Jesus leads the way towards a new experience of life that is so utterly alive that death is powerless to threaten, limit or constrain it.
Jesus leads the way towards a new experience of life that is so utterly alive that death is powerless to threaten, limit or constrain it.
The COVID-19 scare can reinforce our Lenten call to prepare our hearts by facing up to our mortality and the real limits of our control over the world.
Jesus calls us to neither conservatism nor iconoclasm, but to a faithful reckoning with the gifts and the sins of the past as we welcome and adapt to the new.
In the face of monumental devastation and suffering, God speaks a word, and the word becomes flesh.
The Christmas stories assure us that Jesus is the one who brings light into our darkness.
Faithful waiting for for the fulfilment of God’s promises can leave us feeling compromised and alienated in the world around us.
The coming kingdom culture confronts the world’s violence by redemptively suffering and absorbing it, not by reciprocating it with even greater violence.
The imminent arrival of God’s messiah asks each of us to take up the identity of witnesses who open the way for God to be known.
We can face the unknown future with confidence because we know that the one who holds the future loves us and can be trusted.
When God calls us to invest in the places we live, it is a call to active agents of positive change, not compliant patriots.
Facing an epidemic of depression and despair, Jesus calls us to follow on a tear-stained path of prophetic faithfulness.
Lived faith is the way to life in God, but it passes through a baptism of fire.
In Christ’s ascension onto the mysterious cloud, we are gathered together into his mysterious presence.
We have been drawn into an unstoppable rumour that keeps interrupting the dominant story of fear, hostility and death.
Jesus sets out to reshape our view of the relationships between sin, repentance and disaster, and if possible, to call us out of our spiral into global self-destruction.
The call to love our enemies is not a new law to slave at, but a call into a culture of love so wild and free and strong that no one can hate it out of us.
It is with the love of Christ taking charge of us, that we can venture into combat with the wrongs of our time without being dragged down by the very same demons that we oppose.
It is not from the halls of power but from humble places that the love which offers wholeness and healing and peace erupts into life.
The baby whose coming is awaited will turn the world upside down (not just the lives of its parents!), and our counter-cultural observance of Advent is a necessary preparation of ourselves for that reality.
Angry prophets who tell us the hard-to-hear truth about ourselves pave the way for a new world to emerge.