We live in amidst a culture of highly toxic, self-righteous, finger-pointing. Jesus calls us to a radical love which will stop the blame game but still speak transforming truth to those who oppress.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on Generosity
The indiscriminate ways Jesus shared and spoke about food broke the rules of his society and the rules of many churches down to this day.
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.
Jesus calls us to a Resurrection Imagination, praying for courage and discernment on how to use your resources until the dream of a world where there are no poor among us is fulfilled.
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.
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.
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.
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.
God does not judge people’s capacity to respond and focus love and care only on the productive, but gives gifts with wanton freedom and extravagance and calls us to do the same.
When you know yourself truly beloved by God in Christ, you are freed from fear and shame to live fully and generously and courageously.
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.