Marginal Christianity

Jesus stands before you. Yes, that Jesus. The one the Romans crucified on Friday afternoon. Yet he stands before alive again on Sunday morning.           He’s the same Jesus. The real Jesus. He eats food the way he always did. The gash in his side and the holes in his hands and feet are beyond doubt.           Yet he’s different, too. He seems able to appear where he wishes. He can pass through locked doors.           He’s the same Jesus. The one we betrayed, before whom we are guilty. We thought he failed, disappointed us. Don’t know what to think now. Same with our despair, hopelessness, and fear. What must he think of us now!           Yet he’s different, too. Jesus is here with no recrimination or blame for us. No suspicion or disappointment or victimization. Only happiness to see us again...

http://www.jamesalison.co.uk/texts/eng13.html A transcript of a talk given in Brisbane, Australia, in August 2004. I have been asked to talk to you about Worship in a violent world. As though there has ever been any other. There hasn't. It is only because of the introduction into our midst of glimpses of a world, not yet our own, where all is peace that we are able to look at our world and refer to it as “violent”, rather than simply normal. The discovery that might is might, a frightening aberration for which we can take some responsibility, rather than right, a natural part of the order of things which just tends to run away with us, is a hugely complex insight whose consequences we haven't yet worked out. What I would like to do with you today is to stand back and ask what it is that allows Christians to use a horrid word taken from the world of violence such as “worship”; what we mean by it when we do use it; and what indeed do we do that counts as “worship”. In 121...