Times and Seasons

​Christian life is bound up with proclaiming the hopefulness of time. We do not see time as a mere human invention, measuring successive moments as they tick relentlessly towards oblivion. Rather all time belongs to God who is the creator and Lord of all existence, including space and time. In Jesus, God synchronises time to eternity, eternity to time, opening the cosmic cycles of the stars, sun, and moon; the natural seasons; the events of history; and the stages of each person's lifetime to the loving rhythm and ever-present abundance of God's eternal life as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Echoing the psalms, we might say, in Christ, time and eternity are met together; they have kissed each other.

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It is especially in its liturgical worship that the Church lives out its sharing in God's intimate concern for time. As Christians, in our spiritual sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, we participate in God's hallowing of time and space, of all that exists.​ This sacred task has both a weekly and yearly pattern.

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Sunday​

Sunday is the day consecrated to God, the Sabbath day of rest. It is eternity within regular time; the recurring feast of the victory of God's love over the forces of darkness and death; the day of Resurrection.​

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Keeping Sundays holy orders the purpose of each day of the week, allowing us to turn our work, joys, struggles, relationships, and very selves into offerings to God. In our Sunday worship, God receives, blesses, and transforms these gifts of our everyday lives, making them to be the means whereby we receive God's offering of himself. By making time and space in worship to lift up our hearts in awe and wonder and so give freely of ourselves to God, we are welcomed - mind, body, heart, and soul - into God's own life of self-offering love and are empowered to share God's love with others in all aspects of our existence.

 

This sanctification of our daily lives lies at the heart of the Sunday celebration of the Eucharist. As he promised at the Last Supper, Jesus comes amongst us, making our offerings of bread and wine into the sacramental gifts of his body and blood. By giving us a share in the gift of his self-giving presence, in his death and resurrection, we are remade into the communion of Christ's body alongside others and, with them, live out more fully both the truth of our shared humanity and our own personal identity and calling in fellowship with others.
 

The significance of Sunday morning as the main act of weekly worship is not arbitrary. It echoes the morning of 'the third day' when Jesus rose from the tomb. It is also the first day, not simply of the new week, but of the creation of a new heaven and earth. And it is also known as the eighth day in which all time is coming fruition beyond itself, when God shall be all in all.

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Easter​​​ and the Triduum

The celebration of Christ's death and resurrection at Easter is the epicentre and pattern of all Christian worship and life. Easter is the heart of the Christian faith from which radiates the light of God's transformative love that shines out in the lives of all who bear witness to Christ.

 

By his dying for us out of love on the Cross and his bursting forth from the tomb, Jesus subjected himself to the forces of death, darkness, and destruction, only to repurpose and overcome them. Jesus took death captive and shattered sin's hold over human life and the rest of creation. Through this mission, in his birth, life, death and rising to new life, Jesus unites, in his own person, our mortal existence to God's undying love, transforming our humanity and bringing us to new life in communion with the Father in the Spirit.

 

In this way, Easter reveals our true human destiny: to be fully alive within the love and knowledge of God. This means dying to self by living anew for and with others, as those who have been liberated from selfishness and violence, born into faith, hope, and love, who know the truth of and constant need for God's forgiveness and reconciliation, and are empowered, in all humility, courage and gentleness, to build up love's beauty, goodness, and truth within our lives, relationships, society, and world amid suffering and injustice.

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More fundamentally still, it is at Easter that Jesus reveals in his own person, in his full humanity and full divinity, the truth of God's nature and being as self-giving love. Easter tells us that God is an unbreakable communion of love - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - whose love resides at the heart of all things as their innermost and intimate truth, calling them into being for the sheer joy and beauty of what each thing is in itself, and bringing them to fulfilment in their glorious distinctiveness and interconnectedness. Most startlingly and challengingly, out of this same love God affirms and cooperates with our freedom insofar as we embody God's creative and restorative mission in who we are and how we act, and live fearlessly as emissaries of love. This alone fully answers to our spiritual dignity, freedom, desire, and vocation as being made in God's image and likeness. As those who are established, healed, bound together, shaped, and enlivened as an Easter people, as witnesses to the Resurrection, we are to take up each other's crosses daily and follow the crucified and risen Christ in the way of love.

