The Parish

Celebrate when you recognize God at work in front of you, and search when you can’t. Both are spiritual practices. Both are holy work.

We live in an age of spectacle and it can be tempting to think that the church needs to follow suit. But Jesus has a different idea.

Jesus is starting a revolution, but not the kind anyone expected.  His followers would have felt unqualified to challenge the systems around them.  Yet Jesus insists that darkness is not defeated by power, but it is overcome by light.

When you challenge the status quo....when you expose what others would rather ignore....when you call people back to the heart of God, opposition often follows.

We sow the seeds of peace when we speak graciously, share generously and love deferentially

Have you ever felt that your life is spread too thin, with so many things competing for your attention, and loyalty. That shallow life is robbing us of not just seeing ourselves more clearly, but in seeing God more easily.  Spirituality has always insisted that the sacred is found in the depths, not merely at the surface.

Mercy-we need it more than we think...and we need to give it more than we think we do.

What if we could find satisfaction in working towards justice, not just in the experience of justice, It would mean planting trees of whose fruit we might never get a chance to eat.

When Jesus pronounces blessing on those who are meek he isn't addressing those who are weak and ineffectual but rather those who may have power and privilege but choose to hold them in reserve.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted... both troubles and intrigues me, if this is a promise, it doesn’t seem to work the way we think promises work.

Jesus isn’t looking for religious rule-keepers with their noses deep in their bibles, he is looking for followers. Followers who know they aren’t good at it yet, so know they need to stick close and watch what Jesus does.  

A lot of things in this life can seem like an uphill battle. It can feel at times like these mountains-and God are working against us.  Jesus will have us pause to consider that there might be Gold in these hills.

Death, burial and resurrection - it is a story that captivates us; it is theology that grounds us and it is metaphor that shapes our lives.

We often discover joy in places where happiness could not survive.

This is one of those stories were we are watching people who don’t fully understand what they are seeing. And if we’re honest… neither do we.

What if the answer was as close as your next breath, you just have to breathe it in.

Two questions. Two answers. On opposite sides of the same road...one invitation remains.

Satan was offering a deal that sounded too good to refuse but Jesus knew enough to read the fine print!

Faith isn't made real when God shows up, it is made real when you realize God never left.

The tempter offers Jesus a convenient plan for dealing with his uncomfortable wilderness time. But, it seems some lessons can only be learned when we are in the desert and we are hungry.

What we become on the journey can matter as much as what we hope to find at the end.

Social trends and the availability of digital media seem to be shifting us toward becoming spectators in life. But Jesus invites us to get out of our armchairs and really see our neighbours. 

The hope of the world is not that God gives up on human kind and fixes everything without us. The hope of the world is that God refuses to abandon us…and keeps working through ordinary people.

At the wedding in Cana, Jesus gives us a picture of how to be kind in a deeply human situation.

I wonder if the opening chapter of Genesis didn't tell us that Humanity was created in the image of God, we would have ever had the courage to look for it.