Since our highly successful live, interactive Earth Day webcast on Sunday, there have been lots of enthusiastic additional comments and ripples that I’m just catching up on this morning. (At the end of this post I’ll tell you what I’ve been up to since Sunday.)

I arrived home from Kootenay presbytery at midnight last night, bursting with resurrection soul-energy for God’s wonderful world and wonderful church. The packed choir loft of Kimberley United Church in Kimberley B.C. yesterday couldn’t contain the harmonies of trumpet and voice in singing and playing What a Wonderful World (music and lyrics by Weiss and Thiele, arranged by Russ Robinson.)

I spent last week as a participant in a High Level United Nations meeting on Wellbeing & Happiness: Defining a New Economic Paradigm. It may be my most memorable Holy Week ever. (You may have already seen reference to this in Saturday's Globe and Mail where I was interviewed for a story about the  'Jesus Year' phenomena.)

Our worship this year has been framed by a Good Friday that fell on Earth Day last year and a Sunday in Easter that will fall on Earth Day this year. (I wrote about this in the Toronto Star on Good Friday 2011.

I took advantage of this coincidence to plan an Easter celebration of Earth Day involving

Some of you have wondered about where I’ve been. Not only where my travels have taken me but how far I’ve wandered from blogging, facebook and twitter.

Since mid-January I haven’t been as active as usual on social media. There are two main reasons: a couple of infections slowed me down so much that I couldn’t invest energy beyond the many ‘essentials’; and a felt need for a more contemplative time to balance action for awhile.

With physical energy returning along with the spiritual reorientation of Lent, I am ready to be online again.

Hope was born in a stable, and those the world had judged wise came to see. After witnessing this fragile new hope, the Magi “went home by a different way.” They were not the same.

My thoughts this Epiphany are filled with both the fragile new hope that I saw born at the UN climate change talks in Durban, and the bitter disappointment that calls us to go home by a new and different way.

When the angel Gabriel told Mary that she would bear the Son of God, “For nothing will be impossible with God,” Mary answered, “Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

What an amazingly powerful response to God’s hope for the world. With Mary’s response, Christ was born and the world came to know God’s love in new form.

I have seen miracles. I have seen God act powerfully, mysteriously and miraculously. I pay special attention to miracles at Christmas.

In our United Church Song of Faith we sing of how “God tends the universe, mending the broken and reconciling the estranged.” We go on to sing of the initiative that God took in the birth of Jesus, to make this mending and reconciling visible in a new way.

Leadership is what the 15,000 of us here in Durban are waiting for.

As Dr. Jesse Mugambi said yesterday, “We’re not seeing statesmanship here in Durban. We’re seeing politics and that’s not the same thing. Statesmanship means you’re prepared to give leadership even when there’s a political cost.”

My heart pounded when we sang Amazing Grace in our service on Sunday here in Durban.

“… I once was lost, but now am found; was blind but now I see.”

Soul-naked words that stir hearts everywhere. Words that transcend all boundaries because they speak to the universal human experience of being confronted with a choice between good and evil.

John Newton wrote this hymn when he needed to make a choice. He was a slave trader – wealthy, no doubt. His heart was changed when he realized that he had to choose between moral and immoral commerce.