An All Saints Church Marlpool publication
Why not join us for one or more of our services as we follow Jesus from Palm Sunday to the cross?
Monday April 3rd 7pm Service of reflection
Tuesday April 4th 2pm communion and reflection
Wednesday April 5th 2pm Service of reflection
Maundy Thursday 7pm Holy Communion
Good Friday 9.30am meet at church of walk of witness in Heanor Market at 10am
Good Friday 2 pm A service of reflection in church – The final hour of Christ’s agony
Maundy Thursday is the fifth day of Holy Week – the final week of Lent, which begins on Palm Sunday and runs up until Easter.
It gets its name from the Latin word ‘mandare’, from which we get the word ‘command’. Christians remember Jesus’s command: “Love one another as I have loved you.” On this day Christians remember Jesus sharing the Last Supper with his disciples before his death on Good Friday. We have a service of Holy Communion in church at 7pm to do this. As part of the service we also strip the altar as we remember that Jesus left the supper and went to Gethsemane where he prayed before he was arrested.
At the Last Supper Jesus washed the disciples’ feet as an act of humility and service. Some churches recreate this act of service at special services on Maundy Thursday. Foot washing is a reminder of how Jesus served others and of the kind of service we as Christians are meant to demonstrate to others.
Every year the Sovereign distributes silver coins at a special service on Maundy Thursday. It is part of a tradition dating back to the 13th Century when the Royal Family took part in ceremonies washing the feet of poor people and giving money and gifts.
The Maundy Money ceremony itself began in 1662, when Charles II gave out coins. This year will be the first year King Charles III gives out Maundy Money as King.
Each year on the fourth Sunday of Lent, countries around the world celebrate Mothering Sunday. This typically involves lavishing Mums with gifts and attention and celebrating the women who have nurtured us throughout our lives. It is also a difficult day and sometimes a painful day for many.
It has origins that start in the middle ages are some o traditions that have shaped Mothering Sunday into the celebration recognised today:
In the 16th century, Mothering Sunday was less about mothers and more about church. At that time people would make a journey to their ‘mother’ church once a year. This might have been their home church, their nearest cathedral or a major parish church in a bigger town. The service which took place at the ‘mother’ church symbolised the coming together of families. This would have represented a significant journey for many.
Another tradition was to allow those working in the fields on wealthy farms and estates in England to have the day off on the fourth Sunday of Lent to visit their mothers and possibly go to church too. This was a variation on the theme of visiting the ‘mother’ church and was a move towards a more family focussed occasion. Before the days of cars and roads, family get-togethers were far more rare, (zoom and Whats app were still a long way off). In some ways this tradition is still alive today as grown up children often visit their parents on mothering Sunday.
Simnel cake has a strong affiliation to Mothering Sunday as it is usually associated with spring and Easter. Also mothering Sunday is also known as refreshment Sunday as the Lenten discipline of a simpler diet are relaxed, hence cake. Simnel resembles a Christmas fruit cake but should be slightly lighter in texture. The other difference is the two layers of marzipan. Simnel cake should have a layer of marzipan running through the middle like a victoria sponge and then another layer of marzipan on the top. Traditionally, you should also roll some marzipan into eleven eggs and place these on the top. The eggs are supposed to symbolise the disciples who followed Jesus – note that Judas is excluded.
The question is, do you boil or bake your simnel cake? Some say it’s necessary to do both because of an argument from folktale where two people could not agree on the correct way to cook the cake.
On Mothering Sunday, churches around the country will be sharing their own traditions, celebrating and giving thanks to the huge impact mothers have on each of our lives. The main service on Mothering Sunday in churches across the country is central to the life of the church.
The church recognises that the day may be difficult and complex for some people. If you are childless or the relationship with your mum or daughter is hard or your mum or child has died or that you feel you are not coping as a mum this day is a day you might wish would go away. For some women, it is the only day of the year when they receive flowers
As part of our service we include prayers for those who don’t find the day particularly easy and there is space for your own thoughts. Also if you need someone to listen ,we will do that too.
Families across the country will be preparing little presents and cards and in some churches flowers are blessed and handed out during the main service.
Families come together to have lunch, or children make breakfast in bed for their mothers, leaving all the mess to be cleared up later! It’s all about showing appreciation and many make a huge effort to make their mother feel special.
What we do want to do is value each person and value the role of woman in our lives. We want to recognise that family is not just biological but contains the people who care for us and that might include friend, neighbour and church. This Mothering Sunday come and see what we have to offer.
Ingredients
For the almond paste
For the cake
Method
Is Mothering Sunday/Mothers Day just another way of emotionally blackmailing us into spending money? No more a homemade card and wild flowers picked as we go for a walk or snowdrops and daffodils from the garden.
Presents with Mother or Mummy printed on and a fancy bag to put it in with the onus on Dad to get it right.
