Hello everyone. 

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A few miles from Rhyl, where I grew up, is the picturesque, and by now quite sizeable, village of Dyserth. The name is the clue that its existence is rooted in Celtic Christianity. Like Dysart, in Fife, it’s an invocation of the desert in which so much of Christian contemplative practice emerged, and of course this goes back to Jesus himself, and his forty days and forty nights in the wilderness. Even in well-irrigated (!) Celtic landscapes, the desert isn’t far away. 

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Our Presbytery Prayers this week fall on Ash Wednesday. It’s a day we Presbyterians are aware of sometimes just as the day after the pancakes, sometimes when we see faint marks on the foreheads of friends and neighbours and say “Of course! They’re Catholic/Episcopalian…” (and probably reflect on the austere beauty of practices in other traditions) or if we choose – and as Presbyterians, we have the option – the beginning of our own disciplined pilgrimage towards Easter. 

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When we think of Jesus in the desert, a particular resonance exists this year; I’d imagine that most people have experienced the pandemic as a wilderness of sorts, and I know many people who have actually called it that. But again, we remember that Jesus’ time in the desert was sandwiched between his baptism and the start of his ministry. It had a beginning and an end. 

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The water, the dove, the voice; Jesus’ baptism was the threshold at the entrance to the forty days. The temptations – according to Matthew and Luke, anyway; Mark is ambivalent – mark the exit from the experience. 

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The water, the dove, the voice – there’s an old tendency to represent these things at his baptism as the moment Jesus understood the scope of his mission, and fully grasped who he was and what he was to do. That makes me very uneasy; the Gospels don’t invite us to imagine Jesus’ states of mind, and when we need to know them – the anger in the Temple, the grief at Lazarus’ grave, the agony in the garden – they show us, and tell us, unambiguously. There’s no hint in the Gospels that his baptism was a moment of insight for Jesus. But affirmation, yes, that’s certainly there and the audible proclamation of the Father’s good pleasure, the proclamation that Jesus has, and is, everything he needs and needs to be, to do this. 

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And if we have reflected on that during our extended stay in the pandemic wilderness, haven’t we also discovered this  – that we, in our perplexity and apprehension at what lies ahead,  are sufficient for the work God has given us, in ways we hadn’t imagined? 

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Whether we observe Lent as a discipline or not, forty days of reflecting on who we are, what we have and how we shall approach the work and ministry before us now, is surely no bad thing for us in our lives and congregations, and maybe no bad thing for us as a Presbytery either.
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Yours in our shared work

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Owain 

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In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” Mark 1: 9-15

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1) Jesus Christ, our Starting-Point

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Lord Jesus, 

your ministry before you, 

your baptism – the voice, the dove, all that, behind you now – 

you went into the wilderness. 

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We cannot imagine how he felt, Lord –

that distant Jesus, then, looking out beyond the wilderness

and over what he could see of his ministry – 

but we know how we feel, looking out over this wilderness,

and over our ministry, individual and shared. 

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We cannot presume to guess

what you thought, what you felt, what you imagined.

but we can trust the humanity of these things, Incarnate Son – 

because of your solidarity with us

in incarnation. 

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“We cannot presume to guess,” we say – 

and yet, we do. 

We seek reassurance, in our perplexity.

We know how we feel – 

and all the things we feel – 

and we need to know that you understand,

and that we are understood.  

Assure us that, in your humanity,

our humanity, 

is known from within, brought to God, loved, and understood. 

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2) Where we are starting from… 

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We come to you as your Presbytery in prayer. 

We come to you with, and from, your congregations in Argyll. 

We come to you examining our lives as individuals

and our shared life as your Church. 

We are filled with apprehension, 

as we prepare to emerge from our wilderness

into a challenging, challenged world. 

Were you, too, Lord? 

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We are filled with anticipation

of the work that lies ahead.

Were you, too, Lord? 

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In ways of being and staying together,

of worshipping and witnessing and sharing the Gospel amid challenge and strangeness, 

we have discovered that we have what we need. 

Is that what you encountered in your baptism

when the dove came and the voice spoke,

and the Father pronounced himself well-pleased in his Son? 

