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!
We worship our God with words and images from the imagination of human beings, believing that God can take even what we say and do speak to us in a voice nor our own and images not our own.
In the elusive quest to know Christ, spiritual disciplines are a valuable means, but can also easily degenerate into idols.
At the deepest level of our need, we are called to rest in the love and righteousness of God, which can never be forced.
There is no such thing as a ritual-free space, and performed well or performed badly, rituals change things, change people’s lives.
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.
Jesus is opening our eyes and widening our focus to allow God’s ‘unbiased grace’ to break through.
The only thing which proves to be worth anything at all, the only thing that proves able to continually redeem our lives from the brink is faith in the crucified and risen one.
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.
It is only by letting go of our tribal need to define who is in and who is out, that any of us shall, in the end, show forth a kingdom which is from God.
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.
If we are committed to the way of Jesus more even than we are to each other, we will end up doing what is truly best for each other and for all God’s creation.
We voluntarily live a vowed life as a grateful response to God’s saving acts.
If Abraham is our common father in faith, and like him we are justified and made whole by our faith in God’s mercy, then Christians, Jews and Muslims might find unity in sharing, humbly, in the wonder of that gift together.
The world is full of offers of poisoned cups to quench our thirst, but Jesus offers us his own Spirit to sustain us in the wilderness.
The wound of abandonment which haunts every human being will find its healing in Christ who is everywhere present as the authority and power of God.
We go out not to take Christ to others, but to meet Christ among them and reconnect his story and theirs.
The resurrection of Jesus is about the in-breaking of something which is so new, so different, so unheard of, that it changes things so entirely that we will never again become captive to all that is predictable, or ‘necessary,’ or ‘fated’.
We are called not to know, but to be known, not to see, but to be seen by God, who gazes upon us with a love so wide and long and deep that it surpasses all our imaginings.
Living as God requires may not make sense in the world, but God will make it worth our while.