... Jesus places himself in situations where the rituals of old have run their course, and opens up opportunities for people to create new ones, breaking taboos where they have to, all for the sake of liberating oppressed people from those things which harm them, all for the sake of bringing marginalised people into the centre of things, all for the sake of love.
... the story (of the woman who anointed Jesus' feet with her hair at the table of Simon the Pharisee) encourages us that with faith in one who loves us, who longs to forgive us and liberate us from all that harms or limits us, we can turn those situations around. We can find the wit and the imagination to do something different, to make something new, to challenge prevailing norms and open up new arenas of experience for ourselves and others.
We live in a world where the rituals of old are fading and new demands are being made on how we humans co-exist. A fitting subject, I suggest, for Father’s Day, with the role of the male within the family unit having changed massively in our lifetimes, presenting families generally, and fathers in particular, with the challenging need to create new rituals to sustain new models of relationships. ...
- from Luke 7 - Ruptured rituals and transformed taboos, my talk today.


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