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What we are, where we are, how we are, in the midst of all of this –

reassure us that you understand. 

Our reassurance is that you have been here,

that you understand, 

and that you will bring us through. 

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3) For access to the true wilderness 

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Desert, Dysart, Dyserth;

our forebears turned aside from life and its patterns, 

to seek the healing, repairing peace of the wilderness,

as Jesus sought you, and found you there.

They simply called these spaces “desert”

and came to seek you in them. 

The desert is not far away. 

God is close. 

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Yet we have lived these months in another desert. 

Around us is the disruption, hard and hurtful

Of life’s patterns, of relationships and expectations,

in this wilderness that we did not choose.

But we can turn aside from this, too, 

to seek you, and be found by you

in the desert-place of prayer.

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Spirit of God, who led Jesus into the wilderness, 

lead us now. 

Give us forty serious days,

to turn the lessons of COVID’s wilderness

into renewed understanding of your presence with us, 

new preparedness for the ministry ahead of us, 

a deepened understanding that where we are

Jesus has been.

Turn our pandemic wilderness into the wilderness of Lent.

Make this time a strangeness our space of contemplation. 

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4) Prayers for others

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We withdraw from the flux and flow and noise of life, to pray;

but we, like Jesus, are immersed in the world, for the world. 

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We pray for the world. 

Our experience is so limited, our imagination so constrained; 

we easily reduce the whole world’s experience to our own. 

Forgive us where the immediacy of our experience has denied us perspective,

and we have forgotten that this is a global pandemic. 

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We pray for the dedicated work which has produced vaccines, 

and which will be required to meet the virus’ new mutations. 

We pray for the ongoing work of vaccination, 

giving thanks for the skill and stamina of those who organize and execute it. 

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We pray for our society, frozen in lockdown,

anxious about what thawing circumstances may reveal, 

the stresses and fractures that may emerge,

the damage to economic, artistic, productive life. 

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We thank you for glimmers of hope, intimations of resilience, 

manifestations of kindness and care,.

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We pray for our communities, our congregations, 

And all those lives directly in contact with ours. 

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We pray for those whose needs we especially know, 

and those around us, whose needs we have not seen – 

especially where we might have, and should have.

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[SILENCE] 

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And as Jesus taught us, so we pray: Our Father… 

Hello, everyone.

Next month, I celebrate a melancholy anniversary. It’ll be a year since I saw my father. He celebrated his 94^th birthday at the end of last month, and shortly afterwards he met his great-granddaughter. I have no real idea when I shall see either of them.  I speak to Dad every day, and my brother’s family keep me in touch with Eira-Lily’s rapid development. And yet… 

Realizing I’d miss Dad’s birthday got to me. Realizing it will shortly be a year since I saw him got to me. I hadn’t realized the extent to which the anniversaries would. I would imagine you’re having similar experiences. 

“We should have been…” One of the team who offer the worship we upload weekly to the UCB YouTube channel asked me yesterday “What’s happening with Harvest this year?” – and I was stunned. I hadn’t given any thought to it! It wasn’t on my radar despite the fact that it recurs every year. It’s in that sense an “anniversary”. 

And I was surprised at the emotions this stirred in me. We decorate the Communion Table rather than the church nowadays, but in a way, that has let us bring out the global and pan-human themes much more strongly. 

And we last did this a year ago., The anniversary is upon us. We’ll be celebrating harvest home the Sunday after next – and I’m not sure how to do it yet! But what felt like shock and disappointment – and “We should have been…” suddenly feels like a liberation into new possibilities of thought, and symbolization, and thanksgiving.  

But it also weighs heavily. “We should have been…” “A year ago, we were…” The anniversaries are painful, and as a winter second wave seems to grow in likelihood, and the virus finds ways of asserting that we aren’t on top of it yet, we see some of the really significant Christian anniversaries coming. Christmas. “We should have been…” 

As Christians, we must, of course, “rejoice in all things” as Paul tells the Philippians. But was there ever a more challengingly honest thinker in the Christian tradition than Paul. From him we learn that rejoicing must never become denial, or we let our refusal-to-look-at-things-as-they-are steamroller, and hurt, people who are hard-put to find things in which to rejoice. And maybe, each one of us is sometimes among such people.  If you are finding the times difficult, especially as the anniversaries come round, you are in all our prayers, as I always know I am.  

