God comes to us, in seemingly insignificant places and borne by easily overlooked people.
If the message of Christmas is real, then our preparations for it need to be radically life-changing.
A growing incidence of cataclysmic violence is not a sign of God’s activity, but it does call us to hold on to our hope and look for God’s action in small signs of life coming from death.
Christ’s grief gathers up our griefs and achieves the promise of a day when tears will be no more.
We remain blind to much of what Jesus would have us see until we allow him to open our eyes to see through the eyes of others.
True greatness comes in devoting ourselves to recognising and liberating the greatness in others, and that will often come at the cost of misunderstanding, sniping and rejection.
Taking up your cross is about a willingness to pay the price of following Jesus and living out your baptism. It is not a generalised stoicism.
God is doing and saying far more than we can see or hear, but God is always ready to penetrate the presumptions and complacencies that are closing our eyes and ears.
God blesses us with much more than we need, but instead of throwing away the excess, we are to take what we don’t need and do something with it.
But the call is to be “Fair Dinkum” with each other, to be open and trust who we are to this community.
Our One God and Father feeds us with one bread so that we might grow up into Christ and be the missional community the Spirit is leading us to become.
Jesus reveals that God is a God of abundance who will lovingly provide plenty for all, but the common perception of scarcity easily corrupts us and leads to treachery and abuse.
God created everything and destined everything to be part of the one glorious story of God’s love and grace, and through Jesus, God draws us back into the story.
Though the experience of grief often feels like an absence of God, it is a deep experience of the heart of God, and is symbolised as such in the brokenness of the Eucharist.
When things are desperate, God calls us only to be faithful and committed, because the outcomes are in God’s hands, not ours.
The Spirit of God is acting to bring life out of death and hope and vitality out of despair.
When we encounter Jesus, we are seeing the truth about God and the truth about life as it is meant to be lived. To embrace that truth will put us at odds with the world, but on the pathway to fullness of life.
The knowledge that we are loved by God and the tenacious sharing of that love break the power of the world’s systems to lock us in to destructive cycles overwork, over consumption, and compliance with injustice and war.
The risen Christ and his word are often revealed in the words and actions of a stranger. Sometimes we are called to welcome and heed the stranger; and sometimes we are called to be the faithful stranger to others.
Faith in the risen Christ is always a physical thing, experienced and expressed in physical ways.