Jesus calls us to resist the satanic desire to credit violence and disaster with meaning, and instead to acknowledge meaning and truth only in God’s suffering love and mercy.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on Isaiah (Page 2)
Jesus calls us to neither conservatism nor iconoclasm, but to a faithful reckoning with the gifts and the sins of the past as we welcome and adapt to the new.
The Christmas stories assure us that Jesus is the one who brings light into our darkness.
Global chaos marked by war, terror and injustice is growing inevitably, and as followers of Jesus we stand in witness against it, knowing that God is with us to the end.
It is with the love of Christ taking charge of us, that we can venture into combat with the wrongs of our time without being dragged down by the very same demons that we oppose.
Love names, creation, joyful service and gifts for the common good can be signs of the nature and culture of God.
What is God challenging you to return to? Will you be a witness to the joy and love, and the possibilities of the alternative world heralded by Jesus?
The doctrine of the Trinity helps us to see that, though exalted and transcendent, God is nevertheless close and personally involved with us.
Jesus demonstrates the need to reflect on our results and reject the easy success and popularity that are built on meeting basic needs.
Jesus was born to reveal and fulfil what God had long sought to do; set people free to live joyously as God’s children.
As God’s people, we celebrate life in the face of death, because we know that the victory of life has been secured.
In the violence and suffering that surround the Christmas story, we find the revelation of a God who does not inflict violence and suffering, but suffers violence to bring love and peace.
Jesus is the Word – what God has to say – who reveals true humanity and illuminates our path to becoming fully and truly human.
Jesus Christ is the coming one who will fulfill the hopes and yearnings of the world, but we will imperil our faith and hope if we keep trying to set the agendas for him.
God’s visions of the future are often dismissed as unrealistic because our limited vision causes us to expect only more of the same.
There are numerous competing claims about what a faithful Christian life looks like, and sometimes the truth about following Jesus may be the least palatable of them all.
Our lives are gift: a gift from abundance, a gift to be shared, a gift given for the life of the world, a gift we can give away because we are confident that the eternal source of life, the God who promises healing and freedom, will always replenish us.
In Christ, God is made manifest to the world as King, Light and Lover.
The feeling of distance and separation from God – which we all feel – is perception not reality… it is the fruit of our fear and our holding-back.
Advent is preparing us for the coming of the Lord, that already and not-yet event for which people have lived and worked and prayed for millennia.