The good news of resurrection meets us in the darkest places of our lives and so is initially incomprehensible and disorienting.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on Fear
While many have a passive-aggressive relationship with God, the gospel gives us a vision of God that liberates us to live freely, expansively and joyously.
Jesus never stops crossing the menacing water to come to where we are, saying: “Take courage. It is I. Don’t be afraid.”
Jesus calls us to follow him in being a contagious force for love and mercy rather than fearfully quarantining ourselves from bad influences.
When you know yourself truly beloved by God in Christ, you are freed from fear and shame to live fully and generously and courageously.
We are often afraid to face what must be faced in order to enter the new world God has promised, but God continues to promise an abundance of blessings when we overcome our fears and obey.
Jesus’s encounter with Thomas and the first disciples can show us a thing or two about living under lockdown and hoping for a miracle to save us.
Jesus leads the way towards a new experience of life that is so utterly alive that death is powerless to threaten, limit or constrain it.
The COVID-19 scare can reinforce our Lenten call to prepare our hearts by facing up to our mortality and the real limits of our control over the world.
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.
In the face of monumental devastation and suffering, God speaks a word, and the word becomes flesh.
There are plenty of reasons to despair of the future, but Jeremiah and Jesus show us a pathway of hope that overcomes despair.
Facing an epidemic of depression and despair, Jesus calls us to follow on a tear-stained path of prophetic faithfulness.
In a world that is hell-bent on self-destruction, Jesus calls us to gather to him and to love faithfully and vulnerably with him, rather than surrendering to the hate and fear.
It is not from the halls of power but from humble places that the love which offers wholeness and healing and peace erupts into life.
In the face of a politics grounded in nationalist arrogance and fake news, Jesus proclaims a ‘kingdom’ grounded in shared humanity and truth.
All of us, men especially, share responsibility for confronting and changing the culture that enables men to feel entitled to rape, and Jesus leads us into the new culture that sets us all free.
Pretending to be better than we are alienates us from God and one another. Being open and real about our weaknesses and failures open us to God and one another.
In the face of tragedy, we naturally cry out “Why?” Jesus meets us in the suffering and helps us find the path of life.
God invites us to live joyously, boldly and freely in the midst of mystery, but we are frequently tempted to grasp for something more tangible and certain.