Taking Risks

When someone mentions an eagle, what do you think of in your mind?


Many people imagine a big bird, flying high up in the air, with its wings spread out, moving around gracefully with so little effort. The eagle has very sharp eyes which can see a long distance. When it sees a meal, like a rabbit on the ground, it can come down very fast and grab the animal with its sharp claws. The eagle is called the king of the birds. It has great strength, super vision and really strong claws.

A story is told of a man who found an eagle’s egg. He put it with his chickens and the mother hens. Soon the egg hatched. The young eagle grew up with all the other chickens. Whatever the chickens did, the eagle also did. He thought he was a chicken, just like them. Since the chickens could only fly for a short distance, the eagle also learnt to fly a short distance. He thought that was what he was supposed to do. So that was all that he thought he could do. And that was all he was able to do.


One day the eagle saw a bird flying high above him. He was very impressed. “Who is that?” he asked the hens around him.


“That’s the eagle, the king of the birds,” the hens told him. “He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth — we are chickens.


The eagle was faced with a challenge: live and die as a chicken, for that's all he'd ever known; or take a risk and go beyond his self-understanding.



Are you an eagle or a chicken?

The Pentecost Rainbow

by Teresa Burnett-Cole • 10 June 2019
Today is Pentecost Sunday. The day we see and hear about some of the great symbols of faith. The day we all see red! Traditionally Pentecost is about being surprised, and being fully enlivened by God’s spirit, as Jesus was. And Pentecost is about hearing and experiencing the present-ness of God in a language we can understand... Not just in English or French or Korean or German, but also in the language of unemployment, television commercials, supermarket shopping and school playgrounds.

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!

by Teresa Burnett-Cole • 28 April 2019
Alleluia, Christ is Risen! Christ is risen indeed, Alleluia! This morning, I want to say a word about Easter, a word taken from one of the great Eastern images of the mystery of the resurrection, an icon that has been a part of the Christian vision of what the Resurrection is all about since around the year 600. I have been powerfully drawn to this icon lately, and I want to talk about it a bit this morning. Let’s take a look. Remember: icons are about the theological meaning of people and events; they aren’t representative art like we might typically encounter. Icons are never depictions of exactly what happened. They’re pictures of what things mean. So, an icon of the Resurrection doesn’t show what the resurrection might have looked like back then—an icon of the Resurrection shows what it means now.