15 December 2019
God of the Poor
While visiting her cousin Elizabeth, Mary praises God’s goodness, and looks forward to a world turned upside down. Years Later, when Elizabeth’s son John the Baptist doubts his own acclamation that Jesus was the true Messiah, Jesus provides him with evidence. However, he warns that God (nor, by implication, God’s Messiah) is not to be found in palaces among the rich and powerful, but in the wilderness – the place to which the scapegoat is sent on the Day of Atonement.
1 December 2019
The Reality of Advent
During Advent we prepare our hearts for God’s coming through faithful work and prayer. But unless we grasp the reality of the consequences of our way of life, our work will be in vain. Both Paul and Jesus advise us to “wake up” and see what is happening, while Isaiah envisions life after the “Day of the Lord”.
17 November 2019
Listening to the Warnings
The prophets warned us about the consequences of social injustice and Jesus warned us about the consequences of social wholeness and wrong ways to seek personal wholeness. Humanity has failed to heed these warnings, and also warnings about the consequences of ignoring ecological integrity. Repeated warnings, consistently ignored, are not always ‘crying Wolf’ – when the wolf is real, we had better pay attention.
3 November 2019
Whatever we do
Our worship of God and our work for the kingdom are intimately bound together, and whatever we do with our lives, 24/7, is the frontline on which we live them out. Doing whatever we do in Jesus’ name isn’t about getting other people to come to church or about getting them to accept that what we believe is right; it is about promoting and fostering ways of living that are life-enhancing, that promote personal wholeness, social coherence and ecological integrity to the benefit not only of all creation, but of our children, of their grand-children and of their grand-children’s grand-children.
15 September 2019
Seeking Wisdom, Finding Grace
Jeremiah warns of the consequences of continually getting it wrong about the way we choose to live, and Jesus tells parables about God’s outrageous care for outcasts and yjr marginalized. As Paul discovered after he ‘saw the light’, those who seek wisdom find grace. We can discover this for ourselves if we see the Bible not so much as a ‘manual for living’ but more as an invitation to join an ancient quest in search of wisdom.
25 August 2019
A Consistent Message
In Isaiah 58 the prophet encourages the exiles returning to Jerusalem from Babylon to desist from cultural, economic and ethnic exclusion and oppression. Some 500 years later Luke’s Gospel tells a story of Jesus healing a disabled woman on the Sabbath in accordance with his manifesto for the kingdom of God. Today, time is running out for humanity if we don’t finally come to our senses about the inevitable consequences of our unjust social, economic and political systems that the Council for World Mission characterises as ’empire’
7th July 2019
Like Lambs Among Wolves
When Paul spoke to the philosophers and mathematicians of Athens, he could be sure that he and his listeners shared a common understanding of the structure of the Universe. Today, we no longer share that understanding with the majority of secular scientists and people who simply reject religion. If we are to tell people what Jesus meant when he sent his seventy followers ‘like lambs among wolves’ to tell people that ‘the Kingdom of God has come close’, then we need to find a way of talking about how the world works that allows for meaningful two-way communication.
19 May 2019
The urgent need for love.
What if the imperitive to love included the whole of creation, and not just our fellow humans? What if we used the language of care, instead of the langauage of politics, economics and science?
