God’s love for us is so all-consuming that he accepts us as soon as we accept him and is happy for our behaviours to be sorted out in the transforming experience of love.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on Purity
Jesus calls us to follow him in being a contagious force for love and mercy rather than fearfully quarantining ourselves from bad influences.
Jesus comes to break us free from oppressive understandings of God and of God’s expectations of us.
Much traditional morality is based on the idea of separation into binary categories, good and bad, but the Bible also points a path towards a liberating non-binary future in God.
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.
The power of God is that a contagion of life—of transformation, hope, and peace—is more powerful than a contagion of death.
Jesus’s invitation is radically open and inclusive, and we need to guard carefully against our own culturally conditioned instincts to start narrowing and policing it.
When God is moving to do something new among us, it almost always seems scandalous, immoral and offensive to many, and is just as likely to involve those who are regarded as morally suspect.
It is human nature to think that our ways are God’s ways, and so to shun those whose ways seem alien or disgusting to us, but Jesus calls us to recognise God at work in others, however different.
Jesus and the Canaanite woman bring us along with them into a new understanding of what defiles, and what makes us clean and whole.
When God accepts and gifts those who are supposed to be excluded according to our theology, then its time to change our theology to a rule of love instead of a rule of purity.
God consistently favours love and acceptance over purity, so when we are not sure, it is better to take a risk on love and acceptance.
Being saved can be painful, but its goal, becoming a purified people who can worship rightly without fear, is the ultimate reward.
The New Testament teachings on the priority of the spirit of the law over the traditional interpretations of it actually give us a biblical basis on which to reevaluate our understandings of sexual purity.