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.
We shall be ourselves when we are able to surrender ourselves to Christ and say ‘not my will, but yours’.
In baptism, the Holy Spirit is ordaining us (all of us) for mission.
Belonging to God does not exempt us from disasters that may come, although that is often what people hope and expect, but it does mean that they will not have the last word on us.
John calls us beyond insurance policy religion, but Jesus calls us still further into participation in God’s radical generosity to all the world.
With Jesus we are baptised into a Spirit-inspired costly life of living the new culture of scandalous reconciliation.
Faith in the risen Christ is always a physical thing, experienced and expressed in physical ways.
The promise of baptism with fire may surprisingly lead us to a loving suffering messiah.
In baptism we are adopted into a new family that is radically inclusive of those who have been cut off.
The death of Christ strips us bare, but in his resurrection we are clothed in Christ and become participants in his resurrection life.
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.
In baptism Jesus submits himself to his God-given destiny and vocation, and it is by a similar submission to God, allowing Christ to live out his baptismal life in us and for us, that we have life and hope.
In baptism, we have passed from the preoccupations of the present to the a life shaped by God’s future, and though the completion of that transformation may be painful, it is nevertheless the fulfilling of our deepest longings.
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.