The glory of God is most fully revealed in Jesus’s willingness to suffer death at the hands of the law.
We are prepared to sacrifice and kill in the name of our God, but God is willing to be sacrificed and be killed to save us, even when we were enemies.
When we approach God’s way of life and the Sabbath not as punishment, but as gift, the experience becomes a chance to rest from work and from striving; and to allow space for God through contemplation and re-creation and play.
Jesus calls us to turn away from pathways of judgement and condemnation and to follow him on the harder path of love and new life.
Lent is a time to walk knowingly into the wilderness, to face the Accuser and the wild beasts that emerge when we live out our identity as God’s children.
Expecting God to always appear as an exalted triumphant victor blinds us to the reality of God’s glory which is made known in suffering, self-sacrificial love.
Jesus urges us to take stock, to recognise the sicknesses which warp us and the demons which colonise our hearts and our minds, to renounce them so that we become free to minister to one another, and to proclaim the good news in our words and our lives.
Jesus calls us to model a pattern of love and generous inclusion, and to avoid the demonic temptations of exclusion and pride.
Jesus leads us into a joyous and healthy way of living that avoids both constricting legalism and destructive libertarianism.
The feeling of distance and separation from God – which we all feel – is perception not reality… it is the fruit of our fear and our holding-back.
God has become flesh so that we might know God and realise our own destiny in God in the world.
To grow up well, children need to be anchored to a broad community with shared values, which nevertheless allows for individual differences.
We are welcoming a baby born into occupied territories to a fiercely holy young woman, and we are recognising in that baby the hope of liberation.
Joseph models a courageous willingness to be stripped of his sense of entitlement that he might become all God wanted him to be.
Preparing ourselves for the coming Lord is not a matter of rigorous rule keeping, but rules can help us learn the appropriate new way of being.
Advent is preparing us for the coming of the Lord, that already and not-yet event for which people have lived and worked and prayed for millennia.
Jesus calls us to courageously follow him through a world of apparently apocalyptic violence towards the advent of hope and peace.
In our desire to see mercy and compassion expressed for the needy, we must beware of falling into desiring the exact opposite for those who have not shown mercy and compassion.
You cannot serve two masters; for a slave will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other.
Our readiness to welcome and celebrate Christ is integral to his becoming present and active among us.