I'm a minister in the Uniting Church in Australia, with two congregations: one in Northcote / Chalice, which now includes Cafechurch Melbourne, and one up the road in Reservoir, confusingly known as Preston High Street. I am
How does Friedrich Nietzsche help us make sense of the astonishingly tough demands Jesus makes of his disciples? How could being told to “give away all your possessions” possibly be Good News?
No-one knew it was Holy Saturday that first time. No-one who lived through Good Friday would have called it anything but evil, terrible, destructive. The end of all that they had hoped for. All that excitement – the drama of being called and leaving everything to follow this new rabbi, the gradual buildup of the […]
I was once asked to sum up the gospel in a sentence. I said this: Jesus is Lord. Why is this so controversial? Did you react a bit when I wrote it? It certainly caused quite a stir amongst the nice, well-meaning Christians in my group. Is this not very stark? Surely the idea of […]
Could a sermon on the impossibly demanding commandment to love your enemies really be about grace?
Out of all the many odd, unsettling, even shocking, things Jesus had to say, it is possible that this is the oddest. Blessed are the poor? Really?
“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” Such a well known reading, much used in wedding services. But is Paul talking particularly about weddings and romantic love? Or is there something else going on here?
What does Frank Herbert’s Sci-fi epic have to teach us about Jesus? What does it have to teach us about a two thousand year old social call?
“There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars….” Haven’t we outgrown all this magical thinking? Does the idea of the Second Coming really have anything to say to us here and now?
“So you are a king” said Pilate to Jesus. What a simple phrase: what a lot going on. What does it mean for Jesus to be a “King” in our democratic age?
When great troubles come upon us, when we are beginning to suspect that we might not be God after all, where do we turn?
Alister Pate