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.
Seeking and Sharing the Fullness of Life
Seeking and Sharing the Fullness of Life
Sermons on Incarnation
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.