This Sunday
We are six weeks into Easter. Six weeks of sitting with the Risen Christ before the Church sends us into Pentecost – and the readings are doing what they always do at this point in the year: they are asking us whether we have actually received what was given, or whether we are still carrying the weight alone.
This Sunday the liturgy places us at a crossroads in the history of salvation. The Church is barely born. Stephen has just been stoned. The community is scattered. And Philip – running, not strategising – lands in Samaria, a city no observant Jew would have chosen to evangelise. The Spirit falls. Joy breaks out. And the border that centuries of religious geography had held firm quietly dissolves.
The Church did not expand because it had a plan. It expanded because it was displaced – and trusted the displacement.
Where We Are
Liturgical season: Easter, Week 6 – Year A In the Born to Recognise series: Week 6 – the blessing of the shoulders Receive the cross on your shoulders, that you may bear the gentle yoke of Christ. In the Dust to Grace – Joseph series: Joseph and Potiphar’s wife – the embodied “no” that love requires
The ancient baptismal blessing over the shoulders is the lens for this Sunday: not a call to endure, but an invitation into partnership. The yoke was never designed for one. The question underneath all four readings is the same: whose yoke are we actually in?
This Week’s Resources
Biblical Background
Whose Yoke Are You Actually In? A close reading of all four Sunday texts – Acts 8, Psalm 66, 1 Peter 3, and John 14 – through the lens of the shoulders blessing. Written from the pew rather than the lectern. For homily preparation, personal study, or anyone who wants to arrive at Sunday nourished.
Sunday Experience
An Inner Vision Board of God’s Mercy A guided post-communion meditation – approximately ten minutes – moving through images of rest, delight, nourishment, warmth, and return. Not images of aspiration. Images of what has already been given. And at the end: the recognition of who was present in every single one of them. For presiders, ministers of the Word, or anyone who wants to pray their way through Sunday afternoon.
Prayer of the Faithful
Love Before Rules Intercessions for the season of first communions and confirmations, for those who left sacramental life feeling nothing changed, for the scattered and displaced, and for all suffering despair. With a closing prayer that stays close to the ground. Free for parish use.
Coming Later This Week
Born to Recognise – Week 6: Shoulders The sixth post in the Easter-to-Pentecost series on the ancient blessing of the senses. This week: what the condition of our shoulders actually reveals about what we believe. The Kuczynski painting. The white-knuckled steering wheel. And the agricultural image Jesus was holding when he said my yoke is easy – because a yoke was never built for one animal alone.
Dust to Grace – Joseph’s Echoes of Yourself Joseph and Potiphar’s wife: the moment when love requires a bodily no. The coat left behind, and what it looks like to say yes to God by saying no to everything that would pull you off course.
A Word Before You Go
Peter writes to scattered communities – people under pressure, living in the low-level dread of not quite belonging – and he says: always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in you.
Not a theological argument. A reason for your hope. Something already rooted in the body before the emergency arrives.
This Sunday is an invitation to find that reason – in the meal, the warmth, the restful place, the ordinary mercy of having been held – and to carry it out of the pew and into the week.
The Spirit does not share our maps. But (s)he knows the way.
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