Blog - City Life Church Luton: Recent Episodes
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There are structures in our town that are threatened by the current situation. But what's growing in those cracks? The Jesus I know speaks life, grace and hope. So I'm on the lookout for the wildflowers. The beautiful and surprising flourishing in unexpected places.
Resurrection offers hope beyond circumstances and powers and systems. And so as young people dreamt of a better future for themselves and committed to fight for it, shouting into the face of death, I saw hope. I saw resurrection.
This is an ongoing question for me and - I'm sure - for many others. How do we bear it? How do we integrate our experiences of the intense beauty of being alive, with the immense suffering going on all around and in us?
These are anxious times. Over the last few days I have found myself torn between feeling hugely connected to and concerned about my local community and feeling overwhelmed by the amount of noise on social media about people’s needs and the many ideas of what we could, or should, all be doing in this time.
Where society had developed the necessary lie of the scapegoat, Jesus in his death and resurrection exposes the sacrificial system as a lie, as oppressive and as inherently false.
Like shoes liturgy carries us - it is a long term commitment to say certain truths week by week, year after year, no matter how we feel or what is going on in our lives.
In the act of eating the broken bread and the spilled wine we partake in and invite the work of the holy spirit to breath in us and continue to make beautiful things out of the dust, out of the mess, out of us.
If you are anything like me, offering hospitality even to friends and family might already feel like a bit of a stretch. The house is too messy, I'm too tired, my brain has gone blank when I try to think of anything to cook. So what, then, are we to make of the Christian tradition that says that hospitality is about welcoming strangers?