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.
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.
By preparing ourselves to die with Christ, we are raised and transfigured, new people with a new vocation.
Our faith is about grace – that God comes to meet us in the truth of who we are. God is far less threatened by the darkness in our lives than we are!
Many of us want the faith story to go according to our script, but the call of Jesus crashes through our dominant religious and cultural understandings and aspirations.
Darkness cannot conceal anything from God, but God who confronts us with truth and justice, and invites us to choose life and promises to help and bless us in that choice.
Those who insist that faith must satisfy their every ideology may miss out, while those who simply yoke themselves to Jesus will find the freedom and peace for which they yearn.
We go out not to take Christ to others, but to meet Christ among them and reconnect his story and theirs.
Living as God requires may not make sense in the world, but God will make it worth our while.
Jesus calls us to take the way less travelled, to leave behind the sin that entangles, to be welcomed by God, that we may have power to welcome and love even our enemies.
Even those whose actions are morally indefensible usually have attributes that challenge our own failings.
Our liturgical expression of faith can nurture but not substitute for putting our faith into action.
Following Christ may take us into costly confrontation with the powers of the world, and we cannot be protected from the costs of that, but Christ will bring us through to the land of promise beyond.
Although the coming Christ is brings our deepest hopes to fulfillment, the transition will be traumatic and we still fear his coming because of our unhealthy investments in the present.
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.
Jesus is not calling us to self-mutilation, but he is saying that our efforts to root out sin in ourselves need to be as rigorous as it takes, even if it means appearing like a fanatic.
The Bible highlights the consequences of the world’s unjust economic system, and we, as the church, are called to find ways of living out our prayer for justice.
Christians are to be known for what they do rather than what they abstain from.
Christ has come that we might have fullness of life, and it has cost him dearly.
The church rightly has an impact on the world, bringing out the taste of God, but it won’t come from pedantic obedience.