17 May 2012

As we draw near to the end of the "God’s Story" part of the Church Year, the important feast of Ascension offers some significant truths on which to build our life of following Christ. The challenge is to hold this event in the context of Jesus’ whole life and message – which makes it impossible to view it as a basis for a dualistic view of God, or a belief in God as somehow "separate" from creation. Rather, the image of human flesh and blood being integrated into the Godhead should leave us with the awesome realisation that God is more inextricably immersed and connected with creation than we could ever have dreamed!

May our meditations today draw us deeper into the mystery of incarnation and of the God who is intimately interconnected with God’s creation.

(more…)

20 May 2012

As the Easter season draws to a close, the final challenge of this part of the Lectionary, before turning to Pentecost, is for us to commit to Christlike holiness – which, as it turns out, is also a call to unity and community. For this task, we will certainly the empowerment of God’s Spirit that next week promises, but if we are willing to answer the call, our quest to live our connectedness will have deeply healing effects on our world.

May our worship connect us more deeply with God, with others and even with ourselves this week.

(more…)

And so we finally come to what may be thought of – in some senses at least – as the most important Sunday of the year. If resurrection is just about a miraculous event that happened to Jesus long ago, or if it’s only about something that happens to some people at the end of time, then it has little real value, no matter how fascinating it may be. But, of course, resurrection is about far more than this. It’s the promise of God’s life available to us both now and forever. And it the call for us to follow Christ by becoming life-givers and agents of resurrection in our families, communities and our world. What a glorious and miraculous challenge!

May the empty tomb be more than an event for us as we worship this year, and may our worship lead us into a real and transforming encounter with God’s irrepressible life!

(more…)

Easter is not over! While we celebrated Easter Sunday last week, the fifty day Easter Season continues until Pentecost Sunday on 12 June. During this time the Lectionary invites us to dig deep into the meaning of Jesus’ resurrection. This season flows out of Holy Week as a kind of mirror of Lent which led us into it – the latter being a preparation for the powerful and challenging journey of Holy Week, and the former being an outworking of the Holy Week experience. This week the gift of the Lectionary is the gift of assurance – a confidence that our faith is not just a fantasy, or a distant dream, but is something real and transforming that we can experience and live each day.

May the power of resurrection life fill our souls as we worship this week, and throughout the Easter Season.

(more…)