Inviting Christ into your dwelling means being renovated from the inside out.
Inviting Christ into your dwelling means being renovated from the inside out.
Those who are insiders in the life of God are characterised by their love and compassion for all, especially those deemed unworthy of it, and by the humility to be schooled by outsiders.
Being missioners needs to be patterned on Jesus if it is to have any integrity at all, and so it will be characterised by intentional engagement, genuine curiosity, deep listening, allowing others to be a blessing to us, and trusting ourselves to God.
The resurrection of Jesus opens a path and calls us to follow into a life that is no longer dominated by the crucifying powers that destroy some of us and dehumanise others.
In Christ, God has made an agreement with us, offering us everything and demanding nothing, but if we offer nothing we will be at risk of squandering it all.
If we can hold on to the visions of glory, while resisting the urge to nail them down, we can step into a world of suffering knowing that there is light.
The temptations faced by Jesus reveal common patterns in the demonic temptations that we face in our own lives.
God’s generosity provides the context for our worship and the model for our living, especially when we are faced with hostility.
All that matters about God, about sin and forgiveness, and about living with integrity and freedom, flows from the human encounter with the crucified and risen Jesus.
A close encounter with God in Christ can make us paralysingly aware of our own sin and failure, but the experience of grace can transform that into a solidarity and gratitude that empowers us.
The only measure of our progress in Christian faith is our love for others, including those we are least inclined to love.
The promise of baptism with fire may surprisingly lead us to a loving suffering messiah.
We can’t take it for granted that Jesus will be where we want to go, for his ways often go contrary to ours and our business is to follow him.
The visitation story is a powerful introduction to the gospel of God’s lavish and overwhelming love for us, and to God’s hospitality as we see it in Jesus.
The joyous message of Christmas demands a response from us all year round.
The mercy of God – like the dawn that breaks a long darkness, the song that breaks a long silence – gives light, life and hope to those shadowed by death.
Christ calls us to be alert for his salvific coming in the midst of the terrors of the here and now, not just in the past and future.
Christ is always stretching the boundaries beyond what we can comprehend, and his ascension stretches his presence to encompass even what seem to us to be his absence.
We mostly don’t see ourselves as either terrible sinners or as gloriously Christ-like, but in the resurrection we are called to fully imagine both as world-changing truths.
God has hung a star in our sky, and called us to follow it to the Christ child, who will receive the gifts that we bring and we will return changed to our homes.