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.
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.
Jesus’s unique priesthood ensures that he is able to help us, and his solidarity with us in suffering ensures that he will help us.
God’s love for us is so great that God will do anything to give us a way out of the self-condemnation and self-destruction of continuing to live in conformity with the world’s ways.
Jesus is angered by our trivialising of religion that inoculates us against the claims of a holy God, and calls us to clean out the crassness and commercialism and approach God on God’s terms.
Hope is the melody of the future – Faith dances to it today
When we glimpse the fullness of what could be, we are called to the tough work of bridging the gap between here and there.
The unfailing love of God is with us, even in the tragedy, confusion, and anguished questions and doubts.
God is with us to comfort and revive us in the face of horror, but also to challenge us to turn things around.
Jesus meets us with not just words of hope, but with actions of authority and integrity.
We have become exiled from our destiny as God’s children, but Jesus has been born among us to reveal to us and restore us to that destiny.
Let us keep the festival by standing confidently, and affirming our faith in the God who takes flesh among us, today!
In God’s coming reign, things we find impossible to reconcile will be reconciled.
Jesus, the coming king, will rise above power mongering and tenderly lead the people into paradise