A modern paraphrase of a homily for the Feast of the Nativity by Ephraim the Syrian (306-373CE) taken from his second Christmas hymn.
The coming Christ will continually confound our expectations, no matter how well informed or righteous they may be.
In the pain of discouragement, God keeps whispering to us: I am still with you, and the future has possibilities you have not dreamed of. So take courage, keep at it, hold on, don’t give up.
When we do not live lives of gratitude, which would actually expand our sense of the world in which we live, God still does not rescind his gifts.
The Cross is the tree at which we come to know the fullness of good and evil, and as we choose to bear the consequences of good and evil, it becomes for us the tree of life.
Jesus acted out the parables that he was telling in his encounters with people, expressing the nature of God who seeks after us and rejoices in our being found and restored. God invites us to be people like that.
God is deeply hurt and offended by our rejection of God in favour of things that are worthless, but Jesus has made possible both our forgiveness and our reconciliation.
When we detach from things, God comes to fill or possess us by God’s Spirit, and suddenly the world is full of life once more.
God has given us a new identity and a new allegiance in his kingdom, and our loyalty is now to truth and compassion regardless of their consequences for the interests of any other communities or kingdoms.
The world will try to domesticate the gospel and get it to reinforce the world’s status quo and moral codes, but as people identified with Christ on the cross, we live the radical (and offensive) life of the new creation.
Christian ascetic discipline is not about earning God’s acceptance, but about banishing the demons so that we can live life more fully in the here and now.
The message of Pentecost is the message of Pascha – Christ is risen and, in him, we are liberated from our captivity to the spirits of death, fear, despair, and division, and freed to dance to the Holy Spirit’s tune.
When God accepts and gifts those who are supposed to be excluded according to our theology, then its time to change our theology to a rule of love instead of a rule of purity.
Jesus’s resurrection was a sign which declared that Jesus’ cause was God’s cause, that Jesus’ values were God’s values, that Jesus’ people were God’s people.
The risen Christ is extravagantly generous and excruciatingly unwilling to settle for pious platitudes in return.
The experience of the resurrected Christ may not be as instantly transformative as we’ve often thought, but those who seek Christ’s self-revelation will grow into his mission.
Repenting of our past ways and following Jesus does not guarantee us safety from disaster, but it certainly opens the way to an abundance of life that is beyond what any disaster can destroy.
In the face of powerful evil, our choice like Jesus’s choice is between the natural human instincts of flight or fight, and the third way of obedience to God.
Extravagant grace can be terrifying because it asks nothing of us but a complete change of life!
God consistently favours love and acceptance over purity, so when we are not sure, it is better to take a risk on love and acceptance.