The imminent arrival of God’s messiah asks each of us to take up the identity of witnesses who open the way for God to be known.
Seeking and Sharing the Fullness of Life
Seeking and Sharing the Fullness of Life
Sermons on Baptism
Lent calls us to faithfulness to God and we need to assess the direction of our journey, our call to ministry and also to meet our own demons.
The task of being changed into what God calls us to be involves a radical break with the established norms of our world.
There is no neat finish to the Jesus story, because it is far from over. The risen Jesus is always ahead of us, calling us to follow and live the next chapter.
Our longing for God is met in the Holy Spirit who opens heaven to us and makes all things new.
Baptism is to the Christian life as a wedding is to the married life – an ongoing symbol of the vowed and relational life in God.
Baptism is a magnificent gift, far surpassing anything we could imagine or devise, for ultimately it is God’s chosen means of self giving to us.
In baptism, the Holy Spirit is ordaining us (all of us) for mission.
With Jesus we are baptised into a Spirit-inspired costly life of living the new culture of scandalous reconciliation.
In baptism we are anointed to reign with Christ over a new creation, but it is a reign of suffering servanthood, not a sanctimonious force.
The Transfiguration points us back to Jesus’ baptism and forward to his resurrection, and reiterates that the only way from one to the other is the way of the cross.
In baptism, the Holy Spirit is ordaining us for mission.
Jesus shows us the link between personal conversion and social action and transformation.