Perhaps amidst the increasingly depressing state of the world, Jesus is calling us to learn the path of faithfulness from those who never win.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on Mark
Jesus affirms generous giving, but he also condemns the religious exploitation of generous givers.
Jesus’s primary aim was not saving us for heaven after we die, but establishing a culture of whole-hearted loved in the here and now.
The capacity to understand and follow the way of Jesus is a miraculous gift.
In calling us into the culture of God, Jesus calls us to give up our addictions to tribalism, competitive grief, and selective compassion.
Jesus calls us to embrace God, life, and one another with joy, delight, hope, and grace, not with heartlessness cloaked in legalities.
The book of Esther is like a joke that has aged badly, enabling us to see how righteous anger at anti-semitism can become its horrifying mirror image.
Jesus offers himself to us to serve and bless us, and calls us to do the same in serving and blessing others.
Jesus carries and embodies the Biblical tradition of wisdom, calling us to let go of our self-focussed lives and expand into new lives of wisdom, love and compassion.
God’s gracious acceptance is so free from favouritism that we find it scandalous and daunting.
God’s love for us is so all-consuming that he accepts us as soon as we accept him and is happy for our behaviours to be sorted out in the transforming experience of love.
In his suffering death, Jesus calls us to solidarity with all who suffer, and in his complete lack of vengefulness, the risen Christ offers the hope of healing from our violence.
God is most likely and able to work through those who accept their own weakness and don’t try to forcefully assert their own power and influence.
Despite our almost idolatrous attachment to social structures like traditional family and monarchy, God wants us to live up to our calling to be a radically egalitarian community of prayerful shared responsibility.
The good news of resurrection meets us in the darkest places of our lives and so is initially incomprehensible and disorienting.
In an increasingly polarised world, championing the radical love and mercy shown by Jesus is likely to bring hostility from all sides.
The transfiguration reminds us that in and through Jesus, the perfect Son of God and the perfect Son of Man, we each have the potential to experience and to be glimpses of God who is the true agent of change in our lives and in the world.
Following Jesus in ministering among the needs around us is not a call to do everything ourselves.
Jesus overcomes the demonic powers which colonise our religious structures and thinking and which rob us of our freedom, integrity and life.
In baptism, the Holy Spirit is ordaining us (all of us) for mission.