Service for Palm Sunday – 10th April 2022

Welcome to St. Paul’s Athens especially if you are here for the first time or visiting Athens.  Great (Holy) Week begins today in the ‘Latin Calendar’. We will begin outside with the blessing of palm crosses and process into church.  Do stay for coffee in the church garden after the Liturgy.

 The presiding priest and preacher is Fr. Leonard, Senior Chaplain. The deacon is The Revd. Deacon Christine Saccali.

Liturgy of Palms (in the Garden)

All:  Hosanna to the Son of David, the King of Israel. Blessed is he who comes in the name of      the Lord. Hosanna in the highest.

Priest:  Behold your king comes to you, O Zion, meek and lowly, sitting upon an ass. Ride on in the cause of truth and for the sake of justice. Your throne is the throne of God, it endures for ever; and the sceptre of your kingdom is a righteous sceptre. You have loved righteousness and hated evil. Therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness above your fellows.

All:   Hosanna to the Son of David, the King of Israel. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

Priest: Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, during Lent we have been preparing by works of love and self-sacrifice for the celebration of our Lord’s death and resurrection. Today we come together to begin this solemn celebration in union with the Church throughout the world. Christ enters his own city to complete his work as our Saviour, to suffer, to die, and to rise again. Let us go with him in faith and love, so that, united with him in his sufferings, we may share his risen life.

The people hold up palms or branches while this prayer is said by the priest

 God our Saviour, whose Son Jesus Christ entered Jerusalem as Messiah to suffer and to die; let these palms +  be for us signs of his victory and grant that we who bear them in his name may ever hail him as our King, and follow him in the way that leads to eternal life; who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

We now process around the church, and as we do so we sing:

 We have a King who rides a donkey, we have a King who rides a donkey

We have a King who rides a donkey, and his name is Jesus.

Jesus the King is with us, Jesus us the King is with us, Jesus the King is with us

Riding on a donkey.

 Priest:  In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

The Lord be with you.

 All:      and also with you

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Liturgy for the Nativity of Christ – 25th December 2021 – St Paul’s Athens

Welcome to St. Paul’s Athens especially if you are here for the first time or visiting Athens for Christmas. Happy Christmas! The presiding priest and the preacher is Fr. Leonard, assisted by Angelos Palioudakis and Nelly Paraskevopoulou.

Entrance Hymn    36   The first Nowell

Priest:  In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

The Lord be with you.

 All:      and also with you

 Priest:   Christ the light of the world has come to dispel the darkness of our hearts. Let us turn to the light and confess our sins.                     A period of silent stillness follows

Minister: God our Father, you sent your Son, full of grace and truth: forgive our failure to

receive him.  Kyrie eleison.

All:           Kyrie eleison.

Minister: Jesus our Saviour, you were born in poverty and laid in a manger: forgive our

greed and rejection of your ways.  Christe eleison.

All:           Christe eleison

Minister: Spirit of love, your servant Mary responded joyfully to your call: forgive our

hardness of heart.  Kyrie eleison.

All:          Kyrie eleison

Absolution we hear the words of God’s forgiveness to those who are truly penitent

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Service for the feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary – 15th August 2021

Anglican Church in Greece – St Paul’s Athens

Fr. Leonard will lead the worship and preach. The deacon is Deacon Christine.   Before our worship begins the organ will play.

Opening Hymn: 185   (tune Abbot’s Leigh)

Priest:                Blessed be the kingdom of God.

All:                     Now and for ever. 

Priest:                The Lord be with you

All:                      and also with you

Priest:                Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women

and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus.

All:                      Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of

                            our death.

The deacon invites us into a short time of silence and stillness

All:        Most merciful God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we confess that we have sinned in thought, word and deed. We have not loved you with our whole heart. We have not loved our neighbours as ourselves. In your mercy forgive what we have been, help us to amend what we are, and direct what we shall be: that we may do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with you, our God. Amen.

Priest:   Almighty God, who forgives all those who truly repent, have mercy upon you, pardon and deliver you from all your sins, confirm and strengthen you in all goodness,  and keep you in life eternal, through Jesus Christ our Lord .   Amen.

Gloria:  Glory in the highest to the God of heavens:

              Peace to all your people through the earth be given.

              Mighty God and Father, thanks and praise we bring,

              Singing Alleluia! To the heavenly King.

              Jesus Christ is risen, God the Father’s Son;

              With the Holy Spirit, you are Lord alone.

              Lamb once killed for sinners, all our guilt to bear,

              Show us now your mercy, now receive our prayer

             Christ the world’s true Saviour, high and holy one,

              Seated now and reigning from your Father’s throne:

              Lord and God, we praise you! Highest heaven adores:

              In the Father’s glory, all the praise be yours!

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Bishop Robert’s Christmas Message 2020

In one of our best-loved carols, Christina Rossetti situates the birth of Jesus ‘in the bleak midwinter’. She paints a severe and freezing manger scene, with howling wind and deep snow. She represents the frosted earth and water with iron and stone.

From the biblical narrative, it seems unlikely that Jesus was born in the bleak mid-winter, as the shepherds would not be putting their sheep out to pasture in freezing conditions. But that does not stop us gladly enjoying Rossetti’s romantic poetic licence and reminding ourselves that the conditions of the first Christmas were hard, extraordinarily hard by modern standards.

Mary was a young girl giving birth a long way from home. The town of Bethlehem was crowded with strangers registering with the tax authorities of the occupying powers. Mary laid her new-born baby in an animal’s stone feeding trough. And the first visitors were not close family but rough men from the fields.

It is extremely difficult to recover this first Christmas. The festival has become overlaid with medieval nativity scenes and Romantic or Dickensian winter scenes. In the twentieth century, Christmas became the setting of the perfect family gathering. Most significantly, the run up to the commercial Christmas – the ‘golden quarter’ – is a now a vital part of the retail industry’s overall wellbeing so that vasts sums are expended on advertising to persuade us to acquire more goods and more debt.

But not in 2020. This year it will be very different. Travel bans, lockdowns and quarantines mean it will be harder and perhaps impossible to get together with our loved ones. People are poorer. High streets, at least at the time of writing, are closed in many countries. And even when they re-open, shopping isn’t quite the same when you have to physically distance and wear a mask.

Christmas will be simpler this year. And for many it will be sadder. As Covid-19 has progressed, more and more families have been affected by the virus and its frightening and sometimes long-term symptoms. Some of us have a relative who has been in intensive care, struggling to breathe. Many of us know someone who has very sadly lost their life, and some of us face the first Christmas without someone close to us. This year, perhaps we more intuitively sense the harshness of the manger scene, the cruelty of death, the pain of a bleak mid-winter.

Another well-known – and much older – carol speaks to us about ‘tidings of comfort and joy’. In 2020 we need to hear these tidings. For Christmas is at heart the story of a God who draws near to us in Jesus, sharing the sorrows and joys of human experience. In the mystery of the incarnation, the eternal God wonderfully condescends to be born as a human baby, in the roughest conditions. He is ‘Immanuel’ – the God who is with us.

Whatever conditions you face this Christmas, I hope you will be able to reach out and find the God who is with us. I hope you will take comfort from the presence of God with you, and perhaps also find opportunity to comfort others.

‘God rest you merry’ in modern English means ‘may God grant you peace and happiness’. The unknown author continued:

‘Let nothing you dismay

for Jesus Christ our Saviour was born on Christmas Day.

To save us all from Satan’s power

when we had gone astray

Which brings tidings of comfort and joy.’

I wish each of you and your families comfort and joy as we approach this Christmas season.

+Robert Gibraltar in Europe