Jesus calls us to look to the new things God is doing and seeks to humbly cooperate with them and bear witness to them.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on Luke
Jesus meets us in our doubts and discombobulation and gives us instead a community of joyful hope.
Whether or not you can accept the idea of a personal devil, there are forces of evil in the world that are bigger and more powerful than our own inner flaws, but conscious and united, we are stronger still.
The particularity of Jesus’s identity scandalises our tribal sensibilities, but our attempts to erase such details in favour of a more “universal” truth inevitably fail to convey the good news of God with us.
Jesus comes to break us free from oppressive understandings of God and of God’s expectations of us.
The global social breakdown of which Jesus speaks is caused by the failure of our old oppressive ways of maintaining peace, but God has promised us a better way on the other side.
Jesus’s perplexing teaching on marriage and singleness calls us into a new network of relationships in which all are fully valued.
The faithful who have gone before us are held securely in the powerful gracious memory of God, where their love and prayers for us live on until we are united with them in resurrection.
Jesus seeks out and embraces the outcasts, taking upon himself the hatred and hostility that had been directed at them.
God invites us into a journey of healing, growth and reconciliation, and values our engagement with that journey far above our individual accomplishments.
God has promised a time of resurrection and renewal, and has given us guidance for living faithfully in the meantime.
Jesus challenges us to bring our lives to where God is active, to share in building the kingdom of God.
The cross of Jesus can teach us to recognise the innocence of suffering, and so enable us to recognise our own dependence on God’s mercy and to stop digging our own hells.
Jesus’s parables always shock us, and few things shock us more than the outrageous graciousness that God shows us and calls for from us.
Jesus calls all who are worn out from maintaining appearances as hosts to relax into the humility of being guests.
Adversity, violence, and suffering can come as a consequence of not just sin, but of radical love, but with love it can strengthen and sharpen us for fullness of life.
The Lord’s Prayer is a manifesto for a whole new way of relating to God and the world.
Inviting Christ into your dwelling means being renovated from the inside out.
Those who are insiders in the life of God are characterised by their love and compassion for all, especially those deemed unworthy of it, and by the humility to be schooled by outsiders.
Being missioners needs to be patterned on Jesus if it is to have any integrity at all, and so it will be characterised by intentional engagement, genuine curiosity, deep listening, allowing others to be a blessing to us, and trusting ourselves to God.