Sunday, September 13, 2026
O God,
without you we are not able to please you:
mercifully grant that your Holy Spirit
may in all things direct and rule our hearts;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
Stay In Touch
Father Ted Starr - Priest-in-Charge - 0451 929 180 - edward.starr@anglicanchurchsq.org.au
Mrs Liz Peters - Rector’s Warden - 0400 844 946
Mrs Gail Symons - People’s Warden - 0409 618 511
Mr Tony Hughes - People’s Warden - 0468 764 009
Zoom Church - 328 492 8300 - 548 747
Readings
for the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Exodus 14:19-31
Psalm 114
Romans 14:1-14
Matthew 18:21-35
Printed copies of every sermon are on the back table
Sermons from every service are available under “Homilies”
Giving
Offering - 704 901 - 0000 0780
Building Fund - 704 901 - 0001 4767
Other Stewardship
Cards are on sale at the back of the church.
Mission and Outreach
Woody Point Special School has been discerned as a focus for our new season of mission and outreach. The yellow lid bins at the back of the church are waiting for your extra groceries to donate to their pantry. Meals which are labelled with date and ingredients, packaged and frozen can be put in the church freezer for collection. For more information, contact Elizabeth on 0404 080 861, or Leisa.
BCA Boxes are due: please leave them on the back table, or hand to Elizabeth.
Spirited Generosity is an ongoing initiative in our parish. Please check the back table for information on our next steps. If anything has been raised in your spirit as a result, please continue the conversation with fellow parishioners, parish councillors, wardens, and Fr Ted.
We ask of your goodness, Lord, to comfort and sustain all who in this transitory life are in trouble, sorrow, need, sickness, or any other adversity, and especially Shirley and Alan Kimber, Rosina, Ann, Barbara, Kevin, Ian, Chris, Jeff Byrne, Karne, Greg, Aaron, Joanne, Grace and Faith, Beryl Old, Fr David, Nina, Sophie, Lesley, Helena, Claire, Melissa Cameron, Janice, Carol, Shakiraia and Kristy. Please contact Fr Ted to be on this list.
We also give thanks for those whose year’s mind occurs at this time. Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord, and let light perpetual shine upon them.
Ministry During the Week
Mother’s Union: Every third Wednesday at 9am.
Thursday Fellowship: every first and third Thursday from 9:30am to 11:30am. All welcome for a cuppa and a chat. Bring your craft to work on or just enjoy the company.
Caring and Sharing: every fourth Wednesday after Holy Communion.
Bible Study: Tuesdays at 9:30am and Thursdays at 7pm. All welcome; all materials supplied.
Beaumont Aged Care: Holy Communion every third Friday at 10:30am.
Recycling has resumed in the new location: the small white shed at the back of the property. Any questions call Elizabeth Melvin on 0404 080 861
Services: Part of the priestly calling is that clergy “shall unite themselves with the unceasing prayer of the Church on earth and in heaven, being carried by this rhythm of prayer in peace and joy.” Various services throughout the week are offered to this end, and all are warmly encouraged to attend.
The Week Ahead
Tue, 15 Sep
8:00 am - Holy Communion
9:30 am - Bible Study
6:30 pm - Parish Council
Wed, 16 Sep
9:00 am - Mother’s Union
10:00 am - Holy Communion for St Ninian of Galloway
Thu, 17 Sep
9:30 am - Friendship and Craft Group
6:00 pm - Solemn Evensong for St Hildegaard of Bingen
7:00 pm - Bible Study
Fri, 18 Sep
10:30 am - Holy Communion at Beaumont
Sat, 19 Sep
10:00 am - Child Safety Training
Sun, 20 Sep
7:00 & 9:00 am - Holy Communion for the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
Fisher Bags
Welcome • Care • Mission
Our Fisher Bags — Bags of Love are a simple way for our parish to extend Christ’s love beyond our church doors. They are designed to welcome those who are new among us, offer care and encouragement to those who may need a little support, and strengthen our mission of reaching out and connecting with our wider community.
Thank you to those that assisted with the packing of the Fisher Bags last Sunday.
If you know someone who might appreciate receiving a Fisher Bag — perhaps a neighbour, friend, someone who is unwell, lonely or simply in need of a little encouragement — there is an Expression of Interest form at the back of the church. Please add your name and the number of bags you would like to distribute.
Thank you Leisa
Growth Committee Update
The Growth Committee have been busy preparing for the second half of this year. Please see information below for events coming up in the life of the parish.
The Blessing of the Pets will be on the afternoon of Saturday, 10 October at 3pm. Donations this year will go to Happy Paws, a community-run animal shelter.
Melbourne Cup Afternoon Tea will be held on Saturday, 31 October from 2pm. Tix are $20 each.
