A Good Weekend

We have had quite an adventurous weekend at the Mustard Seed House.  Saturday morning we braved the cold and the snow (or at least threatened snow) to get out and plant the cool season garden – cauliflowers, cabbages, broccoli & greens all went into the ground and are obviously shivering under the unexpectedly cold burst of weather Seattle is enduring.  Hopefully the row covers will keep them snug and warm.

Saturday night we held a community games night by candlelight to celebrate Earth Hour.  It was great – not just because we saved a small amount of energy by turning off the lights but more importantly because we had a wonderful community evening of fun and fellowship.  We are thinking about repeating this once a month.  Another way to slow down and enjoy life.

Unfortunately most of the rest of Seattle did not turn off the lights – though Sydney Australia certainly did.  Here is a great video of the lights on the harbour bridge and opera house going out.

Christ Is Risen Indeed

For the secular world Easter is over and done but for us who live into God’s resurrection world the season has just begun.

Yesterday we celebrated with a feast and a festival at the Mustard Seed House

We brought together a great group of people

Read liturgy, sang of the resurrection and with Catie’s leadership decorated a banner.

We finished with a wonderful feast of rich food and good wine.

May the glory of the risen Christ go with you this day and throughout the easter season

Easter Thoughts to ponder and live

The world has already been turned upside down; that’s what Easter is all about. It isn’t a matter of waiting until God eventually does something at the end of time. God has brought his future, his putting-his-world into rights future, into the presence of Jesus of Nazareth and he wants that future to be implicated more and more in the present. That’s what we pray for every time we say the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy Kingdome come, they will be done on earth at it is in heaver.”

… if Lent is a time to give things up, then Easter ought to be a time to take things up.

Easter is a time to sow new seeds and to plant out a a few cuttings. If Calvary means to put things to death in your life that need killing off if you are to flourish as a Christian and as a truly human being, then Easter should mean planting, watering and training things up in your life (personal and corporate) that ought to be blossoming, filling the garden with color and perfume and in due course bearing fruit.

All right, the Sundays after Easter still lie within the Easter season. We still have Easter readings and hymns during them. But Easter week itself outght not to be the time when all clergy sigh with relief and go on holiday. It ought to be an eight-aday festival, with champange served after morning prayer or even before, with lots of alleluias and extra hymns and spectacular anthems. It is any wonder people find hard to believe in the resurrection of Jesus if we don’t throw our hats in the air? Is it any wonder we find it hard to live the resurrection if we don’t do it exuberantly in our liturgies? It is any wonder the world doesn’t take much notice if Easter is celebrated as simple the one-day happy ending tacked on to forty days of fasting and gloom? It’s long over due that we took a hard look at how we keeo Easter in church, at home, in our personal lives, right through the system. And if it means rethinking some cherished habits, well, maybe it’s time to wake up. That always comes as a surprise

+NT Wright

Praying with Missio Dei

One of the blessings of grassroot communities is to be able to collaborate and support other communities in the fringes living out and embracing God’s dream.

Missio Dei is one of those communities – Missio Dei is a church–but not a conventional church. It is to most churches what a tangerine is to a regular orange: smaller, but more intense. Some folks might call them a “new monastic” community. And I guess those folks might be right.

Tonight at the MSH we will pray with our brothers and sisters of Missio Dei, by praying using their Prayers Breviary.