Conversion to the way of Jesus is not just a matter of belief, but requires a serious reckoning with our past complicity with attacks on his way.
Seeking and Sharing the Fullness of Life
Seeking and Sharing the Fullness of Life
Sermons on Conversion
The baby whose coming is awaited will turn the world upside down (not just the lives of its parents!), and our counter-cultural observance of Advent is a necessary preparation of ourselves for that reality.
Angry prophets who tell us the hard-to-hear truth about ourselves pave the way for a new world to emerge.
The task of being changed into what God calls us to be involves a radical break with the established norms of our world.
We are often blind to our own entanglement in evil, but when our eyes are opened, we are called into pathways of repentance and transformation that lead to life and healing.
The life that Jesus calls us too will not be found and enjoyed until we give up trying to engineer the life we dreamed we were supposed to be living.
The culture of God is emerging in our present world, confronting us with a choice – do we cling to our allegiance to the cultures that have raised us or let go of them and embrace the culture of God.
Christians are to be known for what they celebrate and affirm and encourage rather than what they are against.
Even for Jesus, and certainly for us, there is sometimes the need to be jolted into the reality of what God’s new revelation of grace is all about.
Meeting us on the road of despair, Jesus reveals to us that suffering and defeat are God’s means of bringing new life and hope.
A comic monologue on the story of Doubting Thomas, presented in the style of “Fred Dagg” as a fan’s tribute to the late great John Clarke.
Jesus subverts our concepts of sin and offers to open our eyes and free us from it all.
Our deepest thirst will never be satisfied by cautious morality and religious compliance, but it will be abundantly quenched when we drink deeply of the living water of joyous intimacy that Jesus pours out freely.
Lent is a recurring reminder of the fragility of our discipleship in the face of tempting shortcuts and instant gratifications.
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.
History will end with the unbridled joy of a loving shepherd who celebrates the neighbourhood filling up with dead losers who don’t deserve to be there.
When we’re met by the living Christ, we’re not invited to simply change our opinions about some things in life, and go on as we have before. We’re called, we’re changed, we’re transformed from top to bottom, from the inside out. Life can never be the same again.
Jesus calls us in a new direction, full of strangers and dangers and turmoil and wonder. And in that vision of a new way, a new future leaping with silvery hope, we will find the courage to leave everything.
We grow into the likeness of Christ as we model ourselves on him, and he is a model of growth rather than a model of static perfection.
Only when the world models itself on the self-sacrificial love and mercy we have seen in Jesus will it be saved from the cycles of apocalyptic violence and chaos.