The storm was fierce, the night was black and you could hardly see who was next to you. Then Jesus comes walking over the water. What would you do? What does faith look like in the context of our current storm? Can you open your mind and heart to hear Jesus say: “Take heart, it is I. Do not be afraid”?
I don’t know about you, but I am getting soooooo tired of Zoom. Let me clarify: it’s not Zoom as such – and indeed thank God for it, given how much worse things would be without it. It’s more… this whole socially distanced life is getting pretty stale. And, with no sign of things improving […]
What is the meaning of life? What does it all mean? This continual torrent of experiences, good, bad and indifferent? This world with so much beauty and terror? This sense that there is something more, something which will take everything and somehow harmonise it into something moving, powerful, and life-giving? Sometimes we can hide from […]
“Listen! A sower went out to sow….” As Melbourne goes back into lockdown, what is the good news for us from Jesus’ parable of the sower? Also: just how much wheat were the hearers expecting from a head, and does it matter?
The experience of living in the world of COVID-19 is a sort of trauma. Not, perhaps, the sort of trauma one gets from being buried by a fallen building for several days, but it isn’t nothing either. Our sense of what is secure and reliable vanishes into smoke. What does it mean to bear the easy yoke of Jesus in this new, radically uncertain, world?
“After these things God tested Abraham. He said to him, ‘Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.'” Here begins one of the most disturbing stories in the Old Testament. God asks Abraham to kill his son. In the end (spoiler alert!) he doesn’t have to . But what sort of God demands that – and what sort of person is prepared to do it? Is this simply an appalling story we should ignore – or does it plumb the profound depths of human experience at the limit?
What does it mean for Jesus to promise abundant life in a world beset by COVID-19? What does it have to tell us about abundance?
God picked up Ezekial and deposited him in a desolate valley of dry bones. A place where hopes had come to die. We’re not quite in the valley of dry bones yet – but I feel like we’re looking at one of those big green highway signs pointing down into a worryingly barren looking desert. These are dry, uncertain times, where a pitiless sun feels like it is beating down on us. And who knows when the rain might come again?
If we were writing the beatitudes today, what would we write? What does it mean to be #blessed? Could the church to be a blessing? And what does it mean to be blessed in the midst of grief and suffering?
What does a classic call to adventure story from almost two thousand years ago tell us about the relationship between Discipleship and the self-actualisation that we desire?
Alister Pate