December 2015 Crosslight now available online
The October 2015 issue of Crosslight is now available online. Click here to access it.
Author Archives: CraigT
December 2015 Synod Newsletter
Advent Taize events in Melbourne
Taize CBD Advent Prayer
Where: Wesley Uniting Church, 48 Lonsdale St, Melbourne
When: Monday 21st December
Time: Music practice from 6pm, service commences at 6.30pm; Supper will follow 🙂
Join us for an evening of prayer and reflection during this busy Christmas period!
There is also another Taize advent prayer happening in Box Hill for those who are local:
Advent Taizé Liturgy on Thursday 17th December, 8.00 pm @
St Peter’s Anglican Church 1038 Whitehorse Rd, Box Hill.
Volunteers needed!
Keen to help out with the Taize prayers? We are looking for enthusiastic helpers to help with music (instruments and singing!), welcome, set up and pack up and prayer organisation. If you’re keen to be involved, send us an email!
Keen to visit Taize?
A group from Monbulk will be visiting the Taize community in January 2016.
They will be flying from Melbourne to Paris on January 1st, spending some time in Paris, staying at the Catholic hostel, Adveniat, and then proceeding to the Taize community around the 9th January to spend about 9 days.
Anyone who would like to join them is welcome. Please contact Libby Fensham: 0439 756 655
Looking forward to seeing you all at the CBD Taize Advent prayer!
Email: taize.melbourne@gmail.com
Check out our Facebook group:
The Christmas Bowl 2015
Each year Mark the Evangelist encourages its members and others to contribute to the Christmas Bowl, an annual appeal run by Act for Peace which raises funds for various national and international relief projects.
For an introduction to the focus of the appeal this year, click on the video below. The Christmas Bowl’s own home page is here. To contribute to the appeal, go directly to the appeal’s donation page.
Introduction to the Christmas Bowl Appeal 2015
LitBit Commentary – Rowan Williams on grace 1
“The gospel will not ever tell us we are innocent, but it will tell us we are loved; and in asking us to receive and consent to that love, it asks us to identify with, and make our own, love’s comprehensive vision of all we are and have been. That is the transformation of desire as it affects our attitude to our own selves – to accept what we have been, so that all of it can be transformed. It is a more authentic desire because more comprehensive, turning away from the illusory attraction of an innocence that cannot be recovered unless the world is unmade. Grace will remake but not undo.”
Rowan Williams, Resurrection, p.89
Christmas 2015 at Mark the Evangelist
Your are most welcome to join us at our Christmas celebrations this year!
Sunday December 20: a service of Advent carols and readings with Eucharist, 10am.
Christmas Eve: (we have no service at Mark the Evangelist, but commend the Christmas Eve services at St Mary’s Anglican Church – the 4pm “Kids’ Christmas” and the 11.30pm Christmas Eve Midnight Mass)
Christmas Day: Worship with Eucharist, 9.30am
Normal services will continue, 10am, on December 27 and throughout January
Mark the Evangelist Update – November 26 2015
Friends,
the latest MtE news update:
- Advent begins this Sunday! The lectionary readings for the new liturgical year can be found via the link on our worship page.
- There will be a special meeting of the congregation following morning tea on Sunday 6 December to adopt the 2016 Budget and to appoint the auditor for the year ended 31 December 2015. Copies of the Agenda and recommended Budget are available in the narthex on Sunday.
- The most recent update on the Synod’s Major Strategic Review is here.
- St George’s Anglican Church in Travancore has a concert series coming up in 2016 which some MtE folk might be interested in; the details are here.
- You might be interested in an Advent Service at Auburn Uniting Church this coming Sunday.
- AND, see the image below for details of the fundraising concert following worship this coming Sunday November 29!
Craig
LitBit Commentary – Rowan Williams on the Eucharist 13
“Celebrating the Eucharist not only reminds us that we are invited to be guests; it also reminds us that we are given the freedom to invite others to be guests as well. We have experienced the hospitality of God in Christ; our lives are therefore set free to be hospitable… Being in the neighbourhood of Jesus is sharing Jesus’ freedom to invite – to make our lives and our communities places of welcome for those most deeply in need of solidarity, of fellowship.”
Rowan Williams, Being Christian, p.46f
LitBit Commentary – Timothy Radcliffe on the Eucharist 2
Think of the domination, exploitation and pollution of man and nature that goes with bread, all the bitterness of competition and class struggle, all the organized selfishness of tariffs and price-rings, all the wicked oddity of a world distribution that brings plenty to some and malnutrition to others, bringing them to that symbol of poverty we call the bread line. And wine too – fruit of the vine and work of human hands, the wine of holidays and weddings … This wine is also the bottle, the source of some of the most tragic forms of human degradation: drunkenness, broken homes, sensuality, debt. What Christ bodies himself into is bread and wine like this, and he manages to make sense of it, to humanize it. Nothing human is alien to him. If we bring bread and wine to the Lord’s Table, we are implicating ourselves in being prepared to bring to God all that bread and wine mean. We are implicating ourselves in bringing to God, for him to make sense of, all which is broken and unlovely. We are implicating ourselves in the sorrow as well as the joy of the world.
Timothy Radcliffe, Why Go to Church? p.130
LitBit Commentary – Rowan Williams on the Eucharist 12
“The Eucharist demonstrates that material reality can become charged with Jesus’ life, and so proclaimed hope for the whole world of matter. The material, habitually used as a means of exclusion, of violence, can become a means of communication. Matter as hoarded or dominated or exploited speaks of the distortion and ultimate severance of relationship, and as such can only be a sign of death… The matter of the Eucharist, carrying the presence of the risen Jesus, can only be a sign of life, of triumph over the death of exclusion and isolation”
Rowan Williams, Resurrection, p.112f