Nehemiah 8:1-10  & Luke 4: 14-21

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I led an outdoor service in the Maniototo for a Patearoa School Reunion. The reading was from Nehemiah 8, the story of the reading aloud of the Torah to the people gathered in a square in Jerusalem.  People who were descendants of the exiles to Babylon some 100 plus years before but who, under Persian agreement, had resettled in and restored Jerusalem’s temple and wall sometime in the 400’s BCE. This is a reading about community and identity, about “hope born out of broken heartedness on the way to whole heartedness”, to quote Kirsta Tippett from the On Being Project. Continue reading The Book of Life →

Isaiah 62:1-5 & John 2: 1-11  

As some of you are aware, I’ve been on holiday and then I spent the early part of this week on retreat in Hamilton with the World Community for Christian Meditation. This was a silent retreat so it was with some amusement that asI sat by the lake at Waikato University and browsed through the lectionary readings for this Sunday the passage that stood out and kept resonating with me was the Isaiah passage: For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent. 

Continue reading Abundance in the Gap between Promise and Reality →