Jesus’ prediction of conflict and oppression for his disciples is a hard reading. Yet, it reveals something profoundly helpful about who Jesus is and what it means to be a disciple.
Category: sermons
How a fourth century thinker helps us challenge the meaningless universe of (post-)modernity. Was love the answer all along?
Jesus said “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No-one comes to the Father, except through me” Did he mean something like “if you want to get to the Father, you have to get through me first? Is Jesus standing in the way, preventing people from getting to God, like a soothsayer on a bridge asking impossible questions? Or is “the way” more like being the Mandalorian, where “this is the way” refers to a whole way of life? What do Jesus, Monty Python, and the Mandalorian have to do with one another? And was it absolutely necessary to bring Wittgenstein into it?
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Do not be afraid
A Sermon for Easter Day – Year A – Matthew 28:1-10 It is a bit of a commonplace among some science-y types that humans are insignificant in comparison to the universe and all the many things in it. They love to point out how small humans are, how a brief a human life is, in […]
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You Must Be Born from Above
What does it mean to be “born again”? What is that stuff about the Moses and the serpent on a pole? And what does “for God so loved the world” really mean? And, finally, what does all this mean for us in the everyday reality of our lives?
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Vulnerability and Triumph
What does the story of Jesus temptation in the wilderness have to do with me? Did Jesus mog Satan into submission? Or is there something for both “the universe was made for me” and “I am nothing but dust and ashes” people?
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The Good News of the Transfiguration
How do we live? This is the fundamental question. Our lives are a cascade of objects and events, joy and sorrow, all conducted in front of the backdrop of a world which just continues on as usual no matter what is going on in our own lives. What do we make of if all? Is it ever possible to say of our lives “this is my life, I want no other?”
A sermon on Matthew 15: 21-28 I’m a big fan of the movies of the director Wes Anderson , and I was excited to hear that his newest film was out, and showing at the Thornbury Picture House, which I’m also a big fan of. I don’t know how familiar you are with his work, […]
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The Cost of Discipleship and the Last Man
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 […]
Alister Pate 