Tag: love

Matthew | Love in the shadows

God demands Joseph wake up to a deeper reality, where love takes priority over obedience to God’s law and scandal forms the womb of grace. One from the archives. (Listen here.)

This Sunday, in the midst of Christmas chaos plus a funeral, I brought out an oldie but a goodie for Manningham Uniting Church. You might hear it as a simple reflection personal faith, and that’s well and good. But for those who have ears to hear, it also has much to say about current events, whether the shootings in Bondi, the ongoing deaths in Gaza, or so much more. For, in Matthew’s story, God demands that notions of righteousness and holiness are set aside in favour of love. In such a faith, violence is impossible, not only the violence of holy war but the violence which demands we destroy the violent. This loving insistence on nonretaliation is one incarnation of the scandal of grace. But for now, let’s turn our attention to a man caught up in another aspect of scandal incarnate: Joseph.

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Psalms | My grandparents’ breakfast table and other stories

Another week, another family story – this time, about lifelong faith. (Listen here.)

My grandparents’ breakfast room opened off the kitchen. It had a brown sideboard, brown scratchy chairs and a brown shag pile carpet. Whenever my sister and I stayed with them, we participated in their morning ritual. First, we held hands and said grace. Then my sister and I would gobble up our breakfasts while our grandparents were still fussing around assembling theirs. Cornflakes. Sultanas. Bran. A bit of sugar. Milk. Yawn. My sister and I would sit swinging our legs, discreetly itching where the chairs scratched and waiting impatiently for our grandparents to finish eating. But even then, we couldn’t get down from the table for, after breakfast was cleared away, it was time for morning devotions.

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Luke | A rollicking romance, revisited

How following Jesus nearly tore my family apart, then brought it together again. A story from the archives with a new interpretive movement for a new context. (Listen here.)

I’d like to introduce you to a very shocking man: my father. But to understand why he is so shocking, first you need to know a bit about my mother. Like me, my mother grew up Baptist. Unlike me, however, she was raised in a fundamentalist household. Her family of origin rejected infant baptism, evolution, smoking, divorce, and many other things. Because my mum was super-smart and good at languages, and because everybody knew that no man would marry a super-smart woman, she had been groomed from an early age to be a Bible-translating missionary spinster. So away she went to university to study anthropology and linguistics: but there she met the man who became my father.

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Hosea & the cycle of violence

Not every image of God is faithful to Jesus. (Listen here.)

‘When Israel was young, I loved him … It was I who taught Ephraim to walk … I bent down to feed them,’ says God through the prophet Hosea. These beautiful words resonate deep in my body. They recall the love I had for my own little children, the hours I spent holding their upstretched arms as they tottered down the hall and learned to walk. I remember the thousands of times I bent down to feed them, wipe their chin, see eye-to-eye with them and hug them. So it’s a crying shame that I find these words nearly drowned out by a long litany of violence.

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Matthew | Love like salt

On law, exile, love and salt. (Listen here.)

Salt, light: no doubt most of you have heard a sermon or three about these before. And no doubt at least one of these sermons has talked about doing good in this world. I’m all for this interpretation: I’m a Protestant! So I’m a huge fan of running around for Jesus and doing stuff, for ‘faith without works is dead.’ (James 2:17). But I’m also aware of the risks of this approach. Too easily, saltiness becomes something we strive for rather than a description of who we already are. Too readily, we get caught up in being seen to be good people who are doing good works, and we forget the fundamentals of relationship.

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Micah | Shall I sacrifice my child?

A message for, from and about those who ask me to use my platform to speak on their behalf. I acknowledge the privilege that enables me to speak in churches in this way. (Listen here.)

One of my dear friends grew up in a good Christian family, as we say. Her father was an elder, a pillar of the local church; he still is. And when she was fifteen and he realised she was an incorrigible lesbian, he threw her out of home.

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Luke | No ifs about it!

A reflection on Jesus’ time of testing for the beginning of Lent, shared with Westgate Baptist Community. (Listen here.)

If. It’s a very small word with a very big weight. If only I were a better person … If I just prayed more … If I tried a bit harder … If I really trusted God … Again and again I hear some version of this, sometimes from other people, sometimes from the voices in my head.

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John | The relational god

Life in the gospel according to John: what is it? Here’s my take for a second-gen Vietnamese-Australian congregation living in a secular age. (Watch on YouTube here.)

You’ve all seen them. Maybe there’s one in a house you know, or maybe at a place you like to eat pho. Maybe it’s on a shop counter, or in the corner of an office. Wherever it is, it’s a little shrine. What’s on it can vary. Sometimes it’s oranges, but at Tet, or the lunar New Year, it’s the five fruits. Usually there’s incense, often jasmine tea. There may be flowers, even an oil lamp. Perhaps a Buddha or a crucifix. And, of course, there’s the photographs of ancestors who are being remembered and honoured at these altars.

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Isaiah | The politics of love

A fascinating pairing of texts from Isaiah and Philippians, and an invitation to speak on love in a troubled world, from West Preston Baptist Church. (Listen here.)

“Today Christians stand at the head of this country … I pledge that I will never tie myself to those who want to destroy Christianity … We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit—we want to burn out all the recent immoral development in literature, theatre, the arts and in the press—in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess …”

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