
Julie
Revd Julie Mintern Vicar Lambourn Valley Benefice