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In the encounter with Jesus, our self-delusion and our scapegoating are painfully exposed, but with the possibility of forgiveness and freedom.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on Jesus (Page 14)
The coming Christ will continually confound our expectations, no matter how well informed or righteous they may be.
Jesus acted out the parables that he was telling in his encounters with people, expressing the nature of God who seeks after us and rejoices in our being found and restored. God invites us to be people like that.
The world will try to domesticate the gospel and get it to reinforce the world’s status quo and moral codes, but as people identified with Christ on the cross, we live the radical (and offensive) life of the new creation.
Jesus’s resurrection was a sign which declared that Jesus’ cause was God’s cause, that Jesus’ values were God’s values, that Jesus’ people were God’s people.
In the face of powerful evil, our choice like Jesus’s choice is between the natural human instincts of flight or fight, and the third way of obedience to God.
It is always a shock to realise just who Jesus is and what he’s on about.
Religious ritual and ethical living are both bound up together in the journey of following Jesus into the Realm of God.
Making the Church in the incarnate body of Christ is costly for God, and both challenging and salvific for us.
If we can lose ourselves in the worship of Christ, then Christ will come to fill our emptied egos with his own self which now dances in the freedom of God.
God has promised that if we stay connected to him, then he will give us the energy and the love to go out from our comfort-zones into the alien territory of those who need God’s love most of all.
The message that salvation is exclusively in the hands of the risen Christ may be unfashionable, but it is the only message of salvation we have to offer.
The experience of resurrection results in joy and mission.
As the victim of the ultimate in human evil, the risen Christ is the One who can offer the complete forgiveness, to us, and through us to the rest of the world.
Christ crucified is both a sign of the ultimate consequence of evil, and of the ultimate victory of Christ over evil through the power of suffering love.
The hope that empowers us to maintain our counter-cultural obedience to Christ, is that the One who will eventually rule over all is the One who offers himself as a suffering servant of all.
The Coming Christ will reward and celebrate with those he finds having a go and making the most of all they have been given, not those who fearfully play it safe.
In the elusive quest to know Christ, spiritual disciplines are a valuable means, but can also easily degenerate into idols.
Many of us want the faith story to go according to our script, but the call of Jesus crashes through our dominant religious and cultural understandings and aspirations.
Those who insist that faith must satisfy their every ideology may miss out, while those who simply yoke themselves to Jesus will find the freedom and peace for which they yearn.