Of course the next worry is when parents have split up – who takes the responsibility ,the estranged father or perhaps the stepfather. Where do the children spend their day?
The days when the young people in service in the richer households were allowed to return home for the day taking the simnel cake are history now.
The original Mothering Sunday was a Christian festival when people returned to their mother church, where they were brought up and baptized and this is probably why the custom continued for the domestic servants.
Should we worry that the custom has evolved to the more modern habits of commercialism as with Christmas or accept that things change?
But where does it end?
There is no doubt that home insulation is good. It’s good for our pockets, it’s good for our comfort and it’s good for the environment
BUT! –yes there is a but!
What sort of insulation is best?
The very first thing to do is to stop drafts. Draft exclusion is generally cheap, easy to do (even if you’re not able to do it yourself a local trusted tradesperson will do the job for you), it’s easy to check if it’s worked.
The most frequent causes of draughts are external doors, followed by windows and then maybe the loft cover. If your house is double glazed and fitted with modern doors then draughts may not be a problem but wait for a windy day and go round your house and check.
Next on the list should be loft insulation but be cautious.
You may well have been told that up to 45% of a building’s heat can be lost through the roof. This is true but unless you have no loft or roof insulation at all it is very unlikely that your house is losing anything like that. Nevertheless it is well worth checking how well your loft is insulated. Is there any insulation between the joists supporting the ceiling below? If so how thick is it and what state is it in? Is the loft floor boarded over? Is there any insulation of the roof itself?
You may come the conclusion that you either need insulation or that the existing insulation could do with upgrading. If so you will have no difficulty in finding companies offering to do the job for you – you might well have received mail or cold callers offering their services.
Don’t get suckered in by their sales pitch! However good they may claim their product to be, is it worth it to you ?
Let’s take an example:
If the cost of heating your home over this winter has been say £10 per day then if the heat was on all year that would cost you £3,650 but clearly that will not be the case so let’s assume that you annual bill will balance out at £2,000. Let’s further assume that better insulation could save 20% of this cost – £400. You might feel happy to recover this saving over say 5 years. If so then a spend of £2,000 would mean that after 5 years you would be making a financial saving. This should be the maximum that you spend on loft insulation.
Is that realistic? – It most certainly is. The cost of materials to insulate the loft of an average sized house is between £100 and £200. It should take a trades person no more than 1 day to fit and it is not a skilled job so that should be little more than an additional £200 – £400.
What you may well find is that insulation companies will massively oversell the benefits of their ‘unique’ products and quote £10,000 plus to do the job.
Back to the sums. Based on the above figures of a £400 per year saving it would take 25 years to recover the investment!!. Utter nonsense.
If you decide that you need additional loft insulation then the best thing to do is get some quotes from trusted local trade’s people. Loft insulation is NOT rocket science.
Lent, the forty days in the Christian year that lead up to Easter, is a valuable time for Christians. The word “Lent” comes from a variety of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic words meaning “spring”, a time budding with new life and hope. For Christians, Lent is not a celebration of nature; rather, it is a process of prayer and spiritual renewal looking to a time budding with new spiritual life and hope. The Lenten season is an opportunity to cultivate the interior life through spiritual exercises and practices.
In the early church new believers were baptized into its fellowship once a year on Easter Sunday. Leading up to their baptism a period was set aside for their preparation. In their baptism they would signify their death to the power of evil and their call to be risen into new life in Christ, who overcame the power of death on the first Easter. In time the whole community of the faithful came to experience this season as a time for growth in faithful discipleship. Lent emerged as a time when both new converts, as well as the body of believers, would join more closely with the living, dying and rising of Jesus. Thus in today’s Church, as in the early Church, Lent is meant to be experienced as a time for the making of disciples.
Rather than being seen as a forty day endurance test, Lent is a quality season. It is a time of rediscovery, a golden chance to open ourselves more deeply to the beauty and power of the dying and rising to new life in Jesus. It is a time to ponder the reality of the death and resurrection and to allow it to soak into our deepest parts.
Lent is the time for new life and hope, a time for, self-examination, an opportunity for us as individuals to recognise our need for God, to pause a little in our busy lives and focus on our creator and redeemer.
Through the centuries, Lent became characterised by practices which typify the meaning of this season. One of these is prayer. Lent invites us to step aside from the busyness of our daily life, the many things that clutter and crowd our life in order to get in touch with the self and at a deeper level, with the Spirit of God within. Essentially, prayer is attention to God; it places us in a posture of listening. Amidst all the noise and tumult of our daily life, Lent encourages us to experience a new depth of prayer, an authentic attentiveness to God through which we learn to be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might.
