We were delighted at St Chrysostom’s to host worship of the 2016 SCP Conference. This ranged from a reflection on Our Lady on the Sunday evening to Vespers and Benediction, the rosary (led by our own rosary group) and Compline. The Conference Concelebrated Mass, a Votive Mass of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Eternal High Priest was especially inspiring.
SCP members were encouraged at the Mass by the sermon of Andrew Nunn, Dean of Southwark and SCP Rector General, whose words included:
In the heady atmosphere of the Passover in Jerusalem, with threats coming from all directions, Jesus takes his disciples into that Upper Room, that Cenacle of which Bishop Mark spoke on our first evening, and feeds them. St Luke began that passage that we heard in the Gospel with those four poignant words
‘When the hour came…’
At the right moment, God acts, just when it was needed, just when it is needed and into that room the disciples and Jesus brought the tension and the emotion and the fear and the challenge and the sense of not knowing and the desire for betrayal and the anger and all the rest of it and Jesus takes it with bread and wine and transforms it into the stuff of the kingdom. That, my friends, is what we have to do.
When you take that bread, when you take that wine, when you take those offerings they’re loaded with so much more and at this moment in our history they’re loaded with all the stuff that needs consecrating, needs transforming, needs breaking, needs reconciling, needs reconstructing.
And after Mass, as the conference ended all put on their happy faces and gathered for the traditional end of conference photograph.
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