Sunday Service (Warleggan) 07th February 2021
Readings
2nd Sunday Before Lent
Psalm 19.1-7
- ICEL Translation 1995 The sky tells the glory of God, tells the genius of God’s work. Day carries the news to day, night brings the message to night,
without a word, without a sound, without a voice being heard, yet their message fills the world, their news reaches its rim.
There God has pitched his tent for the sun to rest and rise renewed like a bridegroom rising from bed, an athlete eager to run the race.
It springs from the edge of the earth, runs a course across the sky to win the race at heaven’s end. Nothing on earth escapes its heat.
John 1.1-14
- ‘The Message’ translation, by Eugene Peterson The Word was first, the Word present to God, God present to the Word. The Word was God, in readiness for God from day one.
Everything was created through him; nothing – not one thing! - came into being without him. What came into being was Life, and the Life was Light to live by. The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness; the darkness couldn’t put it out.
There once was a man, his name John, sent by God to point out the way to the Life-Light. He came to show everyone where to look, who to believe in. John was not himself the Light; he was there to show he way to the Light.
The Life-Light was the real thing: Every person entering Life he brings into Light. He was in the world, the world was there through him, and yet the world didn’t even notice. He came to his own people, but they didn’t want him. But whoever did want him, who believed he was who he claimed and would do what he said, He made to be their true selves, their child-of-God selves. These are the God-begotten, not blood-begotten, not flesh begotten, not sex-begotten.
The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighbourhood. We saw the glory with our own eyes, the one-of-a-kind glory, like Father, like Son, Generous inside and out, true from start to finish.
R S Thomas – Suddenly
Suddenly after long silence he has become voluble. He addresses me from a myriad directions with the fluency of water, the articulateness of green leaves; and in the genes, too, the components of my existence. The rock, so long speechless, is the library of his poetry. He sings to me in the chain-saw, writes with the surgeon’s hand on the skin’s parchment messages of healing. The weather is his mind’s turbine driving the earth’s bulk round and around on its remedial journey. I have no need to despair; as at some second Pentecost of a Gentile, I listen to the things round me: weeds, stones, instruments, the machine itself, all speaking to me in the vernacular of the purposes of One who is.