Acts 2:44-46; 4:32, suggest that Christianity predated Marx in living out communism, not to be confused with totalitarian variants. Acts 5:1-12 suggests this was taken pretty seriously.
Blogs
Don’t park here! – canal at rest…
Mouldy old log at the turning of the year…
Mouldy old log at the turning of the year,
once green,
now dead,
lacking sap.
Sad year passing,
gone,
dead.
Watch the turning,
burning of the season,
till white ash snow,
melting brings life,
again.
Not immortality
for that mouldy old log at the turning of the year
is dead,
but new life springs fresh
forcing through cracked,
raw, hardened earth,
starting again,
and that is what we, also,
should do…on and on…season after season…starting anew.
© Andrew Pratt 31/12/2019
Poem from Words, Images and Imagination https://hymnsandbooks.blog/words-images-and-imagination-now-published/
Three men by a manger – Epiphany
Three men by a manger, the camels are spitting;
the inn keeper proffers a flagon of ale.
The strangers are weary, the passage was dreary,
this ship of the desert, has furled up its sail.
The stars had moved slowly, they’d hoped to be early,
our Christmas had placed them right there at the birth,
but Herod had waited, his anger not sated,
two years rambled slowly till wrath seared the earth.
It all seems a muddle, and yet we will huddle,
repeating the story from long, long ago;
what matters the timing when love sets bells chiming,
and just for this season our time can run slow.
Andrew Pratt 22/12/2019
Words © 2019 Stainer & Bell Ltd, London, England, http://www.stainer.co.uk.
Please include any reproduction for local church use on your CCL Licence returns. All wider and any commercial use requires prior application to Stainer & Bell Ltd.
Poem for Holy Innocents – 28th December
Already reaping expectations of the choices we have made,
children wait in sundry mangers.
Families continue into exile unwelcome still at England’s door.
And does Herod wait, disguised in the pretence of wishing to join the celebration?
To usher in a new era?
Magi wait in the wings of an infant’s play bearing false gifts,
guilt covered cardboard boxes,
rich perfume to mask stale corruption.
Yet, out of this pantomime may yet emerge a deeper understanding…
Will today’s innocents survive the devastations of power, politics and greed?
Go home by another way?
Copyright Andrew Pratt 2019
hymnsandbooks 