What are some of the themes that you're pulling on this week? Looking at these readings is a whole.

Well, these are a really interesting set of readings and I think they present all sorts of directions and challenges for preachers.

And one of the choices one has to make is which of these challenges do we try and pick up in our preaching this week? And will that help people? I wanted to pick out a thread which I saw running through the readings, but particularly starts in the reading from Exodus.

Which begins with this exposition of how the people of God, having escaped from slavery and landed in the promised land, Moses had gone off for a bit and they... implore Aaron to set them up something to worship.

They very quickly forget the 10 commandments and they set up this golden calf to worship.

But the bit that I was really drawn to was the conversation that happens at the end of that episode where Moses comes back and God is angry, but Moses pleads with God to have mercy on God's people.

And verse 14, and the Lord changed his mind as a result of that conversation with Moses.

I wonder how you can help us leverage some hope, some sense of love or some sense of sensibility, I guess, in this parable, Simeon.

I just wondered whether there is anything that you can illuminate for us in terms of using this sensitively today or how we might want to connect that to what is currently going on, given the robustness that Jesus speaks about.

Yeah, thank you.

Nothing like a good challenge to get us started.

Yeah, I think the thing I would pull out from this and the lens through which I'd want to look at it is this is about God speaking, Jesus talking about how anyone who claims to follow Jesus should be responding to the generosity of God and the experience of living in God's world, living... taking God's world as gift but also as loan, not as something we can own, something where we can claim power for ourselves.

And so I think it is full of violence, but the violence is not being done by the landlord.

The violence is being done by those who ignore the ways of the landlord, ignore the rules, ignore the expectations.

We'll come on to talk about the Ten Commandments, which is about how God...

Simeon, what have you found in this text?

Simeon, is there anything from this passage or anything that Julie's said so far from this Genesis passage that has got you thinking? Yeah.

I immediately went in the same direction as Julie and thought about how this relates to those who are on the move, far from home, fleeing, freeing from situations today.

And the idea of a refugee is quite a modern concept.

The definition of a refugee is someone who faces a well-founded fear of persecution.

And I think it's fair to say that Jacob faced a well-founded fear of persecutions.

I think we could say he was a refugee.

He had to flee his home.

sort of phrases or words that would stick in our mind, sort of takeaways of people who are reading these passages in church or having them preached on?

Simeon, did you want to respond to any of that?

I'm grateful for Matt for alighting on that part of the passage, which is not where I would have naturally gone, but also for sharing out of your experience, Matt, of how that has worked for you.

The line that stood out for me is the bit about hope not putting us to shame, which connects because a lot of J. Pitt's work we frame in terms of hopes.

We have six hopes for society, which is almost like our vision, our biblically rooted vision for the way that we believe the world could and should be.

And sometimes people question as to whether it's naive for us to start from a point of hope.

Is it just wishful thinking to say that we seek a world where we welcome the stranger, where those who are the poorest and most vulnerable are put at the center? Those are the sum of our hopes.

But I think the counterpoint to that is always that hope, as this passage says, starts from reality.

Simeon, what did you think?