Blessings, and the strength God gives in Christ, 

When you come into the land which the LORD your God gives you for an inheritance, and have taken possession of it, and live in it, you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest from your land that the LORD your God gives you, and you shall put it in a basket, and you shall go to the place which the LORD your God will choose, to make his name to dwell there. And you shall go to the priest who is in office at that time, and say to him… Deuteronomy 26:1-3

Then he said to them, “Go your way, eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions to him for whom nothing is prepared; for this day is holy to our Lord; and do not be grieved, for the joy of the LORD is your strength.” So the Levites stilled all the people, saying, “Be quiet, for this day is holy; do not be grieved.” And all the people went their way to eat and drink and to send portions and to make great rejoicing, because they had understood the words that were declared to them. Nehemiah 8: 10-12

For no such passover had been kept since the days of the judges who judged Israel, or during all the days of the kings of Israel or of the kings of Judah; but in the eighteenth year of King Josi’ah this passover was kept to the LORD in Jerusalem. 2 Kings 23:22-23

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.  Let all men know your forbearance. The Lord is at hand. Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Philippians 4:4-7

We sometimes forget, Holiest God,

To marvel. 

More than that, we often cannot rise

to the heights of living

from which we can look out and marvel – 

marvel at creation, 

and, utterly inadequately,

at the Creator who sustains all things. 

Time runs away with us, 

events press in on us, 

our time for prayer is compressed and constrained,

or sapped by the day we have had, 

or the day ahead, and its duties and difficulties. 

And we have been sapped by the strangeness of these times. 

And then we grasp it:

• the things we forgot to look at – and the strength we could have drawn from them;
• the things that do not change, which are reassuring, and point to you; 
• the things we did not, do not, cannot acknowledge, because it is painful to do so, in times like these.

What shall we confess before you, loving Lord? 

You do not wish us to “confess” our pain – you wish only to salve and heal it. 

You do not wish us to “confess” our smallness, in a huge, challenging landscape of challenge – 

Because you know our smallness, and wish only to call us into the largeness of life in Christ. 

You do not wish us to confess the littleness of our faith – because you know we have faith; it is your gift.

So we confess our denial,

Our resistance to the idea that “things get to us”,

And above all, our insistence to others

That they should not let things “get to” them. 

Lord, have mercy on us.

Christ, have mercy on us.

Lord, have mercy on us.

Especially now, as the anniversaries come around, 

As our congregations approach them in radically different ways –

Distanced, some even (necessarily, we know) denied attendance on that Sunday,

No singing of harvest hymns

Perhaps no singing of carols,

Your apostle tells us “rejoice in all things – again I say, rejoice!”
We thank you for the Paul who looks at things as they are,

at hard, bruising reality for the congregations he knows so well, 

and then tells them “in all these things, we are more than conquerors,

through the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord!” –

and tells us exactly the same thing!

Help us in these unsettling times

To acknowledge the impulse to say

“We should have been…” 

Help us to respond with compassion and understanding when our members say it – 

Help us to own their sadness. 

And then let us bear witness to them,

By grasping for ourselves, 

That the strangeness strips away the peripheral things,

And lets us penetrate to the heart of what we celebrate, and remember

In the recurrent things – the anniversaries. 

“We should have been…” 

and we cannot – 

but you, Lord, open to us this possibility, 

truer to the times,

authentic, and full of hope, 

not looking back to last year, and every year before, 

but forward into a changed world,

in which, in Jesus Christ, we shall still be 

more than conquerors.

So let us approach Harvest Thanksgiving,

for there is a harvest, 

there is food, even abundance. 

there is consoling reference 

to the regularity beyond this intrusive strangeness. 

And there are the urgent themes

that command us, we know, to look beyond COVID:

what we have done, what we are doing, 

what we must as a human family do,

to save and protect our blue, orbiting home. 

There is the irony, we know, 

that we have collectively lost sight of these things, 

distracted by a serious virus which, it seems, 

may have arisen from the way the human species has been feeding itself, 

and farming its animals. 

Father, forgive. 