A second practice associated with this season is fasting. Fasting signifies a willingness to free ourselves from the desires, ambitions and pursuits that center on the demands of the self. It points to a willingness to be freed from the self-centeredness that drives so much of our life in order to experience more fully the liberating power of Christ. Fasting reminds us of the truth that the deepest hunger in our lives must be the hunger for God.
A third practice is giving. True hunger for God leads to the giving of ourselves to others. Lent calls us to a greater compassion for others, especially the poor and needy. It invites us to examine ourselves honestly on how subtly we have accepted society’s addiction to possessions, to affluence. Through the days of Lent we are encouraged to focus our eyes on Jesus who gave his whole life in faithfulness to God, giving his life totally out of love for all. As we keep that clear focus we join our life in the loving intention of Jesus to give himself for all.
Lent is a shining opportunity for experiencing “ the unsearchable riches of Christ”, a time for spiritual growth so that we might walk in newness of life. Let us determine how we can take advantage of this opportunity and then dedicate ourselves wholeheartedly to our Lenten practice.
Some Ideas For Observing Lent Prayer
Take a daily “Time Out” for God.
Go to a quiet place, light a candle and:
Read the Bible;
Read a book about God;
Write a thankfulness journal;
Spend time listening to God, rather than speaking to Him.
Fasting
Set aside one day a week on which you will go without something you enjoy it might be a meal (only do this if you have no medical condition that means you need to keep to a diet) or a favourite TV programme, and spend an equivalent time intentionally seeking God’s presence with you.
Giving
Give something away to those in need for example,
Donate the money saved and time saved from fasting
Bring non-perishable food items to a place where they will be taken to the Food Banks for the needy;
Give money to Lenten outreach projects;
Call someone who is unable to get out, ill, alone, or otherwise needs a friendly chat.
Shrove tuesday (Pancake day) Shrove Tuesday is the day immediately preceding Ash wednesday. Shrove is derived from the word shrive and refers to the confession of sins as a preparation for Lent. This goes back to the middle ages in Europe. Depending on the date of easter it occurs between February 2nd and the 9th March. Although the day is sometimes still used for self-examination and introspection, Shrove Tuesday eventually acquired the character of a carnival or festival in many places and is often celebrated with parades.As the final day before Lent when fasting becomes a feature in the church, Shrove Tuesday also has many customs connected to food. Pancakes are traditional in a number of European countries because eggs, sugar, and fat, are used up so they will not go to waste; the day is known as Pancake Day or Pancake Tuesday in Ireland. Similarly rich pre lenten treats, sweet pa̡czki are traditional in Poland, and king cake is an iconic feature of Mardi Gras (“Fat Tuesday”) In New Orleans.
What Happens on Ash Wednesday?
There is usually a service which is quite reflective, often the services will have periods of silence. We are holding a service at 2pm in All Saints. During the service the congregation will be invited to receive the ashes on their foreheads. Usually, the vicar will dip his/her finger into the ashes, spread them in a cross pattern on the forehead, and say, “From dust you came and from dust you will return.”
In some towns and villages church leaders may go into the streets and offer passers by a prayer and/or the the sign of the cross in ashes on their forehead
Source and Meaning of the Ashes
The ashes are prepared by burning palm branches from the previous years Palm Sundays service. On Palm Sunday, churches bless and hand out palm branches to attendees, referencing the Gospels’ account of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, when onlookers lay palm branches on his path.
The ashes of this holiday symbolize two main things: death and repentance. “Ashes are equivalent to dust, and human flesh is composed of dust or clay (Genesis 2; 7), and when a human corpse decomposes, it returns to dust or ash.”
“When we come forward to receive ashes on Ash Wednesday, we are saying that we are sorry for our sins and that we want to use the season of Lent to correct our faults, purify our hearts, control our desires and grow in holiness so we will be prepared to celebrate Easter with great joy”
After much deliberation the Church of England has now decreed that marriage is a union between a man and a woman and therefore single sex marriage services may not be held in the Church of England. However, the blessing of civil marriages will be allowed. Needless to say, this will not please everyone.
But what is the point of marriage anyway?
To answer this question we need to lookback in time – a long way back, some thousands of years.
In the past, marriage endowed a number of things;
This was the status quo for hundreds of generations and in Western society remained more or less unchanged until relatively recent times. But what about now?
Although not universally the case, predominantly in western society, children born out of wedlock have the same rights as those born after marriage. There may be some exceptions to this such as claims to inherited titles but on the whole illegitimate and legitimate children have equal status and rights and any stigma attached to illegitimacy has all but disappeared entirely. Similarly with bloodlines, most of us, even the most ardent followers of family trees, are generally indifferent to whether a branch is legitimate or illegitimate. In our society there is no limit whatsoever to social interaction between the sexes and indeed intimacy with multiple partners before marriage is now so common as to be considered the norm. Certainly a history of promiscuity is rarely a barrier to a future monogamous relationship whether by marriage or civil partnership. Although mutual care within a family environment remains widespread, there are state safeguards in place for when these environments break down, so the imperative of using marriage as an assurance of support is less important than in the past.
