Nathan has been a pastor of our Church since 1994.
The people who blame Jesus for increasing violence may be right. He has kicked out the foundations of our peace-keeping strategies, and now violent chaos will grow unless we learn the ways of love and mercy.
There are numerous competing claims about what a faithful Christian life looks like, and sometimes the truth about following Jesus may be the least palatable of them all.
If we delight in shaming and punishing wrongdoers, we will not recognise the scandalous love and mercy revealed in Jesus, but instead find ourselves being harshly judged by an outraged condemning god who we have created in our own image.
Election week sheds new light on how we can participate with Jesus in bringing satanic principalities and powers crashing down.
Sometimes God has to kill off our hopes and destroy our faith structures in order to create space for new life and truth to arise among us.
The gospel of love and grace revealed by Jesus is always at risk of being distorted into a false gospel of ‘holy’ hostility.
The self-giving love of the Trinity, contrasted with the experience of a toxic love triangle, calls us to a new non-possessive love that always seeks the glory and delight of the other.
God’s Holy Spirit gathers us into one body where our differences are not erased or downplayed, but boldly offered in love and service of one another.
The Revelation’s surprising image of the absence of church buildings in the fulfilled holy city is a helpful reminder that they have always been a risky concession and that their dangers need to be carefully avoided.
The love of God seeks us out, even when we least deserve it, and then calls us to love others similarly.
Doubts and questions, far from being a threat to faith in the risen Christ, are its normal starting point and constant companion.
Jesus is heart-broken when we refuse his call to gather with him in a place of powerlessness, vulnerable to the hostility of a power-hungry world.
Whether we think of the devil as a personal being or as a metaphor, our call to put our trust in Jesus to strengthen our resistance to the temptation of expedient short-cuts is the same.
We grow into the likeness of Christ as we model ourselves on him, and he is a model of growth rather than a model of static perfection.
In an us-and-them world, people hope to find a way to get God on their side, but Jesus confounds our expectations of God siding against others.
The refining fire made known in Jesus is not targeting “morality” issues, but our hatreds, hostilities and inhospitableness.
In a world increasingly divided between violent powers, Jesus leads a kingdom that is a radical peaceful challenge to both of them.
Only when the world models itself on the self-sacrificial love and mercy we have seen in Jesus will it be saved from the cycles of apocalyptic violence and chaos.
Jesus wants to lift us beyond the deadening conformity that seeks to silence us and confine us to a stunted life.
Most suffering is random and unfair, but Jesus has joined us in it to lead us into new life.