In the midst of this strangeness, 

Let our Harvest Thanksgivings this year

Be grounded in truth, 

Joyous in celebrating your creation,

Honest and penitent in contemplating what we have done to it,

And bracing, consoling, energizing and full of hope

In inviting our folk to keep the feast.

Let our strange, honest, faith-filled Harvest

presage the strange, honest and faith-filled feasts

which may lie ahead this winter.

In the holy silence, we bring our prayers

For those whose needs we know

Or think we glimpse, or can guess at. 

Open our minds in this silence

To possibilities of prayer which can only come from the Spirit’s work within us…

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WE KEEP SILENCE                                                        . .

And as Jesus taught us, so we pray: Our Father… 

Hello again, everyone

I’m writing this on a bitterly cold November day. It’s a pity it’s the eighth of September! I’ve been thinking a lot about the weather lately – well, we all have, and one of the things we’ve perhaps missed without noticing it has been the casual conversing with strangers about the weather which is such a deep cultural thing with all the people of this archipelago! 

Jesus taught us to look at the weather. More specifically, he urged his disciples to read the times as they were accustomed to reading the weather. Anyone knows that weather forecasting is not a form of prophecy! But weather forecasting, like prophecy, is immersed in present realities, in the flux of change, in the pointing-out of trends and tendencies – and how the pre-exilic prophets indicted the trends of their times! 

In a September that feels positively Novemberish, except for the days that feel like a late-delivered parcel of tepid summer, maybe it doesn’t seem odd to dwell on a thaw, when the winter is before us. In a sense, that’s precisely where we are as a society. 

As I write, lockdowns are occurring and spreading – Glasgow, East Dunbartonshire, East Rernfrewshire, and, now Renfrewshire. As the First Minister reminded us, these things are not happening in the same context as they were in May; we have moved on. But we are justifiably anxious about the winter. 

Yet there is a sense of a thaw. In a sense, it’s the privilege of the Church to be a marker of that. Cautiously, and with model care and responsibility, we are reopening. As we are called always to be, we are a sign that there is a “beyond” to this. 

But then, our calling is to be a sign that there is always a “beyond” to things as they are. That’s the shape of the hope of the Kingdom. You can’t get as far into the Christian faith as the end of the Lord’s Prayer without discovering that! 

So the focus of our prayers this week is the “Thaw.” In a sense, hope always makes things more complicated! Hopelessness is, at least, as simple as food in the freezer – nothing is happening, and nothing will happen until someone defrosts something. God is the God who defrosts the hopelessness of the world, and we are God’s witnesses to this, in Jesus Christ. 

Yours in our shared calling, 

He gives snow like wool;

he scatters hoarfrost like ashes.

He casts forth his ice like morsels;

who can stand before his cold?

He sends forth his word, and melts them;

he makes his wind blow, and the waters flow. Psalm 147: 16-18

And the Pharisees and Sadducees came, and to test him they asked him to show them a sign from heaven. He answered them, “When it is evening, you say, `It will be fair weather; for the sky is red.’ And in the morning, `It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times. Matthew 16:1-3

Jesus taught us to seek

to read the signs of the times, Father,

as farmers and fisherfolk read the mornings, the evenings, the seasons.

We have come to an early thaw, 

though there is still more winter before us, 

and our apprehension is

that the winter may be hard. 

Yet we are joyous, and our hope is in you.

Lord, teach us the lessons of these times, 

that we may bring forward the things we have learned, 

the things we have gained, the things we have been given,

that we shall need for what lies ahead. 

Why is it, Lord, that the thaw is so much colder 

than what we call “freezing cold”?

Why is the hope of a beyond to the winter

so damp, and half-lit, and uncertain? 

Remind us that hope is real, 

and that hope and faith pull us into the future.

Warm us against the chill of change

with the constancy of your love.

Our churches and congregations are emerging,

bringing with them the lessons they have learned. 

We must learn new lessons now,

not least How To Do This –

and how to do it safely. 

Ropes across pews, 

A4 notices with instructions

where and were not to sit, 

masks, sanitizers, one-way systems – 

these are the signs of love in loving churches,

along with the cheery, encouraging faces 

of teams trained to welcome and care

as well as to regulate, with meticulous love. 

