In the face of global suffering, we continue to give praise for the power that is working on the side of love, and we unite our power with God’s power until we see God’s will being done.
Seeking and Sharing the Fullness of Life
Seeking and Sharing the Fullness of Life
Sermons on Liberation
We are often afraid to face what must be faced in order to enter the new world God has promised, but God continues to promise an abundance of blessings when we overcome our fears and obey.
Until our eyes are opened to discern the dog-domination and pig-powers that oppress us from within our culture, we will continue to be trampled underfoot by them
Every coin you are holding already belongs to God: every bitterness, every hurt, every disappointment. Do not hold a single one back.
Jesus wants to lift us beyond the deadening conformity that seeks to silence us and confine us to a stunted life.
We have been adopted as the children of a king who does not withhold his love until we comply, who does not ask us to sing for our supper, who does not use us or abuse us, but longs to bind up our wounds.
Despite our often minimal vision for ourselves, and our feeling of not being important to God, Jesus Christ is committed to bringing us to the fullness of life and wholeness.
It is only in light of the resurrection that we can comprehend the sin and death that we are being liberated from.
When we approach God’s way of life and the Sabbath not as punishment, but as gift, the experience becomes a chance to rest from work and from striving; and to allow space for God through contemplation and re-creation and play.
Jesus calls us to turn away from pathways of judgement and condemnation and to follow him on the harder path of love and new life.
Jesus urges us to take stock, to recognise the sicknesses which warp us and the demons which colonise our hearts and our minds, to renounce them so that we become free to minister to one another, and to proclaim the good news in our words and our lives.
There are many stories in the Bible that can appear to portray God as involved in terrorist acts, but Jesus invites us to read them in new ways.
What would happen if violence were met with bread, with blankets, with hospitals, with forgiveness of debts?
Once we recognise that all women, like all men, are made in the image of God, we catch a glimpse of God’s original vision for us, for the day when all people experience God’s radical and abundant love, and the pouring out of justice demanded by that love.
In order for God to come to us as the healer and the liberator of souls, we must be prepared to let go of every religious pretension, every cultural certainty, every economic doctrine, every aspirational rule.
Jesus has freed us to be all we were created to be and to live life to the full, not to indulge the impulses that will lead us straight back into captivity.
Those who, in Christ, have been set free to love as Jesus loves will no longer have their relationships with God or one another bounded or understood by law.
Salvation is about being set free to live life in all its fulness, even in the midst of conflict and suffering.
True forgiveness, which we encounter most fully in the risen Christ, does not gloss over the past but revisits it fully and carefully that we may be fully set free from it.
Jesus leads us in the way of redemptive freedom before the violence of the world.