The Kingdom of God is like this:
It’s a cool, clear morning in late summer. The sun hasn’t quite managed to peek over the eastern lake, and the workers wrap themselves closely in their cloaks and grumble. It’s just another day selling their labour for a measly pittance, just about enough to keep body and soul together. Just enough to make it worth being out of bed before the sun is, and to be standing around waiting here….
Easter feels a long time ago. The weariness of the lockdown wears on and on and, I don’t know about you, but it’s grinding me down. For instance, one of the highlights of my week last week was to sit in my car in the carpark of a local McDonalds eating a Sausage and Egg […]
It seems like every day is a sort of Good Friday. What does it tell us about the truth of our own vulnerable humanity? What does it mean to celebrate Easter in this time of COVID19?
Who is this Jesus person? And what does a parade held on the other side of the world two thousand years ago have to do with us?
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.
Someone asked me once “why does God need us to tell Him how wonderful He is? Does He have some sort of ego problem?” Apart from the regrettable use of gendered language for God, it is a fair point. If God is a personal, as Christians like to insist, then it’s a bit weird. Surely […]
Imagine that Jesus walked into our service here, today. I it’s likely that I would offer him the pulpit – even though I have worked pretty hard on writing my sermon. I can imagine myself taking a chair, leaning forward interestedly to hear what he has to say. This is more or less precisely the […]
What actually is the Good News? Today’s gospel goes to the nub of that question. In Luke’s account of Jesus’ ministry, the first words we hear him speak in public are these: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent […]
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 […]
This blog post is part of a series (starting here) exploring what Charles Taylor can teach us about how faith and secularity interact in his (enormous) work A Secular Age. One of Taylor’s main points seems to be that there is a big story in our culture that Science inevitably replaces Faith. Matthew Arnold’s poem On […]
Alister Pate