In the culture of Jesus, the very conditions that create discomfort, struggle, suffering and even scorn, paradoxically are transformed into the essential ingredients to inherit and inhabit the kingdom of God.
Seeking and Sharing the Fullness of Life
Seeking and Sharing the Fullness of Life
Sermons on Culture
The forgiveness encountered in Jesus is extravagant and all-inclusive, but those who determinedly reject and demonise the Spirit’s winds of change can cut off their own access to it.
Our generation is very good at identifying evils and calling them out, but if our hearts are not occupied by God’s love and mercy, the results can be disastrous.
Jesus calls us to neither conservatism nor iconoclasm, but to a faithful reckoning with the gifts and the sins of the past as we welcome and adapt to the new.
Faithful waiting for for the fulfilment of God’s promises can leave us feeling compromised and alienated in the world around us.
The culture of God’s beloved Son is born at the cross and takes root amidst a hostile world, spreading forgiveness and hospitality.
The biblical pictures of marriage reflect our struggle to live our way into the vulnerable intimacy and relational fruitfulness that God wants for us and with us.
The saints of God are engaged in a war between conflicting empires battling for control of the world, but Jesus has radically transformed our understanding of how we fight.
Faithfulness to God means sticking to the ways in which Jesus has led us, but we are constantly tempted to idolise his name while avoiding his ways.
Where are the signs of the emerging culture of God?
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.
In the face of a politics grounded in nationalist arrogance and fake news, Jesus proclaims a ‘kingdom’ grounded in shared humanity and truth.
The collapse of the institutional church and other social structures will be painful for all of us, but it is not ultimately a threat to mission of Jesus.
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.
Children are a sign of the Kingdom, and our capacity to welcome them is a measure of our capacity to welcome the culture of God.
Jesus confronts us with our cannibalistic behaviour in order that we might follow him into a saving communion with God and one another.
Glimpses of the transformed world that God makes possible transfix us and leave us hungering for more.
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.
Jesus calls us to move beyond hostile identity politics, whether shaped by Sabbath keeping or #Outrage, and to welcome a new culture of love, forgiveness and welcome.