Well this week we have both this week’s reading and next week’s reading because next week Oasis will be leading worship, so today I get to preach for twice as long!

Today in worship, in this time of Advent, that time before we celebrate the birth of Jesus, we think a little about John the Baptist, seen here in a stained glass window by William Morris, with John baptising Jesus. John was called ‘John the Baptist’ because he went about the country side baptising people who wanted to turn to God, and John was also the one who baptised Jesus.

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Things can happen very quickly, and in an instant life is changed. God come into lives very quickly.  It is for us now, to discern the present, to seek to understand the desire of God, and how God is moving in our lives. [Read more…]

I like to think that our world is so much more civilized today, than it was back in the first century, in the days when Jesus was born, lived and died. After all we have gone to the moon, we can operate on a person without pain, we can send a letter from one side of the world to another in a few seconds, we can heat and eat a full meal that came in a cardboard box and which took no preparation; frozen one minute, steaming the next.  It may taste like the box, but you can still eat it, and it’s amazing… just how many people do eat them. [Read more…]

Earlier I asked the children what big questions they had about life and faith. I’ve asked different children before about the questions they have in life, and you get responses like… [Read more…]

When I left Wagga to come to Gungahlin I was given a number of books, one of which is a collection of poems written by Dietrich Bonheoffer; the German Lutheran pastor and theologian. During the Second World War Bonhoffer was arrested in Germany in 1943 and spent two years in jail awaiting his execution; he was hanged just before the end of the war in 1945. During this time he did a great deal of writing and I’m going to read one of his poems written during his imprisonment. [Read more…]