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.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on John (Page 4)
Love names, creation, joyful service and gifts for the common good can be signs of the nature and culture of God.
In the face of a politics grounded in nationalist arrogance and fake news, Jesus proclaims a ‘kingdom’ grounded in shared humanity and truth.
Jesus confronts us with our cannibalistic behaviour in order that we might follow him into a saving communion with God and one another.
Jesus calls us to choose between the old bread of hostility and death and the new bread of compassion and life.
The Holy Spirit fills the church with gifts, not only for its own sake, but so that it might be a gift to the world.
Jesus’s priestly identity and mission have been passed on to us and are to be seen in our prayer and our lives.
Rather than close the book on who can and cannot be accepted into the church, the Bible calls us to follow Jesus on a path of continually expanding inclusion.
Tonight we farewelled Peter from our congregation as he moves north, and he shared his reflections of what his time in this church has meant to him.
In his own demonstration of self-sacrificial love, Jesus has shown us what God is like and called us to love God and one another by loving likewise.
When we expected to be shamed as we have shamed others, we are shocked and saved by the unexpected mercy of the crucified and risen Jesus.
The life that Jesus calls us too will not be found and enjoyed until we give up trying to engineer the life we dreamed we were supposed to be living.
In the face of tragedy, we naturally cry out “Why?” Jesus meets us in the suffering and helps us find the path of life.
The light of Christ reaches the world through those who will bear the wounds of love.
As God’s people, we celebrate life in the face of death, because we know that the victory of life has been secured.
Allowing ourselves to be shaped by the teaching and testimony passed down from the Apostles protects us from falling for the idea that the gospel is a marketable means of gratifying our wishes.
Following Jesus has nothing to do with trying to be good. His love and hope are gifts, rather than demands, and they free us to love and hope freely.
Jesus gives us an abundance of all that we need, and when we learn to trust that, we are set free from rivalry and possessiveness and enabled to share generously.
Jesus calls us to believe that he is the resurrection and the life, not just in theory, but in relation to everything that is dead or dying within us.
Jesus subverts our concepts of sin and offers to open our eyes and free us from it all.