The child of God became a human, so that humans could become children of God.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on Galatians
The instinct to call down fire on those we perceive as God’s enemies is a “fruit of the flesh” that must be supplanted by the fruits of love.
Jesus was born to reveal and fulfil what God had long sought to do; set people free to live joyously as God’s children.
When we fear for our own safety, we condone the violence that promises to protect us, and we use religion to justify it, but Jesus wants to free us to rise above the fear without resorting to hatred and violence.
Sometimes God has to kill off our hopes and destroy our faith structures in order to create space for new life and truth to arise among us.
The gospel of love and grace revealed by Jesus is always at risk of being distorted into a false gospel of ‘holy’ hostility.
In order for God to come to us as the healer and the liberator of souls, we must be prepared to let go of every religious pretension, every cultural certainty, every economic doctrine, every aspirational rule.
Jesus has freed us to be all we were created to be and to live life to the full, not to indulge the impulses that will lead us straight back into captivity.
Those who, in Christ, have been set free to love as Jesus loves will no longer have their relationships with God or one another bounded or understood by law.
Our identity as a community of Jesus’s followers is primarily expressed in love, gratitude and hospitality, not in compliance with a negative code of conduct.
Pray for all people and let God do the judging. The world may be an evil place but you are God’s children and evil has been overcome.
We seek to live and practice non-violence as the only way to overcome injustice, persecution, tyranny and violence and build cultures of peace.
Religious zeal often turns violent, but the revelation of Jesus Christ makes known a God who repudiates our violence and sets us free from it.
The world will try to domesticate the gospel and get it to reinforce the world’s status quo and moral codes, but as people identified with Christ on the cross, we live the radical (and offensive) life of the new creation.
Christian ascetic discipline is not about earning God’s acceptance, but about banishing the demons so that we can live life more fully in the here and now.
God sees us, the baptised, as having the appearance of Christ, which gives us reason to believe in ourselves and live up to it.
Our bodies are integral to who we are and are destined for resurrection and glorification, but the fracturing of the integrity of creation affects us too in ways that mean we often find our bodies at war with our spirits. The pathway to sanctification involves a reintegration of body and spirit, and sometimes that means denial and disciplining of physical desires.