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 do we live? That, it seems to me is the big question. People in every age have asked it, in as many different ways as there have been cultures. Sometimes, as here, both the question and the answer have been explicit. Sometimes implicit – you have to look below the surface froth of events to have a sense of what is really driving things. But there is no escaping it. – all of human life is driven by this overarching question.
How do we live?
A man sits on an ash-heap, scratching at his sores with a broken shard of a clay pot. He looks up at the sky and demands answers. What happens next will amaze you!
In difficult times, our simplistic answers stop working. What is life all about? What big story am I part of?
What do my battered trainers have to do with Paul’s stirring words about putting on the full armour of God?
Our experience of life is such a mxi of joy and sorrow, pleasure and suffering. How can we be grateful when the world is so full of suffering? Can we be grateful for, rather than to, the universe?
Some nights, I dream about freedom. About walking out the door without a mask, or having friends over to my house to have dinner together. To booking a plane ticket to, well, anywhere really, and being confident that I wouldn’t have to cancel it and add it to my enormous mountain of flight credit vouchers. But what does it mean to be really free – free in a way which lockdowns don’t touch?
Is our experience of church more like an untutored 12 year old on the verge of capsizing a catamaran? Or is it more like the skilful competence of the children of Swallows and Amazons? And what on earth does this have to do with the Letter to the Ephesians?
Who is this God person and what does he want from us? The beginning of Ephesians gives us a place to start.
What does suffering mean? What sort of universe is it that allows the suffering of a good person like Job? Are we better off just abandoning the whole idea of a good God?
What does Jesus have to say about Masterchef, my nonna’s favourite recipe, and the “sin against the Holy Spirit”?
Alister Pate