Where affluence creates consumers, abundance creates neighbours. It is the ethic of possessions which Jesus commends to us as a promise of how God deals with us.
Seeking and Sharing the Fullness of Life
Seeking and Sharing the Fullness of Life
Sermons on Generosity
The things we have we are to hold with open hands, looking with a generous eye for the oppotunities to share our resources in ways that make a difference.
Because of God’s extravagant and eternal generosity, we are raised out of death and into God’s life and a burning desire to participate in God’s passionate concern for the world.
The refining fire made known in Jesus is not targeting “morality” issues, but our hatreds, hostilities and inhospitableness.
Every coin you are holding already belongs to God: every bitterness, every hurt, every disappointment. Do not hold a single one back.
Jesus’s invitation is radically open and inclusive, and we need to guard carefully against our own culturally conditioned instincts to start narrowing and policing it.
Jesus rejects the opportunity to fulfil our hopes and expectations in order that he might give us more than we thought possible.
If we surrender ourselves to the Holy Spirit, we lose some of our inhibitions about social conformity and are liberated to break down the boundaries that keep people apart.
With every step we take towards God’s economy, we will become more powerful in our witness to God’s saving action and love for the world, and be filled ever more deeply with God’s good grace.
You cannot serve two masters; for a slave will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other.
Extravagant expressions of love are a sign of the culture of God, and Jesus models generous giving and receiving of them, regardless of the scandal they cause.
God saves us by changing our hearts, but one of the great temptations for the church is to try to turn that back into a system of exclusion and control.
Although the Church and our nation might be stronger if they were more inclusive, the real call to inclusion is simply part of the call to faithfully reflect Christ.
John calls us beyond insurance policy religion, but Jesus calls us still further into participation in God’s radical generosity to all the world.
Jesus affirms generous giving, but he also condemns the religious exploitation of generous givers.
Jesus’s abolition of “us” and “them” categories is so radical that it seems almost impossible for us to comprehend and put into practice.
God calls us to welcome and care for “the strangers” the refugees and asylum seekers in our midst.
God calls us to live exuberantly, generously reflecting the good things God has done and becoming model citizens in the reign of God.
The life and death of Jim Stynes give a contemporary picture of what it means to give your life away.
We want to be rewarded as we think we deserve, but God wants to give us everything.