Book: Acts

When everything familiar has gone and the new thing hasn’t arrived yet, the disciples’ upper room is closer to home than we might think.

Paul in Athens, a Muslim Uber driver, and a Georgian bishop walk into a sermon — and together reframe what Christian interfaith encounter could look like.

Philip asked Jesus to show him God. The answer dismantles centuries of angry-God theology — and exposes the retributive impulse hiding in all of us.

When the executed one comes back, everyone expects retribution. The shock of resurrection is that he doesn’t.

The Church born when God poured out the Holy Spirit, is one in which barriers of ethnicity, language, sex, age, and social status are transcended and all are equal in Christ.

The ascension is the completion of the cosmic liturgy that frees us from our entanglement in sin, lifts us into the holy of holies, and sends us forth as the body of Christ for the world.

Resurrection keeps happening and keeps changing the world and overcoming the hostile deathly powers despite our inability to believe.

True forgiveness, which we encounter most fully in the risen Christ, does not gloss over the past but revisits it fully and carefully that we may be fully set free from it.

The Holy Spirit, poured out on the church, opens pathways of communication, breaking down barriers to enable us to communicate with one another and with God.

Christ is always stretching the boundaries beyond what we can comprehend, and his ascension stretches his presence to encompass even what seem to us to be his absence.

In baptism we are adopted into a new family that is radically inclusive of those who have been cut off.

Looking for emerging patterns can help us (and Jesus?) recognise the ways that God is opening new pathways of grace and inclusion.