Matthew 25

Name: Matthew 25
Address: Worcester, MA, 01610, US
Telephone: +15087575189

01/01/2019

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more,
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out thy mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

"Ring Out, Wild Bells" was written by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Published in 1850, the year he was appointed Poet Laureate, it forms part of In Memoriam, Tennyson's elegy to Arthur Henry Hallam, his sister's fiancé who died at the age of twenty-two.

According to oft-recounted story the 'wild bells' in question were the bells of the Watham Abbey Church. Tennyson was said to be staying in the vicinity at High Beach and heard the bells being rung on New Year's Eve.

It is an accepted English custom to ring English Full circle bells to ring out the old year and ring in the new year over midnight on New Year's Eve. Sometimes the bells are rung half-muffled for the death of the old year, then the muffles are removed to ring without muffling to mark the birth of the new year.

May your bells be wild and your faith run deep in 2019. New Years Blessings to you all from Matthew 25

11/22/2018

Thanksgiving Blessings!

Prayer of Thanksgiving by Walter Rauschenbusch

O God, we thank you for this earth, our home;
For the wide sky and the blessed sun,
For the salt sea and the running water,
For the everlasting hills
And the never-resting winds,
For trees and the common grass underfoot.
We thank you for our senses
By which we hear the songs of birds,
And see the splendor of the summer fields,
And taste of the autumn fruits,
And rejoice in the feel of the snow,
And smell the breath of the spring.
Grant us a heart wide open to all this beauty;
And save our souls from being so blind
That we pass unseeing
When even the common thornbush
Is aflame with your glory,
O God our creator,
Who lives and reigns for ever and ever.

Walter Rauschenbusch, (October 4, 1861 - July 25, 1918) was a cleric and theology professor who led the Social Gospel movement in the United States. The Social Gospel was a movement that exerted a major influence at the outset of the twentieth century with the aim of mobilizing American Christians to work for a more just society for all, especially the urban working class. Walter Rauschenbusch served as pastor to a Baptist congregation of German immigrants on the edge of Hell’s Kitchen (a neighborhood in midtown Manhattan) in New York, taught church history at Rochester Theological Seminary (now Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School), and traveled the length and breadth of America by railroad to advocate the cause of the Social Gospel. He was committed to the necessity of vital religious experience to transform individual personalities and political activism to make social structures in society equitable. Considered both dynamic and compassionate, he always regarded himself as an evangelist seeking to win individuals to a “new birth” in Christ. At the same time, he believed that the Kingdom of God required social as well as individual salvation, and he demanded “a new order that would rest on the Christian principles of equal rights and democratic distribution of economic power.”