The Ascension is not a story about the absence of Christ, but of Christ’s extraordinary presence with us everywhere and always.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on Colossians
The culture of God’s beloved Son is born at the cross and takes root amidst a hostile world, spreading forgiveness and hospitality.
Through Jesus’ life, death and resurrection we are reconciled to God, made free to be the person that God created us to be, and we live into it by embracing a positive culture of love, mercy and consideration.
Jesus models for us a willingness to listen, learn and grow rather than a domineering certainty that insists on knowing who’s right and who’s wrong.
If we delight in shaming and punishing wrongdoers, we will not recognise the scandalous love and mercy revealed in Jesus, but instead find ourselves being harshly judged by an outraged condemning god who we have created in our own image.
We grow into the likeness of Christ as we model ourselves on him, and he is a model of growth rather than a model of static perfection.
When we follow Christ in being pain-bearers, we are participating in the reconciliation of the world.
God’s call to us is to be the embodiment of divine compassion.
The Lord’s Prayer is a manifesto for a whole new way of relating to God and the world.
Christ calls us to continue to grow in the measure of our love, prayer and good works.
With Jesus as our pattern, we find a new identity in our uncompromising allegiance to God’s ways.
The Cross is the tree at which we come to know the fullness of good and evil, and as we choose to bear the consequences of good and evil, it becomes for us the tree of life.
When we detach from things, God comes to fill or possess us by God’s Spirit, and suddenly the world is full of life once more.
God has given us a new identity and a new allegiance in his kingdom, and our loyalty is now to truth and compassion regardless of their consequences for the interests of any other communities or kingdoms.
God calls us to detach, to empty ourselves of desire, to die with Christ, so that we may truly welcome Christ when he returns to his appointed home in our hearts and souls.
In baptism we are joined to Christ and we now live as he leads, and celebrate the freedom of others to do so also.
Our experience of being reconciled to God through Christ provides the inspiration and the model for the work of reconciliation across the various divides within our world.
Christ is the image of God and our goal is that all grow to maturity in the image of Christ.