Categories
Culture and Society Faith sermons Spirituality Suffering

Lazarus Come Out!

When great troubles come upon us, when we are beginning to suspect that we might not be God after all, where do we turn?

Categories
deconstruct-reconstruct Doubt sermons Spirituality Suffering

Job and the Mystery of Suffering

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!

Categories
sermons Spirituality Suffering

Paul and Existential Gratitude

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?

Categories
Faith Philosophy sermons Suffering

Job and Jesus and the Revelation of God

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?

Categories
Christianity Failure sermons Spirituality Spirituality in the Ordinary Suffering

Branches

When we picture Jesus entering Jerusalem, do we imagine the whole of the city turning out to celebrate the arrival of the Messiah? Or is there something altogether stranger happening? What does it all mean?

Categories
Religion sermons Spirituality Suffering

Stones and Ash

What is the meaning of Ash Wednesday? And what does this famous story about a rabbi with two stones have to tell us?

Categories
Christianity Culture and Society Kingdom of God sermons Suffering

Longing and Complicity

“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down…” A year ago that text might have seemed a bit remote from our world. But devastating bushfires, fresh revelations about the injustice of our society, and, of course, the terrible plague which is devastating our world, make these words from Isaiah feel astonishingly fresh.

Categories
Christianity Culture and Society Doubt Failure sermons Spirituality in the Ordinary Story Suffering

Suffering and Gratitude

As the lockdown drags on in Melbourne, gratitude just gets harder. Suffering becomes a kind of blindness as we are turned in on ourselves. But could suffering be an ironic teacher that knocks us out of our limited ways of seeing the world? Could gratitude be a way forward?

Categories
Christianity Failure Faith Suffering

Take Up Your Cross

Why does Jesus persist in saying such depressing things? Take up your cross? It sounds like a real downer. I would pass – except that, in fact, you can’t actually avoid crosses. My choice appears to be: what do I do about it?

Categories
sermons Suffering

A Canaanite Woman’s Faith

Who is God? This is a big question. Perhaps the big question. All our other questions about the meaning of the universe, how to have a meaningful life, how to live in this world of suffering and compromise and ethical grey space – but which also has moments of transcendent moral clarity and of great […]