Weekly reflections

Dear Friends, I have, quite literally this Easter, gone down a rabbit hole! Well, not a rabbit hole, exactly! I have been doing a course through Whitley College on Early Christianity in Context and I become very interested in catacombs! I assume many of you, like me, were brought up on the story that the early Christians hid in the catacombs to avoid persecution. But apparently, this is not the case! The catacombs were very public places in the ancient Read more…

Dear Friends On Sunday we were exploring the relationship between ‘God’s glory’ and ‘lives that are lived for others’. (John 12:23) And on Monday night I saw another beautiful example of this. (You might see a few faces you recognise in the picture!) At the Micah Women Leader’s Event, Asuntha Charles, World Vision’s Middle East Response Director, and former National Director for Afghanistan during the Taliban takeover, shared her story of growing up in southern India. How her father told Read more…

Dear Friends, Last Sunday’s bulletin included a knitting pattern! It was a new pattern for the Common Grace Climate Change Scarf, a scarf with a stripe representing the average global temperature for each year across the last 100 years. The new pattern has come about because 2023 marked the hottest year on record. Global temperatures were broken by what has been described as a ‘blistering margin’. So, a new colour has been added – dark purple – to show the Read more…

Dear Friends, I went to the David Hunter Memorial Lecture last night and was thinking – as we drove away – that the word I would use the describe the evening was ‘feisty’. But I’m embarrassed now I chose that word. Calling the evening’s speakers ‘feisty’ minimises the depth and intensity of what they expressed. The word I should have chosen is ‘angry’. We heard angry speakers on Tuesday night. People who are angry because they see injustice. People who Read more…

Dear Friends, We had a wonderful celebration on Sunday of 95 years of loving and serving God, God’s people and God’s world here in Canberra! Here is the picture John Clark took on Sunday – replicating the black and white image of people gathered around the church on our commencement day 95 years ago. If you have not had a chance to listen to Scott Pilgrim’s message on “Mercy and truth have met together; Righteousness and peace have kissed.” (Psalm 85:10) Read more…

Dear Friends, I keep thinking about the icon of the Transfiguration that Megan included in her contribution on Sunday 11th Feb – the image of foot-in-mouth Peter and James and John tumbling down the mountain, but still clothed in the same light, the same halos of light, as Megan said, as Jesus, Elijah and Moses. It is incredibly encouraging – and humbling – to think that God wants us to be part of what God is doing in our world Read more…

Its ‘dirt on the face’ day! That’s how I heard Ash Wednesday described (courtesy of Lucy Gledhill’s nephews) this morning – ‘dirt on the face’ day. I think it is a very appropriate description! In case you are wondering what I am talking about, Ash Wednesday is the day that marks the beginning of Lent, the period of reflection on Jesus’ giving his life for us, in the lead-up to Easter. And in the Catholic church (and Anglican and Presbyterian Read more…

Dear Friends, As we thought about Jesus taking Simon’s mother-in-law by the hand and lifting her up on Sunday, and as we saw all those people – children, teenagers, and adults – lifting each other up, I was reminded of the words attributed to St Therese of Avila (and the beautiful song that our choir sing). Christ has no body but yours, no hands, no feet on earth but yours.Yours are the eyes with which he lookscompassion on this world.Yours Read more…

Dear Friends,Reading the start of Mark’s gospel (as we have been doing so far in 2024) it is clear that, for Jesus, proclaiming the good news of God went hand in hand with casting out demons. It seems you cannot proclaim a life-changing message and not see lives changed! All this talk of demons and casting out (dare I mention ‘exorcisms’) is challenging for us as twenty-first century, and Western, Christians. We want to turn references to demon possession into Read more…

I was tempted to take a picture of the Australia Day offerings in my local Coles this week. That whole brouhaha seemed a seriously flawed response to an ongoing discussion in our nation. Australian test captain, Pat Cummins, did a far better job, in my view, of speaking into this discussion. “I absolutely love Australia. It is the best country in the world by a mile,” Cummins said. “We should have an Australia Day, but we can probably find a Read more…