Book: Exodus

When everything seems to be against us, God will open up for us a way to freedom and life.

We are given gifts from God – faith, love and hope – to help us cope with all that is less than God – especially when ‘principalities and powers’ overwhelm us.

One of the implications of grace may be that instead of taking swords to the less good and pure, we learn to express the openness of God to the mixed bag of people who are on the journey with us.

God will open the way through the world’s chaos, and it will be grounded on extravagant mercy.

All of us, oppressed and powerful, are invited to act against violence and exploitation, to leave behind the oppressive ways and walk towards a new way of life.

God calls us, as individuals and as a church, to a journey with him, but sometimes we find ourselves sitting at a station watching the trains go by.

When hopes have been extinguished and all is despair, God comes back.

We worship our God with words and images from the imagination of human beings, believing that God can take even what we say and do speak to us in a voice nor our own and images not our own.

At the deepest level of our need, we are called to rest in the love and righteousness of God, which can never be forced.

There is no such thing as a ritual-free space, and performed well or performed badly, rituals change things, change people’s lives.

Icons, as representations of the incarnation rather than images of God, can serve to open us to God rather than becoming alternatives to God.