Nathan has been a pastor of our Church since 1994.
The image of Jesus as the good shepherd can speak of tough life-on-the-line love, not just cuddling lambs.
Nathan has been a pastor of our Church since 1994.
The image of Jesus as the good shepherd can speak of tough life-on-the-line love, not just cuddling lambs.
The physicality of the resurrection is a mystery that assures us that God values and honours us as whole, embodied humans, even if our bodies are damaged or worn out.
The forgiveness we experience in the risen Christ is dauntingly radical and we are called to share it.
The good news of resurrection meets us in the darkest places of our lives and so is initially incomprehensible and disorienting.
God is passionately in love with us and longing to give us every good thing if we will respond to his love.
We all learn our desires from others, but most of them are destructive, and law tries to control them. The pathway to freedom and life is to follow Jesus and learn to desire as he desires.
In an increasingly polarised world, championing the radical love and mercy shown by Jesus is likely to bring hostility from all sides.
Both contemporary and ancient understandings of the rainbow sign point to God’s expansive love overcoming our fears and hostilities.
Following Jesus in ministering among the needs around us is not a call to do everything ourselves.
Jesus overcomes the demonic powers which colonise our religious structures and thinking and which rob us of our freedom, integrity and life.
The story of Jonah challenges us whenever we start thinking that we have special rights as God’s people.
In baptism, the Holy Spirit is ordaining us (all of us) for mission.
God reaches out to us through babies and elderly folks with a message of love and redemption that cuts through the theological justifications of empire and warmongering and calls us to peace.
The the birth of Jesus we see the beginning of a peace mission that is not based on force but on patience, forgiveness and presence.
Discovering who we are called to be is an ever-evolving journey as we follow Jesus in changing circumstances.
Though we are to strive for righteousness and justice now, what we achieve now is a mere shadow of what will be fulfilled in the day of the Lord.
Jesus calls us to a new world in which the lives of nations revolve around bringing the previously marginalised to the centre of our national way of being. Nations that fail to do that collapse into self-destruction.
While many have a passive-aggressive relationship with God, the gospel gives us a vision of God that liberates us to live freely, expansively and joyously.
Many parts of the Bible can be and often are weaponised as tools of oppression, but when we read it critically, with and through the teachings and example of Jesus, it calls us to liberation and life.
We we allow God’s word to work in us, it lifts the burden of oppressive teaching from us.