Box Hill Baptist Church
Welcome to our church community.Archive for March, 2010
28 MARCH 2010
In God we trust.
In the One who comes humbly among us,
taking on our humanity and breaking our idols,
in God we trust.
Riding a donkey and weeping over Jerusalem,
receiving shouts of praise from the common people,
gaining the enmity of the proud and the powerful,
in God we trust.
Riding to face a destiny foretold by prophets,
entering the holy city but with no where to lay his head,
coming to his own but his own not receiving him,
facing cruel death for the sake of those who love him not,
in God we trust.
This Palm Sunday Man,
this Passion Sunday God,
in God we trust.
Wander – This Sunday evening.
Come and join us for a beautifully simple experience as we create a space to walk a Labyrinth, reflect, pray, listen. Wander and wonder.
There will be a short introduction to help everyone understand the Labyrinth and how to walk it, and then an open space for you to walk at your own pace, and/or just sit on the side and pray.
If you haven’t walked a Labyrinth before, we encourage you to come and experience it.
21 March 2010
7pm-8.30pm
14 March 2010
Today we reflect upon the story of the Prodigal Son, that wasteful young man, whose adventure eventually leads him home. We consider how we all can become ‘lost’, disoriented by life’s journey, and wonder about how that ‘re-orientation’ may occur. I share with you a prayer that has nourished me this week, by Bruce Prewer : God our motherly Father, our brotherly Saviour, our sisterly Spirit-Friend, we ask that in our prayers and in the ordinary affairs of each day, we may exhibit your generous spirit to other people. We pray for the millions of homeless people whom we will never meet but whose predicament we see on the TV. Please bless those humanitarian agencies who attempt to care for them, and all who give generously to support their work. We pray for unwanted or destitute people in our own country, from Darwin to Port Arthur and Port Headland to Byron Bay. Please give both wisdom and a generous spirit to Federal and State Governments, and strengthen the welfare ministry of churches. We pray for any among us here today, who with dignity and courage are secretly enduring misfortunes or ongoing worries. Please give your peace and healing to them, and keep us sensitive, that we may recognise a cry for help if it comes our way and respond generously. We pray for neighbours or workmates, and for those familiar but nameless faces we notice each day in train or bus, elevator, bank or supermarket. Please bless each according to their need, and without any prying or self importance on our part, make us ready to help in the hour of need. We pray for all the bewildered, lost souls; for young folk hitting out, puzzled adults who find that neither career nor family satisfy their deepest need, sour elderly folk who are jealous of the faith and happiness of others. Please gather the lost into your loving arms, and help each of us to treat awkward, prickly people with the generous respect that you have for each. Loving Saviour, seeking the lost and the unlovely, we worship you. Caring Spirit, enabling the weak and the meek, we worship you. Holy God, generous beyond all calculation, we worship you. Amen!
7 March 2010
May God bless us with discomfort at easy answers and half-truths
May God bless us with discomfort at superficial relationships
So that we may live deep within our hearts
May God bless us with anger at injustice and oppression
May God bless us with anger at exploitation of all people
So that we may work for justice and freedom
So that we may work for freedom and peace
So that we may work for justice
May God bless us with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, starvation and war
So that we may reach out our hands to comfort them,
and turn their pain, their pain, into joy
And may God bless us with enough foolishness
to believe that we can make a difference in this world
So that God can do what others claim cannot be done
Amen
28 February 2010
The extraordinary thing about Jesus is this capacity to recognize the frailty of others, because he is acutely aware of his own human frailty.
He has looked upon, existed within it, and knows it, as we saw last week in the desert. Today we see that he has the capacity to look on the folly of Jerusalem, for he realizes just what is being lost. Sure, he is angry at the injustice meted out on the poor and marginalized… but the reality is that he knows the authorities are cooking their own goose. He knows that ultimately, injustice and oppression lead to self-destruction. He knows that power breeds greed breeds division breeds destruction. And that has been the story of Jerusalem from that day to this. It is the story of the politics of church.
But there must be something more than politics and power that can unite, heal, restore. And that has to do with this picture of a man who discovers a clarity about who he is in God that can name reality as it is, aware that it will have a dramatic outcome for himself, but who also knows that he is part of a larger picture of the love of God that needs to find expression in the world. There is a perspective that acknowledgment that God’s expression transcends the bounds of establishment and reaches to the margins… right out, indeed, to where we are at. The Lenten story must be taken into our own story, where we can recognize Jesus in our world, walking the walk of integrity, walking along those who have been marginalized and wounded.
If we don’t do that, it is at our peril. If we don’t listen to the dissonant voices of the prophets, then we are deaf to what is going on around us. If we don’t look beyond to the plight of others, if we don’t become advocates for the marginalized, if we get too busy to cook a meal for the hungry, or close our door on an artist who is too much trouble, or refuse to take the risk to let someone in, if we forget that the bush is struggling with the worst drought in history and that farmers are being pushed off the land, if we close our eyes to the needs of our global village, then we will shoot ourselves in the foot. Our empty words will become the bullets. It’s a big challenge. But it is a challenge that will keep us honest.
Anne
