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The latest edition of Becket News, our parish magazine, is fresh off the virtual press. You can read it or download it here.

Looking at the week ahead, including the invitations to this week’s Sunday service and Wednesday’s Morning Prayer on Zoom:

Download the newsletter in PDF format here.

(If you cannot download the PDF for some reason, please get in touch with us at info@anglican-church-hamburg.de, so we can email you a copy.)

On Friday, 9 April, Buckingham Palace announced the death of His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. We join with people around the world in mourning his loss.

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, there will be no books of condolence in the UK or overseas. Members of the public wishing to express their condolences may do so here – www.royal.uk.

Prince Philip, who was born on the Greek island of Corfu on 10 June 1921, was named Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark and baptised into the Greek Orthodox Church. He became a member of the Church of England in 1947, renouncing his membership of the Greek Orthodox Church and his Greek and Danish royal titles on his marriage to Princess Elizabeth, who was to become Queen on the death of her father, King George VI, in 1952.

The Archhbishop of Canterbury celebrated and preached at a Eucharist and Service of Remembrance for The Duke of Edinburgh at Canterbury Cathedral on Sunday, 11 April. A recording of the service can be found on the cathedral website.

BBC Radio 4’s ‘Sunday’ programme on 11 April 2021 devoted segments to The Duke of Edinburgh’s Christian faith and how it informed his views on the environment. You can find it on the BBC Sounds website or the BBC Sounds app.

Today I’d like to share with you Jochim Trede at our organ playing Johann Sebastian Bach’s Chorale Prelude “O Mensch, bewein’ dein’ Sünde groß”. Bach’s “Choralbearbeitung” takes the tune of the Lutheran hymn “O Mensch, bewein’ dein’ Sünde groß” (“O human, bewail your great sin”) and stretches it into long ornamented arcs. It is the virtue of music that the music does exactly what the words prompts us to do: The hymn says “bewail your sin – cry!” and the music bewails and cries.

In this week we’d like to share with you Dietrich Buxtehude’s “Passacaglia in D Minor” played by our organist Jochim Trede at one of the concerts celebrating our 400th anniversary in 2012.

A “passacaglia” is a musical form in which a short bass line is repeated over and over again while on top of that variations flourish.

Is there something meaningful in your life to which you keep returning to? For some it’s a book they can never get tired to read again and again. For others it’s a special place they like to visit. Maybe you discover that there’s a constant meaningful theme in your life and a lot of variations on that? You can take your time to reflect on that while listening to Buxtehude’s Passacaglia:

Today on Ash Wednesday we enter the Forty Days, the season of Lent. Some ask: “What could I do to make the weeks in which we prepare for the celebration of Easter meaningful?” But you could also put the question in another way: “What can I leave out, so that I can make space for God’s doing in and around me?”

Often it seems really hard work to limit yourself and to leave a space open. When we post something each Wednesday in Lent here we hope that we don’t feed that impulse to add more and more things to your to do list (even if that’s a spiritual to do list!). So here’s a 12 minute organ piece played by Jochim Trede, our organist: Choral III in A Minor by César Franck. If it’s hard for you to “do nothing” start with small steps and listen to a piece of music. It’ll give you a good “excuse” if people raise their eyebrows and think that you’re just sitting around idly while in fact a) you’re listening to music and b) you’re holding a space of waiting and listening (and that’s the ground for prayer!).

17 February marks the beginning of Lent. We are not having our own service, but there are two opportunities to join other services online:

Our sister church in Berlin, St George’s, has invited us to join them for their streamed Ash Wednesday service.
The service will be livestreamed at 19:30 CET (on Facebook and available later via YouTube).

The Diocese in Europe Service of Evening Prayer is also at 19:30 CET.
Rev’d Sam Van Leer (Acting Archdeacon of NW Europe) will lead the service. Bishop Robert is the preacher. The liturgy includes an invitation to light three candles at the start of the service and extinguish them at certain moments during the service.
You can watch the service being livestreamed on the diocesan YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/S79rMG_zEWA