More than 35,000 people are reported missing across Australia each year, and although many are found, this is not always the case, and many families are left to deal with the pain of simply not knowing where their loved ones are, or what has happened to them. Today, as we do each year at the … Read more
Today we are all invited to our regular fifth Sunday Parish brunch, where we have an opportunity to share food and fellowship with one another. Sharing food in this way should lie at the heart of our congregational life. We do this on a day when the lectionary takes us to John’s account of … Read more
On this Sunday each year, we mark Mary Magdalene’s Feast Day. We do this because she was undoubtedly a leader in the early church, the apostle to the apostles, sent out by Jesus to announce the resurrection, and one of the few women we take note of in our annual cycle of ‘saints’. We know … Read more
This week we have all been watching the rescue of the young Thai soccer team with bated breath. Although like me, you were probably fearful that getting them out of the flooded caves would prove to be too hard, it was wonderful to have those doubts confounded as skilled divers and medics completed this amazing, … Read more
In today’s Gospel Jesus confronts the disciples’ complacency. No longer can they simply sit at Jesus feet, learning how to be disciples. Now they have to step out of their comfort zone, and go out to share the good news they’ve heard and found with others. But there’s another complication to this sending out: they … Read more
This week’s Gospel story presents us with yet another picture of faith in action. In the stories Mark tells, so often it’s not the insiders, the disciples, who demonstrate faith, it’s outsiders who come to Jesus. So often in Mark’s telling of the Gospel story, the disciples, the insiders miss the point, don’t get … Read more
Today we have one of those very familiar Gospel stories. On the surface it’s a miracle story: Jesus reveals his power as he calms the wind and the sea. Just minutes before, the disciples had been in the most terrible storm of their lives. They were terrified. They were baling water, wrestling the wind-whipped sails, … Read more
Do you have a nickname? Does it display some hidden characteristic that other people can see, for good or bad? I met someone the other day whose nickname was ‘MacGyver’ because he could always fix anything for anyone. This Sunday we mark the Feast of St Barnabas, apostle and martyr, who was a man full of … Read more
At this point in the church’s year, we’ve come through festival after festival, celebration after celebration; Christmas and Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost and Trinity Sunday, all big occasions. Now we’ve entered that strange animal in the church calendar called Ordinary Time. We have a long stretch of time ahead of us, when we just go … Read more
Why do we bother going to Church on Sunday, when the rest of the world is simply pulling the doona over their head and catching some more sleep? I’m not sure what your own personal reasons are for Sunday church-going, but in Scripture it goes right back to the book of Genesis, when God rested from … Read more