The knowledge that we are loved by God and the tenacious sharing of that love break the power of the world’s systems to lock us in to destructive cycles overwork, over consumption, and compliance with injustice and war.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on John (Page 8)
God’s love for us is so great that God will do anything to give us a way out of the self-condemnation and self-destruction of continuing to live in conformity with the world’s ways.
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.
We have become exiled from our destiny as God’s children, but Jesus has been born among us to reveal to us and restore us to that destiny.
When Jesus sees us for who we really are, we are enabled to see ourselves for who we really are, without boxes and labels, and so be saved to become who we were created to be.
God calls us to new beginnings, and we have to let go of old certainties to embrace them.
The unity of the churches, as an expression of reconciliation, is integral to the message of good news in Christ.
Jesus gives us a peace that is not secured at the expense of victims, and he sends a Defence Counsel to lead the defence of the world’s victims.
Jesus is the model for rightly honouring the victims by exposing and resisting the systems that sacrificed them.
Extravagant devotion to the crucified Christ is the foundation of our compassion and care for other victims of the world’s callousness.
Recognising Jesus as Lord requires such a reversal of conventional values that it cannot but dangerously transform us.
To name Christ as King is to identify ourselves as dissenters to the claims of any other authority.
Jesus invites us to find our communion in the violence done to him instead of in doing violence to others.
Jesus becomes a victim of our systems of feeding on one another in order to forgive us, set us free, and nourish us for life.
The God who we encounter in such different ways is, nevertheless, the one God, and we are called to share in the life of this one God.
Love is a gift which we invited to become at home in, receiving and enjoying it, not questioning, measuring and regulating it.
God will do great things with us, but will not impose them on us, so we have to relinquish control before God brings about the growth we crave.
In the encounter with Jesus, our self-delusion and our scapegoating are painfully exposed, but with the possibility of forgiveness and freedom.
To those for whom the griefs of yesterday or the fear of tomorrow is just too much, come Lord Jesus.
The way to enter the life of God is found in Jesus, in relationship with the incarnate life of God.