A broken, inarticulate sermon preached in the immediate aftermath of the Christchurch Mosque shootings. The world can seem like a very dark place some days, and it is hard to preach a message of hope. Nonetheless, this is what I am called to do.
Category: Religion
Categories
Love Your Enemies
Jesus tells us to love our enemies, do good to those who hurt us, not to judge, to do to other people what we would have them do to us. Is that possible? Is it even desirable?
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Do Not Be Afraid
Imagine yourself a tourist in New York City on the 8th of November, 2001. You’ve gotten up early in the morning to take in the sights, and you find yourself gazing up at the enormous glass and steel man made mountains that were the World Trade Centre….. If even something as permanent seeming and invulnerable as the Twin Towers can come down, glinting in the sun one moment and a nightmare of ash and collapsed building materials the next – then what can you trust? What can you have confidence in?
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What do you want?
Jesus asked James and John: “What do you want me to do for you?”
It’s a hard question – As the psychologist Abraham Maslow said: “It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.”
There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. That man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil. Job 1:1 So begins the book of Job. It’s a kind of fairy story really. Job is an archetype of the good man. He has no […]
The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world Matthew Arnold On Dover Beach […]
This video is something I made a few weeks ago for a worship event at college chapel focussing on Acts 17:16-34. Paul called the Athenians “extremely religious… in every way” The question that occured to me: What would Paul make of Melbourne? What gods would he observe? So I went on an anthropological expedition through […]
Every age has its key dilemma, its key anxiety. For us in the post-modern west the key anxiety is the crisis of meaning. What is life really all about? Does it actually mean anything at all? All our traditional ways of finding meaning in life are disintegrating. Given that, I think we will find that, […]
This is a sermon I preached a couple of weeks ago about Mary and Martha. You can listen to it here (and marvel at how slowly I’m managing to speak) Or you can read it below. Luke 10:32-48 Sermon at Wesley Church Melbourne 16/7/2016 Life can feel very mysterious sometimes. Random, and often terrible, events fill […]
I’ve been struggling with finding some sort of way to write interestingly about my experience of being involved in Caféchurch. The problem it is unlike \anything else I have ever done. It is entirely all consuming, and has been amazingly rewarding and deeply costly – the most fun, and the most pain, I have ever […]
Alister Pate 