Topic: Hope

Honestly owning the rage that sometimes consumes us is an important part of maintaining our resistance to all that stands in the way of a Jesus-shaped life.

The Transfiguration is not about the remoteness of God, but about a promise that through the exodus of Jesus’ death and resurrection, we might with him shine, transfigured, with the blazing glory of God.

Jesus came into the world to fill us with new life, and encourage us, and show us how to grow, so if we remain focussed on the light, letting it shine into our areas of darkness, then darkness will never have the last word.

In the fact of the climate apocalypse, we hold on to our hope: hoping and working for the radical, impossible change that is necessary.

Despite our often minimal vision for ourselves, and our feeling of not being important to God, Jesus Christ is committed to bringing us to the fullness of life and wholeness.

The feeling of distance and separation from God – which we all feel – is perception not reality… it is the fruit of our fear and our holding-back.

Joseph models a courageous willingness to be stripped of his sense of entitlement that he might become all God wanted him to be.

Preparing ourselves for the coming Lord is not a matter of rigorous rule keeping, but rules can help us learn the appropriate new way of being.

Advent is preparing us for the coming of the Lord, that already and not-yet event for which people have lived and worked and prayed for millennia.

Jesus calls us to courageously follow him through a world of apparently apocalyptic violence towards the advent of hope and peace.

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

Jesus calls us to entrust ourselves into the care of the Spirit who will carry us into the unknown future of God.