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First Sunday of Epiphany Year C: Prayers and Address

These are the prayers and address I used for the first Sunday of Epiphany this year.

Prayers:

We pray for all baptised and unbaptised people around the world. Help them, and us, to lead happy lives.   We pray especially for all those caught in war, poverty, famine or natural disasters.  Help those around our country whose homes have flooded multiple times and don’t know when the rains will hit them again. We pray for those in Syria and the Middle East, may they find a way to stop the senseless violence.  We also pray for North Korea help them to see that they don’t need to develop new weapons.
We pray for our families, friends and people we know. Let them enjoy themselves with smiles on their faces.   Please help those people who find it hard to smile at this time, those who are sick, in pain or unhappy. Help them to find some comfort, and help us to be able to give it to them.  We pray especially for....
Finally Lord, thankyou for giving us this chance to come and pray to you, to be here with our family and friends and for reminding us how important our baptisms were.

Address:

*walk to the back of the church to the font*
Can anyone tell me what this is?   What’s it used for?
A font and it’s for baptisms well done! What do we put in it?
Water! Is it any kind of water? Holy water yes, good going!
A baptism is a bit like a bath, though we have our clothes on and instead of cleaning us on the outside it makes us clean on the inside. It shows that we want to be, or our parents want us to be, close to God and to have his forgiveness when we need it during our lives.
A lot of people call baptisms ‘christenings’. This is because during the baptism service babies are given their names, this part is called being christened. So the whole service is a baptism – it’s only that part that is a christening.
Now in our Gospel reading today we heard about a man called John. Does anyone know who he was?
He was actually Jesus’ cousin! Some people confused him with Jesus, that’s what happened at the start of our reading, people asked if he was the Messiah, to which he replied that no he wasn’t, the true Messiah is much much more powerful than me!  John used to baptise people in the river Jordan, he didn’t use a font. He would push people under water to baptise them and keep doing it till they said they were really sorry their sins! Did you know that’s why our fonts are so big? It used to be that during a baptism the baby would be put under water then brought out, and keep doing this till the baby cried, because when the baby cried that’s when it had said sorry! It’s much nicer nowadays I think!
 In the end of our reading Jesus is baptised, and the Holy Spirit comes down to him like a dove. What does a dove look like? Correct it’s a white bird! And the Holy Spirit said that Jesus was his Son and he was pleased. This showed everyone who Jesus was, it was a sign from God that Jesus was very special and important. By being baptised ourselves we can feel that special bond ourselves. we don't have doves flying down and speaking with God's voice to us but we do know that our baptism males us be accepted by God and let's us be loved by Him!  And I think that’s a really nice and comforting thought, don’t you?
Amen.

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