We pray, in love, 

for the world you love,

which Jesus loved unto death, 

even death on a cross. 

We pray for a world so often love-lacking,

In which frustration leads easily to foolish defiance, 

pride to the repudiation of protective masks – 

protective of the other, whose needs are forgotten – 

in which contempt for expert knowledge,

arrogance, and self-assertion fed by fear

lead the easily led, 

like sheep gone astray. 

We seek to pray lovingly

Through our own frustration

for those who see the thaw

as a return to what was, previously. 

Things as they were

were not as you willed them to be.

Things as they were before –

you have given us to see more clearly, 

and many to see for the first time – 

could not, we know, be sustained. 

The other side of this pandemic winter,

give our world to understand, 

they are no more sustainable. 

We take so much forward with us

as your people always do, when you liberate them:

Teach us that newness of thought, 

burnished vision,  a sense that losing things we loved can be, 

sad but not tragedy, not deprivation but disencumbering, 

a lightening of burden for the road ahead. 

Remind us, in this week

that the lectionary invites us, if we use it,

to reflect on the Exodus,

that greater than the treasure the Israelites grabbed

as they left Egypt 

(none of which served them in the desert, 

save providing the gold for the Golden Calf!)

was and is the knowledge gained of you, Lord God:

• God who sets us free, 
• God who brings us through all things,
• God of the Exodus,

and, as you have revealed, 

• God who raised Jesus Christ from the dead. 

Now we await our liberation.

Now we read the signs, and feel the thaw; 

Lord, let prudence be the sign of our hope,

Caution, our confidence

As we embrace what now begins. 

We know that, for all the raw, chill, exciting thaw

we are not done with this winter yet, 

and what lies ahead will not be simple. 

We pray for our congregations, as their lives unlock

We pray for our communities, as they take stock of what has happened,

And prepare for what lies ahead

We pray for our society, 

amid changes barely known, not understood,

wrought by the times we are passing through.

We pray for Argyll. 

We pray for those whose needs we know…

And those whose needs we cannot know… 

Hear us in the Holy Silence, grounded in the peace the world cannot give…

[Silence] 

And as Jesus taught us, so we pray: Our Father… 

Lord, let the chill of the times brace us!
Let the rawness of this thawing fill us with hope! 

Energize us to plunge into cold reality,

warmed by the warmth of your love to share!  AMEN

Hello, everyone

Once again, I’ve been fretting! I fret a lot; it’s the good old Presbyterian principle that if you worry enough, everything will be fine; it’s when you neglect the worrying that things go pear-shaped!

I’ll tell you why I was fretting. I’m always aware that what I am sharing each Wednesday, is to a large extent “the view from here”, and that each of you is in a different place. Inevitably, that’s how things are, and  I think that in some ways, that may have been intensified over the last few weeks, despite the increased closeness many of us feel this pandemic experience has brought us. 

Anyway, from where I am, it seems as though we are further into this strange stage of the journey, in which we are experiencing more freedom, and yet still aware of very significant restriction. I wonder if perhaps this registers in a particular way with us, Christ’s Church, because we are called to live in a freedom that isn’t yet realized in the life of the world. Yet we have been feeling the same confinement as everyone else. 

We seem to agree that our experience has been a very particular mix – of liberation into new forms of Church life combined with intense longing for the resumption of face-to-face community. And we all experience this mix differently! In that sense, there really is only “the view from here”. It really is different for all of us, and for each member of each congregation in the Presbytery. We need to remember this, as our congregations and their Sessions process this changing situation. 

This all makes demands on us, in terms of experiences, and ways of looking at them, that may be very different from our own. We have to work harder, to enter, empathically and imaginatively, into the experience of the other. All around, I seem to pick up signs that we’re doing that. 

But all this also reminds us that our life in the world as Christians, and as the Church, is very much betwixt and between, “this, but also that”.  We are simultaneously “sinners and justified” as Martin Luther says; the Kingdom is “already, and not yet”; and now, we are both captives of this situation, and liberated within it – prisoners, you might say, yet simultaneously free. 