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​Holy Week

​Easter comes as the culmination of Holy Week which begins with the celebration of Palm Sunday where we gather outside and process to church with palms and song, re-enacting Jesus' entry into Jerusalem. During the Palm Sunday service the Passion Gospel of the year is read dramatically, leading us up to the events on the eve of Easter.

 

Holy Week moves on from Palm Sunday to encompass the holiest three days of the Christian calendar, the so-called Triduum ('three days'). These are Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday which leads into Easter Sunday.

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At St George's, following the ancient customs of the Church reclaimed by the Church of England, the Triduum is usually celebrated in the following way: 

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Maundy Thursday: a Choral Evening Mass of the Lord's Supper with foot-washing ceremony and the stripping of the altar and sanctuary. A watch before the blessed sacrament at the altar of repose follows in the Lady Chapel until midnight.

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​Good Friday: This most solemn day is commemorated with a dramatic reading of John's Passion Gospel, the Veneration of the Cross, and Holy Communion given from the reserved sacrament consecrated on Maundy Thursday. 

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​Easter Vigil: the Triduum reaches completion on this most holy of nights. The liturgy starts outside as the sun sets and a new fire is lit. From this the Paschal candle is lit and processed into the darkened church from which all those present light their own handheld candles. The Exsultet is sung. There is a solemn vigil of biblical readings, telling the story of God's salvation of the world, before the joyful proclamation of Easter, the blessing of the Font, and the celebration of the first Eucharist of Easter.

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In recent years at St George's, we have encouraged families and children to attend the Easter Vigil and experience its richness and mystery. Children participate in key moments of the liturgy and after the service there is an Easter barbeque feast with activities for children, a film, and sleepover for older children, ready for Easter Sunday.​​

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Easter Sunday: The whole gathered people of God celebrate the Good News of Jesus' Resurrection on Easter morning. The service  starts with a procession of the Paschal Candle and a blessing of the Easter Garden made by the children's church and youth group. We then hear the Easter Gospel and receive the Eucharist, entering into the joy of Christ's resurrected life poured out for all. During the service, the children take part in an Easter Egg hunt and other activities.

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A reflection on the Triduum

​The three days of the Triduum are intimately connected. At the Last Supper, which took place within the context of a Passover meal with his disciples, Jesus does something utterly new. He institutes the Eucharist and so the central act of worship that makes the Church. With bread and wine, gifts of creation and products of human work, along with words of prayers drawn from his rich Jewish religious and biblical heritage, Jesus anticipates, accepts, and responds to the terror he is about to face. This is no passive resignation. In advance of any bloodshed, Jesus proactively, creatively, and redemptively transforms violence and death by making them an occasion to give himself wholly to others in love. A love that absorbs, exceeds, and overcomes the futility and seeming finality of all destruction, even death itself.

 

At the table, Jesus already communicates to his disciples what he later completes on the Cross and in the Resurrection. This is more obvious when we consider the self-giving Jesus embodies at the Last Supper in light of Jesus’ total gift of himself on the Cross. It is on the Cross that Jesus overcomes the frenzy of violence and death with a self-offering love stronger than death. And the Resurrection confirms love’s victory when Jesus’ dead body is transformed into his risen body.

 

However, at the Last Supper Jesus has already shared the love revealed on the Cross and Resurrection in a tangible bloodless way for us to receive. By sharing bread and wine as gifts, Jesus makes them communicate the self-giving love at the core of who he is in his relationship to the Father in the Holy Spirit. The gift of bread becomes the gift of his body given for others. The gift of wine becomes the gift of his blood shed for others. At his institution of the Eucharist, Jesus uses these materials of everyday life to transmit how God’s self-giving love for others is the deepest truth of reality; deeper than sin, evil, death.

 

By receiving Jesus’s gift of himself in the Eucharistic bread and wine, we, like the first disciples, are transformed into the body of Christ. We become one with Christ’s life-changing work, letting Christ’s self-giving love take hold in our lives, to overturn all that is mean and selfish in us, and build up a common life that stands against despair, brings new life to what once was dead, and  fashions an ever more just society based on the creative power of God's mercy, forgiveness, joy, and love. This is why Jesus follows the Last Supper by washing the feet of his disciples and only then giving them the definitive new commandment to love and serve others as he has loved and served them.

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Christmas

To be completed.

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Holy Days and Feasts​​​​

To be completed.​​​​​​​​​​​​​