Violence must be a constant temptation for God, but in absolute love, God has vowed never to resort to it.
Violence must be a constant temptation for God, but in absolute love, God has vowed never to resort to it.
In Jesus, God is calling us to see and hear a gospel that takes us beyond rule making and sacred violence.
God’s new culture of forgiveness is entered by faith, and sometimes it is even vicarious faith.
When we know ourselves as known by God, the demonic power of violent naming is broken and new life dawns.
In Advent, we wait to discern more carefully the One for whom we wait, and the One who waits for us.
Jesus promises that if we will face our deepest fear – the loss of our very souls – and if we will trust in his love, then we shall live, even though we die.
Religious ritual and ethical living are both bound up together in the journey of following Jesus into the Realm of God.
Grace is the opposite of karma, that most ancient and persistent of human laws which proclaims that we get what we deserve. We do not get what we deserve, and thank Christ we don’t!
Jesus is uncompromising in his teaching about what we do with our bodies and the significance of our relationships, but also in promising a new beginning when we find ourselves lost in this way.
The answers to the questions about our future directions are not easy, but we can trust the God who holds our future in his hands.
If we can lose ourselves in the worship of Christ, then Christ will come to fill our emptied egos with his own self which now dances in the freedom of God.
Lent can be a dark night filled with tears and mourning and loss, but it is worth it, for God’s joy comes in the morning.
The Transfiguration points us back to Jesus’ baptism and forward to his resurrection, and reiterates that the only way from one to the other is the way of the cross.
God in Jesus Christ touches our grubby humanity to make it clean, so that human beings and human community might regain their colour, shape and original purpose.
The demonic forces of our culture and time colonise our lives but if we turn to Christ, he will drive away the demons and fill us with his Spirit. His truth will set us free.
We are called to take sides in a conflict between the prophet of love and peace and the prophets of hatred and violence.
In the midst of horror and despair, Christ arrives with love enough, with peace enough, with hope enough to make things very, very, very different.
The Advent season is a gift that illumines our present with light from our promised goal, to shape us as a people of patient and vigilant faithfulness.
Love is both command and promise and is what gives meaning to all our offerings to God.
Summing up the previous section of the gospel, Bartimaeus is a model disciple – one who sees who Jesus is, has no pretensions to power, leaves everything, and follows Jesus on the way.