Topic: Vocation

Imagination, fed by Jesus, enables us to grow and stretch, to make a way from what is to what could be, for the sake of worlds of hope God is already excited about.

When we respond to the call to follow Jesus, he asks us to stop and examine our motives. Is it for the life of the world, or for our own benefit?

In determining our church’s way forward, we need to discern who we exist to serve, and it shouldn’t just be ourselves.

We are invited to work towards visions of God’s reign, knowing we will never be entirely successful, but sustained by imagining the possibilities.

Once we recognise that all women, like all men, are made in the image of God, we catch a glimpse of God’s original vision for us, for the day when all people experience God’s radical and abundant love, and the pouring out of justice demanded by that love.

Jesus honours, commends and models a set of attitudes, or stances toward the world, which can and will change the world, but embracing them is no small challenge.

Full-blooded Christian discipleship may cost us some precious relationships and a lot of blood sweat and tears, but we will have plenty of new supporters and it all all be well worth it in the end.

Like the disciples, we stumble, but we too can pick ourselves up and re-orient ourselves to the transformed landscape that Jesus is slowly mapping out for us.

As creatures made in the image of God, imitation of God is the pathway to fullness of life.

Taking up your cross is about a willingness to pay the price of following Jesus and living out your baptism. It is not a generalised stoicism.

Jesus is angered by our trivialising of religion that inoculates us against the claims of a holy God, and calls us to clean out the crassness and commercialism and approach God on God’s terms.

Jesus commits himself to the path of redemptive suffering in preference to either fight or flight, and he calls us to follow him in that commitment.