Category: Lent

Lent 2018: ‘For The Kingdom, The Power, And The Glory Are Yours’

BY HANNAH BARR We might think that the gap between the sacred and the secular in a Western context has increasingly become a chasm. And yet, you don’t have to search too far to discover that the ways the sacred – something of who God is – permeates the world around us. The writer Leonard …

Lent 2018: ‘Lead Us Not Into Temptation’

BY HANNAH BARR Augustine of Hippo is widely considered one of the most important theological voices in the Christian tradition. A theologian, a bishop, and eventually a saint, his contributions have not just been ground-breaking and central to the discipline of theology, but also to politics, philosophy, and classics, amongst others. One of the (many) …

Lent 2018: ‘Forgive Us Our Sins’

BY HANNAH BARR Do you ever read something and think ‘Can I really say that?’ That’s how I often feel when I come to the line ‘forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.’ It’s a two-fold challenge: to accept that I am forgiven and to forgive others. When we don’t …

Lent 2018: ‘Give us today our daily bread’

BY HANNAH BARR “Rivers of ink have been spilt over the exact meaning of ‘give us this day our daily bread’, because the word that’s used in the Greek is a very, very strange one that you find hardly anywhere else… The simple meaning ‘keep us going, give us what we need’ is all we …

Lent 2018: ‘Your Kingdom Come, Your Will Be Done’

BY HANNAH BARR ‘Your Kingdom come, your will be done’ is a radical line in the Lord’s Prayer. To choose God’s will over our own, to ask for that foretaste of heaven – you can’t pray these words without boldness and expectation of the living God! In the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, the character of …

Lent 2018: ‘Our father in heaven’

BY HANNAH BARR We begin Lent with Ash Wednesday, the day we remember that from dust we came ‘and to dust we shall return.’ It’s a time to remember that the world is in a broken state; that its citizens are daily subjected to appalling horrors and terrors. Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, says …