James Woodward

These lectionary resources were originally written for RSCM Sunday by Sunday magazine and are reprinted here with their permission. For further information about their work do visit   Sunday by Sunday https://www.rscm.com/music-and-resources/our-magazines/planning-worship/sunday-by-sunday-magazine/   Sunday 20 August The Tenth Sunday after Trinity/The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost/The Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time Common Worship Lectionary Proper 15   Genesis 45.1–15 Joseph is reconciled to his brothers Psalm 133 How good it is when kindred live together in unity! Romans 11.1–2a, 29–32 God…

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  These lectionary resources were originally written for RSCM Sunday by Sunday magazine and are reprinted here with their permission. For further information about their work do visit Planning worship     Sunday 13 August 2017 The Ninth Sunday after Trinity   Common Worship Lectionary/Revised Common Lectionary Proper 14   Genesis 37.1–4, 12–28 Joseph dreams he will become great and tells his brothers, who sell him into slavery Psalm 105.1–6, 16–22, 45b* Praise for God who rescued Joseph from slavery…

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St Augustine wrote of God in his ‘Confessions’: “You, my God, are supreme… You are the most hidden from us and yet the most present amongst us, the most beautiful and yet the most strong, ever enduring and yet we cannot comprehend you. You are unchangeable and yet you change all things. You are never new, never old, and yet all things have new life from you.”

  a stone at dawn cold water in the basin these walls’ rough plaster imageless after the hammering of so much insistence on the need for naming after the travesties that passed as faces, grace: the unction of sheer nonexistence upwelling in this hyacinthine freshet of the unnamed the faceless  Amy Clampitt

   “Nothing holds firm.  Everything is here today and gone tomorrow.   But the good things of life– truth, justice, and beauty– all great accomplishments need time, constancy, and memory, or they degenerate. The man who feels neither responsibility towards the past nor desire to shape the future is one who forgets.  And I do not know how one can really get at such a person and bring him to his senses.”                                                   -Dietrich Bonhoeffer (d. 1945)

  The French scientist and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin sums it up nicely in his book “The Divine Milieu.” He writes: “God obviously has no need of the products of your busy activity since he could give himself everything without you. The only thing that concerns him, the only thing he desires intensely, is your faithful use of your freedom and the preference you accord him over the things around you. Try to grasp this: the things that are…

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  Rublev One day, God walked in, pale from the grey steppe, slit-eyed against the wind, and stopped, said, Colour me, breathe your blood into my mouth. I said, Here is the blood of all our people, these are their bruises, blue and purple, gold, brown, and pale green wash of death. These (god) are the chromatic pains of flesh, I said, I trust I shall make you blush, O I shall stain you with the scars of birth For…

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  fresh life   and then my heart pulled itself apart and, filled to the brim with a new light, overflowed with fresh life.   now even the heavens are thankful that because of love i have become the giver of light   Rumi

Wherever we go exploring in the world around us, we find mysteries. Our planet is covered by continents and oceans whose origin we cannot explain. Our atmosphere is constantly stirred by poorly understood disturbances that we call weather and climate. The visible matter in the universe is outweighed by a much larger quantity of dark invisible matter that we do not understand at all. The origin of life is a total mystery, and so is the existence of human consciousness….

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  Vision is quite simply about seeing. In religious terms it means seeing the world as God’s world. It means refusing to conform to the world’s standards and values, or to go along with that cynical pessimism which some call realism but is in fact a terrible, destructive despair. To believe in God is to believe that there is a power for good in the world, a power that makes itself known in the deepest and most creative drives and…

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  Matthew 3 The Proclamation of John the Baptist 3In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, 2‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’* 3This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, ‘The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” ’ 4Now John wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food…

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