Christ Church Mandurah Resources

Pentecost John 20 CCM Today we celebrate the Day of Pentecost, which marks the end of the Easter period in the church.  Pentecost is the Jewish festival called “the feast of weeks”, originally marking the end of the grain harvest. Easter has been leading up to today’s service – today we celebrate the giving of the Holy Spirit to the church.  It was the Holy Spirit which enabled Peter and the other disciples to stand up and to declare their faith. Pentecost in Acts chapter 2 is all action – fire and energy and dynamic.  But in John, Pentecost is about gentleness and peace. In the few short verses of today’s Gospel, Jesus gave his believers two precious gifts: the Holy Spirit and his peace. The Holy Spirit can be a difficult concept for us to understand. We understand God the Father, Jesus the Son, but what is the Holy Spirit? I was ordained a priest during the feast of Pentecost, and was charged by the Archbishop to go out and preach, to teach and to minister in th...

Ascension Day 2020 CCM Today’s Gospel is only 4 verses long: it’s short and sweet, but it really is the crux of what our faith is about. The women who saw the resurrected Jesus have found the disciples and given them the news that they are to go to Galilee and they will see Jesus.  At the same time, the religious leaders were plotting how to cover up the resurrection of Jesus.  Their idea was to bribe the guards who were outside the tomb to say that the disciples came and stole Jesus body whilst they were sleeping.  And that is still a belief amongst some Jewish people. There are still only two choices when it comes to the death, the resurrection and the ascension into heaven of Jesus: to believe that Jesus is the Messiah and that he rose from the dead.  Or to try and ignore, deny or explain away what happened as a lie. We believe that Jesus was the Messiah, and even if we don’t understand what and how it all happened, that’s okay.  God never refuses hones...

John 14: 15 EASTER 6 CCM I am sure that many of you will have seen on the TV recently the celebrations to commemorate VE Day on 8th May 1945.  75 years later, there are still many people who remember that day very vividly.  You will have seen on the TV news people out in their streets, at a safe social distance of course, waving flags and singing “We’ll meet again”.  I have to say I have heard that song played at so many funerals and it still makes me tear up every single time I hear it. A number of people, including Vera Lynn, were interviewed and asked why “We’ll meet again” was so popular then, and why it remains so today.  Their answers were consistent: it was about hope.  During the war, people needed hope that their loved ones would return from the fighting, that their children would be safe, and that all the hardships, the food rationing and air raids they were enduring were for a purpose. And at the moment, people need reassurance for reaso...

John 14:  FIFTH SUNDAY OF EASTER When my eldest granddaughter Charlotte was about 4, she came with me to a nursing home.  She was quite fascinated by the number of people living there, and she asked me “nanny, why do all your friends live together in one big house”.  I always remember that particular visit when I read this Gospel passage from John, because Jesus talks about living together in His father’s house, in God’s house.  I am sure you will have heard this Gospel passage read at funerals, Jesus is meeting with his disciples on the night before his arrest.  They have eaten together, Jesus has washed their feet and now he is explaining that he will be taken from them.  They have shared three years of their lives with Jesus, so naturally they are very distressed at the thought being separated from Jesus. Jesus understands and shares their grief and our grief at being separated from someone we love and with whom we have shared our lives.  It ...

John 10: 1-10 FOURTH SUNDAY OF EASTER I come from central London and I grew up in a high-rise apartment in a busy city environment. So when we moved to New Zealand in 1982, you can imagine how amazed I was to see such a lush green country. I was also fascinated with the sheep and cows everywhere. At that time, I think that NZ had 3 million people, and 60 million sheep. They were everywhere. I couldn’t help but point at them and say “look, sheep” to anyone who would listen, but I can tell you that my husband and even my sons got fed up with me. Once I took my youngest son Sam on a kindergarten trip to a local farm and I even got to bottle-feed some lambs. I think I was more excited than all the kids. I have to say that most of the shepherds I could see were whizzing around on quadbikes and I am not sure how much they had in common with the shepherds of ancient Israel, the kind of shepherd which Jesus talks about. The shepherd was a common image used for those who were rulers, fr...