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 […]
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?
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?
Alister Pate