The child of God became a human, so that humans could become children of God.
Seeking and Sharing the Fullness of Life
Seeking and Sharing the Fullness of Life
Sermons on Incarnation
God has hung a star in our sky, and called us to follow it to the Christ child, who will receive the gifts that we bring and we will return changed to our homes.
God’s coming does not reinforce our social norms and hierarchies, but breaches them to reconcile and re-dignify those who the social order has sacrificed and cast aside.
The doctrine of the Trinity is not a mathematical puzzle, but an invitation to an experience of relationships, sharing in the life and mission of God.
As Woody Allen said, 90% of success is just showing up, and in the resurrection, Jesus really shows up!
In the face of monumental devastation and suffering, God speaks a word, and the word becomes flesh.
The Christmas stories assure us that Jesus is the one who brings light into our darkness.
When God calls us to invest in the places we live, it is a call to active agents of positive change, not compliant patriots.
The God revealed to us in Jesus and experienced through the Holy Spirit is so dynamic and multi-facetted that we may find it hard to believe that we are always dealing with the one God.
Jesus shows us that being overly cautious about the boundaries of personal space and touch can, especially in worship, risk excluding, stigmatising and humiliating people.
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.
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.
Sexual Intimacy is an exquisitely beautiful gift from God, but attempts to control and repress it frequently distort it into a hypocritical and malevolent force.
The light of Christ reaches the world through those who will bear the wounds of love.
The nativity story proclaims the basic themes of the gospel message; God enters into our suffering world as a victim of our violence, and is rejected by most but recognised by the nobodies.
Today, as in Jesus’s day, two fundamentally different visions of God and God’s expectations compete. Jesus calls us to side with the one that centres on love rather than the one that centres on concerns for holiness.
Jesus is the Word – what God has to say – who reveals true humanity and illuminates our path to becoming fully and truly human.
In Joseph we see an impressive example of someone with the integrity and courage to embrace God’s new directions despite considerable personal cost.
To name Christ as King is to identify ourselves as dissenters to the claims of any other authority and to critique all power-mongering.
God becomes human and brings into himself (reconciles to himself) in Jesus the full range of human emotional experience.