On World Day Against the Death Penalty, and in light of this week's news headlines, an extract from tomorrow's sermon: When we get stuck on narratives of vengeance and violence, when we get stuck on who is deserving to attend the feast to which God, not we, issues the invitation, well, then we get stuck.  And here we are, reduced to a nation threatening to stream its gun violence, state-sanctioned and sanitized as justice, to the world. ...

Jesus doesn’t need us to make wine. He can make wine out of water. But we have the opportunity to share in the delight of God, the joy that God takes in planting and tending and harvesting and writing love songs to a vineyard.

They say that a shark will die if it does not keep swimming. Invited into stillness and silence, I notice the tremor in my legs, swaying to and fro, dancing without rhythm to an unheard tune; the heaviness of tongue behind my teeth, seething with swallowed words, unsaid: Am I a shark, weaving through the cold salt sea, sleep-finning in the dark?

What if to have the mind of Jesus Christ, the living image of God was nothing more nor less than to regard that equality not as something to be exploited, but squandered in the service of love?

A sermon on the story of Jonah and Jesus’ parable of the generous landowner (Matthew 20:1-16) The Lord is gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger and of great kindness. (Psalm 145:8) Jonah experienced both the anger of God and the kindness of God, the wrath of God and the mercy of God, each in extraordinary measure. When God first told Jonah to go and preach to Nineveh, he bolted.

Owe no one anything, except to love one another, writes Paul to his congregation of Romans. And, it is written elsewhere, Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. (1 John 4:7) Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. It feels to me as though today’s Gospel reading (Matthew 18:15-20) is like one of those optical illusion pictures where, depending on your perspective, they can look completely like one thing or completely something else.

Pray for the people of Nepal and Tibet, the dead, the dying, the missing and the missed, the grieving, the helping, the despairing. Pray, too, that we might learn to promise never again to flood the whole earth, and, with our knowledge of good and evil, to find a way to keep it.

An inadequate poem after visiting St Michael’s Mount and encountering Lyn Constable Maxwell’s bronze of the Archangel in the island church.

Alone against the storm-wrecked sky she stands; her untired arm lifts up her light to greet the lightning flashing from on high, though to admonish or illuminate is in the beholder’s eye; her face is streaming, rivets making rivulets to multiply and fall, but for whom would she choose to cry if her eyes could see the huddled masses taking shelter from her skirts?

We do not have Pharaoh’s excuse, whose heart by God was hardened, but from that evening in the garden we have pursued our own destruction. We cannot claim we didn’t know, with the fruit still sweet on our tongue. Was it necessary? Better ask the serpent, ask ourselves what it would have taken to remain unstained by the sap and its syrupy lies? 

It’s not Monday any more, but the scent still lingers in the house when they awaken, and Lazarus is grateful for the distraction; he hardly knows himself these days, still amazed at the complicated gift of life. The echoes of yesterday’s prayers whisper through the statehouse rotunda. In the garden of Gethsemane, millennia of olive trees bend low to the ground, patiently awaiting the promise of peace.

Think of the palms, crushed and bruised by the colt and the crowds, and of the ones who came back, the poor, the quiet, who came back to collect their broken stems and bleeding leaves, and wove them into something new, something to sell back to the capricious crowd on another day, so that nothing may be wasted, so that their hosannas may not waste or be swept away. ___________

His last breath took him by surprise. Until its vapour dissipated in the ragged inhalations of his sisters, beginnings to convert his death into ululation; until then, he had thought that he would come. Hard to say what happened next: his astonished body wrapped and sealed, cooling and settling in the garden tomb, until he wondered how, in death, he could still hear…

Do you also want to be his disciples? asked the man. Then try this: Listen. Listen to the stories of the one you have walked by a thousand times in as many days dripping with pity without breaking your stride. Open your eyes to the mundane miracle: Mud, water word; ingredients that made a world and some body to see it, and love it…

I find myself drawn to the contrast between reports this week that some military commanders are framing the war against Iran as an effort to bring about the end times, as though we may decide these things for God, in our wisdom; the contrast between that and Jesus’ words to the woman that the hour is already come, quietly, unnoticed over a cup of water, when reconciliation happens, and the truth of God’s love for the world, in all of its invented factions and fractions, has been revealed.

Fed by generations, torrents of history running wild within the earth, the holy ground shaped and watered by the tears of war and weddings, piety and pity. Still waters run deep within the earth, seep between the shoulders of the land, shrugging off the stories that we tell, shifting and settling, remembering when it was all, when all was shapeless 

We too often misunderstand, I think, what it means to become like God. We build our towers, our satellites in the sky, posing as heavenly bodies, the better to crater and control the earth. We rain down judgement as though it were wise, and fragments of pity as though they were manna. We remember the Flood instead of the rainbow. …

He couldn’t sleep for the moon light streaming through creation, for the sound of the wind sighing over a sea too deep for words, for the shiver when he heard him speak liberty as though it were at hand,the shock of justice overturned, the taste of mercy submerged in wine, dangerous world-defying love; that shiver shook him awake. He found him, he would remember later, swaddled by the fire, as though he had been waiting for him since the beginning of time.

Is it this, that I would choose, to undo the latches, throw open the doors, empty the warehouses, let in the light, let out the breath, let in the light, let out the breath of the people bated, bated too long, to fast from the bread of bitterness, scatter its crumbs to the crows and watch them rise, the people free 

Less a trick of the Lightcondensing out of the cloud, each droplet its own world of shapes and shades, ghosts of the martyred, those sidekicks of salvation, dissipating with their breath than the Light of the world condensing creation, ancestors and angels,witnesses and wantons in one bright moment of hope, burnt into the retinas of their souls for all the valleys to come…

By night, soothed by darkness those for whom visibility is treacherous stretch out their palms to God who clouds the stars. The waters of creation still bring life from beyond the hills, the hopeful distance Psalm 121

Grant that we, putting away all earthly anxieties, may be duly prepared for the service of thy sanctuary;  we, reaching forth our hands in love.