That threw me back into thinking of one of my favourite passages from Sunday School on; Paul and Silas, in prison, when an earthquake rocks the jail, the doors of the cells are open – and they don’t move! Captives in a cell, they don’t need to stage a jail-break to gain their freedom. They were as free before the doors creaked open as they are now.

It’s been at the back of my mind since lockdown began. It isn’t a slick or easy story to interpret, though. So I thought I’d tackle it with you this week. This really is, then, “the view from here”. I hope, though, that you may find it useful, and that it works as a suggested focus for our shared prayer this week. 

Yours in the Adventure of Christ, 

Out of my distress I called on the LORD;
the LORD answered me and set me free. 

(Literally: “Out of a narrow place, I called on the Lord

The Lord responded to me, and put me in a wide place.”) Psalm 118 verse 5

But about midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them, and suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened and every one’s fetters were unfastened. When the jailer woke and saw that the prison doors were open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, supposing that the prisoners had escaped. But Paul cried with a loud voice, “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.” Acts 16:25-28

(i) 

Doors swing open,

And we realize that we were never constrained;

fetters fall away, 

and we grasp that we are not captive,

breadth and spaciousness invite us out,

In you, we are free. 

This is our faith. 

Yet, Lord, we confess,

that with us, things are never that simple. 

Over these days and months, 

our experience has been bafflingly many-sided, 

sometimes full of surprising reassurance, 

sometimes profoundly challenging. 

We have known your liberating presence,

yet we have not always felt free. 

We are uneasy, and we reproach ourselves. 

Should we not expect this, Lord?

In our lives in the world, hour by hour, day by day,

Do we not always know your freedom

Along with constraint? 

Do we not always know your liberation

as both present, and promised,

promised, yet present? 

(ii)

We reflect on Paul and Silas, 

And the pattern of faith in their story; 

how, no longer locked down, but set free, 

in the narrow confines of their cell,

they lived the unlimited breadth of faith. 

When the ground shook, and the doors opened,

they accepted the captivity of the prison, 

and stayed, and sat with the prisoners,

and sang. 

We ask: is this our task, Lord, 

our calling as Church and Presbytery, 

and in each congregation, 

in Argyll? 

Are we to rejoice, and sing our freedom, 

So that our neighbours can hear, and have hope? 

We live among people who need to hear 

our songs, and our singing. 

We live among people 

who will still live – as we will – in the aftermath of this,

when containment 

has become suppression, 

has become elimination,

and yet, the world will have changed. 

They will live with increased unemployment, 

insecurity in their businesses, 

stretched income, stretched resources,

unresolved grief, 

and the shock that this could happen

in a world they thought they knew. 

How shall we sing with them,

How shall we sing freedom, God’s liberation, to them, 

If we do not admit that we share their constraint?

If we do not sit with them in their imprisonment? 

We pray for them. 

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We keep a time of silent prayer

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(iii)

We pray for our Presbytery:

for each other simply as sisters and brothers in Christ;

for our office-bearers, and conveners, and the ongoing work of committees;

for those areas of the life of our Court – your Court –

which are frustrated and frustrating in this strangeness. 

(iv)

We pray for our congregations. 

We shall not sing together for a while. 

For now we must sing in the safety of our homes.  

How symbolic this is, Lord. 

We pray, each of us, for our own congregations, 

the faces we know, the presences we miss 

As a Presbytery, we pray 

For our congregations, all of them, together.

We pray for them in the frustrations they feel, 

and the anxieties they have,

the longing to return, and the trepidation at the thought. 

We pray for Ministers, Interim Moderators, Sessions, 

ministering, mediating, listening and leading. 

We pray that your people may know

the breadth of life that is ours, in you,

amid the still narrow living of pandemic caution. 

We pray for our church, for all the churches, and the whole Church on earth. 

We pray with the Church on earth and the Church in Heaven.

Together, we pray the prayer that Jesus taught us: Our Father…

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We emerge. We are brought out. 

And this is our experience of you, 

God of the Exodus, God of the Exiles, 

God of the Resurrection,

God of our liberation, in Christ. 

This is what you do. This is how we know you. 

You set us free. 

Is this not what Paul and Silas sang 

to the prisoners in their captivity, 

And made it no captivity at all? 

AMEN