So is marriage just a relic of the past and of no relevance to modern society?
Although some of the past imperatives for marriage no longer exist there is still a strong case for it.
The findings of extensive academic research does show that partnerships and families based on marriage are the most successful form of relationship in terms of the wellbeing of children and the longevity of the partnership. That is not to say that all marriages are successful or that they last ‘until death us do part’. In fact more than 1 in 3 marriages end in divorce at some stage but the odds are much better than unmarried partnerships. Our society also recognises the ‘sanctity of marriage’ and although marriage vows of exclusivity are broken, to do so is to break the norms that our society recognises are important.
For Christian’s a marriage involves a vow before witnesses and more importantly, before God that the couple intend to stay married until one of them dies. Not all Christian marriages survive but from the beginning the expectation is that they will. A civil ceremony will not invoke God or any deity but is as its name suggests simply a civil contract between two people. In UK law this contract may be between any two adults of whatever gender. The Christian Church does, however, not take its guidance let alone instruction from whatever norms society as a whole think are appropriate at any given time but from scripture (the Bible) from which it takes its authority. An imperative from those scriptures is that we should treat one another as we would wish to be treated and we should certainly not be too hasty to condemn others or treat them with disdain. But that does not mean that we should subvert Bible teaching in doing so. There is no justification for or examples of same sex marriages throughout the 66 books of the Bible. A marriage by definition is a binding commitment between a man and a woman. The church and indeed all Christians should be compassionate towards a society that thinks differently but the Church of England is absolutely right in forbidding the holding of same sex marriages within its buildings and by its ministers. Should civil marriages be blessed? Even this seems somewhat counterintuitive – if a marriage has been conducted in a manner that is unacceptable to the church then how can that same church offer a blessing for it? On the other hand, has the church the right to withhold a blessing for anyone who asks for it? –In the final analysis it is God who blesses or withholds a blessing not us. We are but His agents. On balance the Church of England seems to have got it right.
On January 6th you may have seen on church doors or on houses of Christians a mysterious series of letters and numbers, looking for all the world like an equation, inscribed in chalk over a doorway. It is often seen on churches of the more catholic tradition of the church.
If you don’t know what the chalk is all about, don’t you are certainly not alone
Epiphany; which can also be known as Twelfth Night, Theophany, or Three Kings Day is the time that marks the occasion of a time-honoured Christian tradition of “chalking the doors.” The formula for the ritual — adapted for 2023 — is simple: take chalk of any colour and write the following above the entrance of your home: 20 + C + M + B + 23.
The letters have two meanings. First, they represent the initials of the Magi (wise men) who tradition say were called Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar — who came to visit Jesus. They also abbreviate the Latin phrase, Christus mansionem benedicat: “May Christ bless the house.” The “+” signs represent the cross, and the “20” at the beginning and the “23” at the end mark the year.
Taken together, this inscription is performed as a prayer for Jesus to bless those homes marked in this way and asks that Jesus stay with those who enter the house throughout the entire year.
The chalking of the doors is a centuries-old practice which is used throughout the world, It is, however, an easy tradition to adopt, and a great practice to dedicate the year to God from its very outset, asking His blessing on our homes and on all who live, work, or visit them there.
The timing for the chalking of the doors varies somewhat in practice. In some places, it is done on New Year’s Day. More commonly, it is performed on the traditional Feast of the Epiphany — the Twelfth Day of Christmas (6th January). Traditionally the blessing is done by either a priest or the head of the family. This blessing can be performed simply by just writing the inscription and offering a short prayer, or more elaborately, including songs, prayers, processions, the burning of incense, and the sprinkling of holy water.
Have you thought of asking God to bless your home and family? You do not need chalk or wait until January the 6th although you may want to start the year this way. You can ask God in prayer any day of the year at any time to do this. Words can be your own or a written prayer such as the Celtic prayer below.
Loving God
Bless this house and those within.
Bless our giving and receiving.
Bless our words and conversation.
Bless our hands and recreation.
Bless our sowing and our growing.
Bless our coming and our going.
Bless all who enter and depart.
Bless this house, your peace impart. Amen
If you want to talk to us about prayer, then why not ask us?
Karen Padley
At All Saints we have a tradition of holding a Carol Service by candlelight and involving as may people from all parts of the community as possible. Lessons are read by children and adults from as young as 6 to octogenarians. Where readers are unable to join us in person we use videos of them reading in their homes. The music is lead by an orchestra drawn from the community together with a choir and organ. And the whole service s rcorded and posted on our facebook page.
Why not experience our Carol Service yourself ? Go to our Facebookpage
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100066783831002