The trees are running on empty,defenseless, exposed to the faceless elements, burned by the cold and starved by the desiccated air, yet they stand and sway as though they listenedto the songs of the land humming through their roots, branches snapping to the beat. Above the frozen river, robins filled their branches, mud-red feathers harbouring heat, gripping the tree limbs as though they would lift them up, piercing the soft bark with hope.

Isaiah 42:1-9, Matthew 3:13-17 Jesus’ ministry is bookmarked by humility. From his humble birth and early childhood as a child of refugees, seeking asylum in a foreign land. And here, coming to John for baptism, the Lord of all has no need to lord it over anyone. There is no pomp, pride, parading. The only display of power is that of the Holy Spirit, descending upon him like a dove, and the voice from heaven falling down like thunder: this is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.

I was busy. It wasn’t until late in the day that I finally sat down to prepare a prayer for our meeting. I found one, a good one, except for one word that rang untrue. Do we need to be forgiven the blindness that keeps us from seeing? Or healed of it? Is blindness often chosen? I understood the sentiment behind the phrase, but chose to substitute “lenses”.

That was the vision in which Joseph placed his faith and his family: that God is with us, God’s promises endure forever. It didn’t make life easier, by any means. God knows it didn’t remove the obstacles of grief and the graft and grimness of the world or the wilderness, its empires, its wars, its little kings. But what it did mean is that he, Joseph, spent the rest of his days in the close and intimate presence of the love of God among us, Jesus.

By the time you reached the star-struck place  you were ready to crawl in on bended knees  and babble your praises like a newborn;  for the foolishness of God's incarnation  was wiser than you or I ever could imagine.

This is the message of Christmas, isn’t it – not so much the drawing in and closing down, the drawing of the curtains against the dark and cold, as it is the opening up; the labour of effacing little by little the things that come between us and keep us from seeing the glory of God incarnate in our neighbours, from realizing the strength and endurance of God’s love, the capacity and tenacity of God’s mercy. When the very heavens are opened for angels to sing to shepherds on the earth, how can we be short of room for one another, friend and stranger, lover and lost, family and fallen alike?

When the night is longest, stretching deep and dark beyond our sight, light a candle; see its flame flicker as the breath of God inhales our prayers, sighs out a shimmer of hope.

A flood of memories of the oblivion before the void contracted into creation, gravity from below and brooding holiness bearing down together until there was light; in the darkness of that night it...

It is not as simple as the poet makes it sound to transform the form of metal, a sword into farm equipment. Just hit it with a hammer, the prophecy implies, and all will fall, seeds into their furrows and nations in obeisance to the Prince of Peace. Yet rumours of the spoils of war echo in the ears of rulers,

And then, imagine it from her point of view: seven lifetimes of love, regret, loss, laughter. Seven lifetimes of abuse - pray not. Seven lifetimes of blessing, despite the woes, hope despite it all. Seven lifetimes and here, in eternity, she was no one's to own: the richest woman with lifetimes to spare in a sky-blue heaven, the angels attendants, …

Be the blessing that will bring us closer to the kingdom of God that Mary and Hannah sang of. Do the good in this moment, at this time and in this place, that will let others know the enduring love of God, who feeds us on bread and wine. Listen, heed the warnings that Jesus offers to those who think that they are untouched by the needs of others. Love God, love your neighbour, change their world, change our world.

It took so long to get the fire lit, even though the wind blew as though the Holy Spirit fanned the flames of Pentecost herself. The children in their costumes came and went without judgement, candy-sweet. When the tinder finally caught, I sought bric-à-brac of twigs from across the neighbour's yard to keep it fed. Consider, I thought, the fires of heaven, and us poor fuel, damp and easily consumed, yet within each the spark of holiness.

There’s a deep irony to this parable, that whenever we read it, we are tempted, aren’t we, to mutter, “Thank God I’m not like that Pharisee!” …

You’ve heard it said that prayer is not about changing God, but about changing us. That, I think, is what this parable and these teachings are about. God is not slow to love every piece and person of creation; so let’s pray persistently and consistently and robustly and resiliently until we are changed into God’s likeness, and enabled and equipped and encouraged to act in God’s image and will, and in solidarity with those crying out to God for the justice that is mercy.

The salvation of the world is not in our hands, but the promise of prayer is. And while the peace of God passes our understanding, it is at hand. It is found in the smallest act of love, a little flower growing between the cracks of a fractured and fractious world, persistent in its beauty, brave in its beauty, and unstoppable in its reach toward the sun.

BANI, a framework developed by Jamais Cascio, stands for Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible. For people of faith, there is one reliable place to turn ​when human understanding no longer works. Hence this prayer for a BANI world.

Jealousy is the thief of joy. It keeps the elder brother from the family reunion. It prevents the citizen from celebrating the rescue of the refugee, the wealthy from celebrating Jesus’ announcement of good news for the poor and the meek. It resents the love of God for its rival, and leads to the casting of golden calves to spite them all. It clouds the vision of the scribes so that they do not even recognize the Word of God when he is standing right in front of them, telling stories from heaven.

As though created in mid-airand surprised, the lamb fellwithout foothold down the cliffand into the stream where we,speechless, sandwiches halfwayto open mouths watched itpick up and shake itself backto life , quiet waters clinging to wool,green pastures calling, it ran onas though pursuedby all the hounds of heaven.

Hatred shared is never hatred halved. The blood of an enemy will not cure anaemia of conscience. Suffer the little children never meant to sacrifice them. The mortality of another will never lessen our own. The immortality of another will never lessen our own.