Colourful Dreamer

In the podcast on WorkingPreacher   about this week’s readings, Matt Skinner describes Jesus’ response in Luke 15:1-10 to the legalists questioning why he was partying with those wrong folks as Jesus saying “Because it's fun. Because it's joyful. Because it's about these restored relationships, these restored connections and new understanding and new society being formed.” He goes on to say that “it's not like God needs one more repentance to fulfill God's own personal needs or something like that. It's that God encounters great joy in seeing the human family flourishing.” And in this Season of Creation, we might also say that God encounters great joy in seeing the whole of creation flourishing. But as we look around this world, we know that God’s creation is not flourishing. It is struggling, and much of the human family is far from flourishing. And increasingly much of that poverty and violence is caused by climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss. We...

Week five of some very heavy theology about Jesus – Christology. It all began with Jesus feeding a very large crowd at Passover, and they wanted more. And Jesus begins making sense of that for them using the exodus, and the mana which God gave to God’s newly liberated and grumpy people. He interprets his action with God’s generosity in the wilderness, while those people learnt how to live with God in their midst, and how to live God’s liberation and generosity for all. But now Jesus is taking them and us deeper. It feels complex and convoluted. How are we to understand “I assure you, unless you eat the flesh of the Human One and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” [1] It’s hard and tricky and a little uncomfortable. It began way back in chapter 1. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…. Everything came into being through the Word, and without the Word nothing came into being. What came into being through the Word was life, and the l...

In our church, this Sunday we honour our patron saint - The Great Martyr Saint George.  Some of you might be asking why we are not celebrating George on his Saint day of April 23. April is way too busy in Tauranga, so we moved our celebration to the nearest Sunday to August 14th, the date we became a parish in our own right in 1962. But Covid got in the way of that this year, so here we are in September doing George. Wikipedia tells us that Saint George (Greek: Γεώργιος, Geṓrgios; Latin: Georgius; d. 23 April 303) was a soldier of Greek origins, member of the Praetorian Guard for the Roman emperor Diocletian, who was tortured and sentenced to death for refusing to recant his Christian faith. We remember his courage in publicly declaring before his emperor both that the command for all soldiers to sacrifice to the imperial cult or be executed was evil, and that he was a Christian and would not be sacrificing. In the Eastern Orthodox tradition he is named among the great martyr...