• Palm Sunday

    There’s no sermon from yesterday to upload. It is the only Sunday in the year when we have no preaching and simply let the story do the work. It is our custom on Palm Sunday to read the Passion story – that’s the story of the end of Jesus’s life from whichever gospel we have been reading through the year.

    Here at St Mary’s, the congregation, who are the body of Christ, read the words of Jesus whilst two people at the front narrate the rest of the story.

    Yesterday is probably the chilliest Palm Sunday on record. Here in this part of the world, we usually associate Holy Week with a growing sense of spring. New life is all around us. This year, it feels as though it hasn’t quite arrived.

    However, that’s a reminder that Holy Week is celebrated in all kinds of contexts. I struggle a bit working out how people could celebrate Easter in the autumn, but that, of course, is what happens in the southern hemisphere. There must be places where Palm Sunday is always held in the snow and it is hard to imagine what that is like.

    As it was yesterday, there was not much snow here. Much of the rest of the country was covered in it but it was a clear, if bracing day.

    I found myself taking to liturgical gloves.

    Brrr.

7 responses to “C of E Border Crossing”

  1. Eamonn Avatar

    I’m fizzing too! It’s not helped, either, by those of our own members who refer to us as ‘the English Church’.

  2. agatha Avatar
    agatha

    That is completely outrageous! Maybe the SEC should have talks with the Muslims and then we could declare Fatwas.

    Or is this the CoE’s off the wall attempt to solve the women bishops/gay bishops question by moving to nae bishops?

  3. FrPaulB Avatar
    FrPaulB

    As an English Anglican I’m pretty embarrassed. So much for the “Anglican Communion” we’re supposed to be busy preserving by setting up covenants and writing letters.

  4. Martin Ritchie Avatar
    Martin Ritchie

    Well, maybe this is a good thing for the SEC? At least we are not being lumped in as “Church of England” which is perhaps a step forward. The future for “state” churches in the UK seems to me to be shaky to say the least, so perhaps it’s to the benefit of the SEC to not be part of that! It is rather surprising that there is no mention of the SEC in the “history” part of the paper, other than a cursory reference to the continuing episcopalian element after 1690. Maybe all this means that we should feel completely free to reject the Anglican covenant as totally irrelevant and a hindrance to the mission of the SEC?

  5. fr dougal Avatar
    fr dougal

    I’m heading for the West Port to saddle up! Bring back Clavers and the dragoons!

  6. John Lindsay Avatar
    John Lindsay

    The CofE CofS meetings have been going on for a very long time as two national churches. The recent report is actually designed to include the SEC – check facts with ICRC or read the report itself!

  7. kelvin Avatar

    Hi John, nice to hear from you.

    I’ve read the report and was not impressed by it. I suppose I am glad that the SEC is to be included next time, something that I acknowledged above that was to happen.

    I’m entirely unimpressed with the C of E appointing one of their bishops as an emissary to the C of S though. Very much border crossing. Very inappropriate.

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