Dear Church Leaders, Partners, and the Pacific Theological College Bula Vinaka! God’s grace through Christ in the Spirit has made possible our voyage this year through the unpredictable currents of life. May God be praised! Christmas is not an expensive story of gifts and Christmas trees. Rather it is a simple, yet revolutionary story of …
The Christmas story, though widely preached and normalised, hardly gives the real message of justice. The world circumvents the birth story with a message of salvation that becomes reduced to blissful ‘heavenly hosts’, idyllic ‘peace on earth’, and a calm Mary and Joseph who produce a humble yet a prophesied King wrapped in cloths, lying …
Jesus was born, at least in the eyes of the elders and storytellers Matthew and Luke, into a mystery of divine economy where MORE of God’s reassurance is affirmed where there is LESS. MORE space was offered for the child outside the ecological household next to animals and nature, when LESS space was offered inside a human …
The Christmas story is one that affirms accessibility and availability of God to everyone. Unfortunately, this year alone accessibility of many to God’s basic gifts of life and securities, even God, was challenging. Many have lost loved ones to the Covid19 pandemic. Many who are sole breadwinners of families lost their jobs. Some who couldn’t …
In addition to the pandemic, the wars, climate change, violence and abuses have intensified the unkindness towards the victims of forsakenness around the world. We thought we have moved on, but many are still stuck in the unbearable period of forsakenness, trapped in the pandemic tomb, immersed in an unbearable pause between death and life, …
Read more ““Victims of Forsakenness and Hope Draped in Remembrance””
If we are to do justice to the story that became the foundation of the Christmas story, the birth of Jesus, then we are invited to pause and to deviate a bit from the normal flow of things. To de-commercialize and unlearn the grand route of capitalism the Christmas story has evolved into. Once we …
Read more ““Ua liliu le vai o Sina”: Grand Routes and the Rerouting God of Christmas”
Luke’s story of the birth of Jesus in chapter 2 begins with the usual display of the Roman world: Caesar, decrees, the census, registration, governor, which are key indicators of a developed fast-paced society. They not only represent the imperial order, but they also represent the imperial pace of rapidity in development. But outside of …
Today, one of our students asked me what is my greatest fear. My response: the fear of not having a safe home. I was thinking of Samoa returning to snap election. This follows a political impasse and a hung parliament refusing to come to some form of agreement. While this is now the reality in Samoan …
Read more ““UA GOTO LE VA’A ILE MAMAFA O ‘UPU” – THE CANOE SINKS FROM THE WEIGHT OF WORDS”
The blindness of the world today, in particular Christians, to see the suffering of the Palestinian people is terribly appalling. A clear display of an era of ‘moral numbness’ driven by religious fundamentalism. Like the walking dead, we carry and read bibles everyday, but we no longer feel Jesus’ grief in the cries of parents …
Long time ago in the 1970s and 80s, when the World Wrestling Federation or WWF was the thing for Samoa, we would die to find a TV on Sunday evenings to watch WWF. One of my uncles, a wrestling fanatic, normally skipped saying the full name of WWF and just call it ‘worldization’. Today, the …