If we keep imitating one another, paying back violence with vengeance, the world will be consumed in an escalating fury, but Jesus rescues us and gives us a life-giving example to follow.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on Conversion
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.
Being born of water and Spirit involves becoming as vulnerable and dependent on God as a newborn baby.
In Jesus, the truth about God’s ways and means is brought to light and we are called to so reflect that light that all might be drawn to it.
Jesus asks us to assess the legitimacy of any ministry by its transforming and liberating outcomes for the world and its peoples.
We mostly don’t see ourselves as either terrible sinners or as gloriously Christ-like, but in the resurrection we are called to fully imagine both as world-changing truths.
When theology and discipleship follow the path of God, they take us beyond an obsession with borders to a new engagement with the kingdom of God, present and tangible in all the earth.
As important as our responses and decisions are, before we know, we are known. Before we understand, we are understood. Before we say ‘Yes’, ‘Yes’ is said to us.
Jesus leads us through the confusion of transition times, into a new space with hugely expanded horizons and lives made meaningful in a global way.
Christ’s gratuitous forgiveness and acceptance always manage to scandalise us, but it is our willingness to embrace them that saves us.
The threat of extreme climate change can only be averted with a major spiritual transformation, and Jesus shows the way.
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.
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.