Volunteers will be needed for all of these efforts. Please consider what your role could be, and how you might support these events.
Prayer Space with Leisa
When life feels overwhelming. S.O.S. can become a simple prayer: Seek Our Saviour. Open our hearts. Surrender our worries.
S.O.S. – Seek Our Saviour
Lord Jesus,
when life feels too loud,
too heavy
or too uncertain,
teach me to seek you first.
Seek Our Saviour –
draw my attention back to you.
Open my heart –
Make room in me for your peace,
your wisdom and your grace.
Surrender my worries –
help me release the things
I cannot control.
You do not promise a life without storms,
but you promise to be with us in them.
So today,
before panic,
before overthinking,
before trying to carry everything alone,
let my soul send out one simple S.O.S.
Jesus, I need you.
Stay close to me.
Amen
Beyond The Pew
Faith. Life. Questions. Conversation.
Beyond The Pew is the beginning of a new parish ministry seeking your prayers and engagement. Beyond the Pew is a relaxed space for conversation about faith and life. Each gathering begins with one question. There are no prepared answers and no pressure to speak — just an opportunity to listen, share, pray and discover something from one another.
You may like to try this out with your church friends. Just ask the question, and see where the conversation goes!
Last week’s question: What is your favourite Bible story – and why?
This week’s question: How does God want us to live?
Invite A Friend
There are some occasions coming up in the church calendar to which you might like to invite a friend. There will be no “signing on the dotted line” expected of them; rather, it is an opportunity to share with someone you love the meeting place between everyday life and the kingdom of heaven.
Do consider inviting someone along to The Blessing Of The Pets. This is not a worship service; rather it is a time to celebrate the goodness of God in his creatures. Bring a pet (or their photo – not everyone is comfortable with bringing Fluffy the Boa Constrictor out of the home), receive God’s blessing upon it, enjoy some community fellowship with fellow animal lovers, and raise some awareness of the good causes in the area supporting animal welfare. Saturday, October 10 at 3pm on the church grounds.
We will also be making a special observance of All Saints/All Souls at the 8am service on Sunday, November 1. Indeed, this is not only for inviting a friend, but for all of us. We have all been touched by the tragedy of the death of a loved one. On this Sunday there will be a particular emphasis on the communion of saints, a belief we confess in our Creeds. At the Holy Eucharist there is a sense of the mystery that we share a meal not only with God, and with the saints beside us in the pews, but also with the saints in heaven who have gone before us. There will be the opportunity to renew our trust in God, and that he is holding our loved ones in his loving arms. Keep an eye out in the near future for more details on how you might like to make the most of this wonderfully pastoral occasion in the Church calendar. Perhaps you know of someone who might need a sacred moment to hold them in their grief – consider offering them a personal invitation to this service.
Parish Council Update on the Veranda Blinds
The Parish council has spent some time seeking a firm to replace the veranda blinds at a reasonable price. Ready-made blinds were not a suitable size. We have finally settled on a very reputable firm at Clontarf who make blinds. The blinds will be a see-through mesh with a handle for easy winding up and down. Plastic PVC blinds were $1000 more expensive. The Quote is for $3000 (made and installed) which includes a discount from the firm. As soon as we have the finances to purchase these blinds, we will give the firm the go ahead.
Morning Tea Update
Our parish initiative of Spirited Generosity is already bearing fruit – fruit cake, that is. You may have noticed over the past several weeks that our faithful workers behind the counter brewing your cuppa have been reinforced by some faithful bakers to make Morning Tea even better.
The Ladie’s Guild is famed throughout the wider parish for their sumptuous catering – and now they are putting the call out to the troops to join in the fun.
There is no reason why we cannot have the best Morning Tea in the diocese – all it takes is your humble self, bringing a special treat to church once every so often to share after the service.
Culture’s Anti-Ageing Messaging
In 2025 the anti-ageing industry in the United States was valued at more than seventy-seven billion dollars, an eye-popping number that is predicted to almost double by 2034. To put it mildly, there’s big money in vilifying the ageing process. And money talks. What message does it shout about how the modern world feels toward ageing? Anti. Against. Hard pass.
But is that altogether wrong? Isn’t ageing a part of dying and, therefore, against God’s original design? If death is an enemy, isn’t ageing also an enemy that we should rail against with all our might? Is it possible that to be against ageing is a form of longing for an afterlife in which we will no longer be subject to the ravages of age? To answer these questions, we need a brief theology of time. What exactly is the true story of the Bible regarding ageing and the passage of time?
Ageing from the Beginning
The creation account of Genesis 1 shows us that time was functioning from day one. We know this because of the repeated time stamp of “there was evening and there was morning,” and because on the fourth day God created the sun, moon, and stars “for signs and for seasons, and for days and years” (Gen. 1:14). The celestial bodies were created for the express purpose of marking the passage of time. It follows that the humans formed from the dust on day six were time-bound, experiencing the passage of time and being impacted by it. But how? What would time’s impact have been in a world before the fall of Genesis 3?
