“I have now seen the One who sees me.”
Read MoreMyth, Legend and Meaning: The legend of Abraham
“I have now seen the One who sees me.”
Read MoreMyth, Legend and Meaning: The Binding of Isaac
Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.”
Read MoreMyth, Legend and Meaning: Cain and Abel
Cain and Abel weren't the only feuding brothers in the ancient world.
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Myth, Legend and Meaning: Adam, Eve and the Automation of Prejudice
“Most peoples of the world are concerned with how things came into being. Creation stories contain within them a conception of the natural or initial order of things. By articulating how things were in the beginning … they make a basic statement about their relationship with nature and about their perception of the source of power in the universe.” ~ Peggy Reeves Sanday
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Myth, Legend and Meaning: It will be a long time
The imagery is clear - the Temple may have been lost, but there’s a new way of thinking about reality. What if the whole earth was God’s temple - and we humans were the image of God in that Global Temple?
Now it doesn’t matter where we are - we still hold serenity in our hearts and we are invulnerable because we can never really be taken away from our God ever again.
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Myth, Legend and Meaning: Let There Be Light
“Tell how at the first gods and earth came to be, and rivers, and the boundless sea with its raging swell, and the gleaming stars, and the wide heaven above, and the gods who were born of them. In truth, at first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, called Gaia”
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After The Fall: Part Three
“Spiritual emptiness doesn’t lead to resignation or depression; on the contrary, it gives hope and frees us from the anxiety of having to be in control. Some people can’t fly in an airplane because it asks for a degree of trust they can’t muster. Similarly, some people can’t be religious because they feel such a strong need to know and to be in control. The solution is to tread more lightly on the earth, to be more hollow than solid, to trust more and to believe less.”
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After The Fall: Part Two
“I've spent my whole life searching desperately To find out that grace requires nothing of me” ~ “One” by Sleeping At Last
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After The Fall: Part One
“First the fall, and then the recovery from the fall, and both are the mercy of God.” ~ Julian of Norwich
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Hallelujah Anyway
Turns out your enemies might not “get what’s coming to them after all”. Even worse, God might love them instead. No wonder the early believers were roundly mocked for worshipping such a supposedly weak God.
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Accepting Salvation
But if we only understand the incarnation as what happened long ago when Jesus walked the earth, and we don’t learn to universalise that truth into to seeing the incarnated God present in every face we see, then all we have is junk religion and we have not been liberated.
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Liberally Conservative
“But we never really wanted freedom did we? We just wanted to know what the rules were so we could figure out how to win the game.”
Read MoreActs 2: The Spirit helps the believers find their voice
I’m suggesting that maybe the outpouring or coming of the Holy Spirit available to ALL people is the central point of the New Testament.
Read MoreLet Go and Stay Where You Are
Like Dumbo the elephant releasing the feather in mid air, we have to let go of the earthly Jesus if we are ever to fully realise that we could fly all along. The symbolism of the feather is important, but it only really works when we let go of it.
Read MoreWhat lies between the dawn of Incarnation and the dusk of Ascension?
If the incarnation is about God coming to earth, then the ascension is about God leaving the earth.
But was God really only with us for the duration of Jesus’ earthly life? Was our Emmanuel, our “God with us”, really that short lived?
Read MoreYou never needed a Theory of Atonement or a Juicero Press
Yes, with a bit of effort, smart people can indeed fashion a ransom-captive or penal substitution theory from a bit of Hebrews here and a slice of Colossians there. But that really doesn’t mean you have to buy one.
Read MoreKeeping Faith in Ordinary Time - A series introduction
In calling people out “to the other side of the Jordan” (beyond the borders of Israel) and then baptising them back into their own faith, John the Baptist was doing something highly controversial with profound implication for us as people of faith today.
Read MoreAtonement vs Love - "The Bells That Still Can Ring" Session 4
If the whole thing about Jesus dying on the cross for our sins doesn’t chime for you any longer, then you’re really not alone. It doesn’t have to end there though, and if you’d like to think again, jump right into this fourth and final episode of “The bells that still can ring”.
Read MoreSunday 12 December 2021 Brian Ammons
Listen here to Brian’s farewell sermon before he heads back to the US next week. This was the 3rd Sunday of Advent, which ignites the candle of Joy.
Sermon audio from Harbour.