In determining our church’s way forward, we need to discern who we exist to serve, and it shouldn’t just be ourselves.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on Vocation
We are invited to work towards visions of God’s reign, knowing we will never be entirely successful, but sustained by imagining the possibilities.
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.
Jesus honours, commends and models a set of attitudes, or stances toward the world, which can and will change the world, but embracing them is no small challenge.
Full-blooded Christian discipleship may cost us some precious relationships and a lot of blood sweat and tears, but we will have plenty of new supporters and it all all be well worth it in the end.
Like the disciples, we stumble, but we too can pick ourselves up and re-orient ourselves to the transformed landscape that Jesus is slowly mapping out for us.
As creatures made in the image of God, imitation of God is the pathway to fullness of life.
The place of belonging that we are looking for is found when we find where Jesus belongs.
In baptism we surrender to God’s claim on us and enter a vowed relationship and life which will have its ups and its downs but in which God is forever faithful.
Taking up your cross is about a willingness to pay the price of following Jesus and living out your baptism. It is not a generalised stoicism.
Jesus is angered by our trivialising of religion that inoculates us against the claims of a holy God, and calls us to clean out the crassness and commercialism and approach God on God’s terms.
Jesus commits himself to the path of redemptive suffering in preference to either fight or flight, and he calls us to follow him in that commitment.
You might have been written off as a dead loss (even by yourself), but only respond to the call of Christ, and you will live!
God calls us to new beginnings, and we have to let go of old certainties to embrace them.
We seek to live and practice non-violence as the only way to overcome injustice, persecution, tyranny and violence and build cultures of peace.
Following Christ in incarnational ministry is not a call to do everything ourselves.
God calls us, as individuals and as a church, to a journey with him, but sometimes we find ourselves sitting at a station watching the trains go by.
We are humble servants who are strengthened and empowered by the Spirit to enter into the redeeming work of God.
In baptism Jesus submits himself to his God-given destiny and vocation, and it is by a similar submission to God, allowing Christ to live out his baptismal life in us and for us, that we have life and hope.
Rediscovering the mission of Jesus is one pathway through which we might re-enter the experience of dependence on God.