The fact that humans are charged to be fruitful and multiply—to birth and raise children—implies ageing: growing older developmentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Though in Eden humans exist in time, time is not an adversary. It simply marks another day, month, or year of God’s faithfulness to their flourishing. Every birthday is evidence of greater maturity, wisdom, skill, and fruitfulness. We don’t know exactly what full development of a body that’s both time-bound and uncorrupted would look like. What we do know is that Adam and Eve were taken from the dust, but to it they and their descendants would not have returned. Rather, the curve of human life in Eden would have simply arced up and to the right from the origin point, extending into eternity. Their bodies—uncorrupted by sin’s corrosive effects—would have never suffered the decline and death with which we are all too familiar.
But then comes Genesis 3: the serpent, the fruit, the fall. How does creation’s relationship to time change after the sin of Adam and Eve? Time becomes an enemy. Pre-fall we had all the time in the world. Post-fall our days are numbered, and our bodies are implicated in that new maths. Rather than arcing up and to the right from the origin point, our lives now map as an arc with an origin and a terminus: birth, growth, decline, death. Rather than grow unhindered in wisdom and knowledge with every passing year, enjoying, labouring, and serving others with an incorruptible body, humans experience in their flesh the effects of a creation subjected to futility.
But remember: Ageing existed before sin entered the world, and that means ageing itself is not a penalty of sin. The penalty of sin on the human body is not that it ages but that as it ages, it declines toward death. It suffers increasing physical and cognitive failure with each passing year on the downward slope of the curve. Before the fall, people simply developed; they became more able, mature, wise, loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, and so on, with every year that passed. After the fall, people still have the capacity to develop spiritually and emotionally for all of life, but our bodies steadily decline toward death. Humans once formed from the dust know with absolute certainty that they will return to it.
Simply put, we were created to age but not to decline in our ageing. We were created for eternal life uninterrupted by decline and death, and those united to Christ will one day look back on decline and death as rude interruptions on our journey toward eternity. But for the present, we have traded a curve up and to the right for an arc with a beginning point and an end point. We all know the shape of this curve. The expression “over the hill” reflects our awareness of it. The false story of anti-ageing says we can thwart the curve, that we can have that pre-fall curve up and to the right indefinitely, or at least far beyond what previous generations ever imagined.
By contrast, the true story says not just that the curve is our reality, but that wisdom is discovered by learning that curve. Perhaps nowhere is the true story of ageing captured more beautifully than Psalm 90. After reflecting on the eternal nature of God and the fleeting nature of human life, Moses asks of God in verse 12: “Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.”
What is the wisdom of numbering our days? It is to pay attention to the passage of time and to live as though each day, each season, each moment on the curve matters for eternity. It is trusting God to help us unlearn the original sin of self-reliance as the ageing process gradually, even faithfully, reteaches us dependence. It is living in hope-filled submission to God, bearing witness to the world around us in our declining bodies that “my flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (Ps. 73:26). It’s the proof that we are living out of God’s true story. That wisdom is ours for the asking, according to James 1:5: “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.”
This wisdom is necessary for faithful stewardship of the time we are given: “Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil” (Eph. 5:15–16).
Competing Narratives
How does the Bible speak of aging? Is it anti? Is it against? Scripture’s insights sound far distant from the way we speak of it today. Consider Proverbs 16:31: “Gray hair is a crown of glory; it is gained in a righteous life.” Or Job 12:12: “Wisdom is with the aged, and understanding in length of days.”
Based on these two verses alone, the yawning chasm between the world’s view of aging and the Bible’s begins to open before our view. To the world, grey hair is a sign of impending irrelevance, and wisdom is found among the young.
But the gap gets bigger.
The Bible tells us that youthful beauty is fleeting (Prov. 31:30) but the world tells us it must be maintained at all costs. The Bible speaks of aging as a gift (Prov. 3:1–2) but the world tells us it is a disease to be fought off. The Bible tells us that care for the elderly is a sacred charge (Ex. 20:12; Lev. 19:32), but the world tells us the elderly are a burden. The Bible says our days are numbered and are to be counted with care (Ps. 90:12). The world says age is just a number, and that you’re only as old as you feel.
Don’t miss the underlying motivators of these two narratives. The world’s false story of anti-ageing is motivated by fear: Don’t get old. You’ll be invisible, irrelevant, a has-been, a burden. The Bible’s true story of aging is motivated by joy: Embrace ageing. You’ll grow in wisdom, depth, and value. No one is a has-been in God’s family.
Jen Wilkin, 22/8/2026, www.crossway.org
