In order to recognise and cooperate with what God is doing, we often need to recognise and see past the assumptions that come with our own privilege.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on Grace
Looking for emerging patterns can help us (and Jesus?) recognise the ways that God is opening new pathways of grace and inclusion.
Jesus never stops crossing the menacing water to come to where we are, saying: “Take courage. It is I. Don’t be afraid.”
God’s Providence usually works by people, moved by the Spirit of God, sharing when they have more above their own needs.
The stairway to heaven is revealed in the darkest places and situations of our lives, in the difficult and dangerous places, in the situations where we least expected it.
Grief and suffering bring us close to the heart of the suffering God and can open us to God’s transforming and resurrecting power.
The world finds the message of Jesus almost incomprehensible because it seems too simplistic and unrealistic to be taken seriously.
God comes to us in unexpected ways, and the break with conventional religious respectability is even more earth-shattering than the break with conventional reproductive biology.
Jesus asks us to assess the legitimacy of any ministry by its transforming and liberating outcomes for the world and its peoples.
Jesus seeks out and embraces the outcasts, taking upon himself the hatred and hostility that had been directed at them.
The cross of Jesus can teach us to recognise the innocence of suffering, and so enable us to recognise our own dependence on God’s mercy and to stop digging our own hells.
Jesus’s parables always shock us, and few things shock us more than the outrageous graciousness that God shows us and calls for from us.
Our unwitting abusive treatment of the Royal family is a symptom of our entanglement in systemic persecution.
Jesus calls all who are worn out from maintaining appearances as hosts to relax into the humility of being guests.
Those who are insiders in the life of God are characterised by their love and compassion for all, especially those deemed unworthy of it, and by the humility to be schooled by outsiders.
All our dinners are an anticipation of the vision of a new world, where God’s very self dwells with mortals, all are welcomed, and all pain is taken away.
We come to be followers of Jesus, not when we believe certain facts about him, but when we hear his voice and follow what it says (even if we don’t know where the voice comes from).
The resurrection of Jesus opens a path and calls us to follow into a life that is no longer dominated by the crucifying powers that destroy some of us and dehumanise others.
All that matters about God, about sin and forgiveness, and about living with integrity and freedom, flows from the human encounter with the crucified and risen Jesus.
A close encounter with God in Christ can make us paralysingly aware of our own sin and failure, but the experience of grace can transform that into a solidarity and gratitude that empowers us.