Our struggles against evil, temptation and suffering are all framed by the security of God’s unshakable love and resolve to bring us safely to fullness of life.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on John (Page 9)
Being born of water and Spirit involves becoming as vulnerable and dependent on God as a newborn baby is on its parents.
In the face of monumental devastation and suffering, God speaks a word, and the word becomes flesh.
The message of Pentecost is the message of Pascha – Christ is risen and, in him, we are liberated from our captivity to the spirits of death, fear, despair, and division, and freed to dance to the Holy Spirit’s tune.
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.
Jesus’s resurrection was a sign which declared that Jesus’ cause was God’s cause, that Jesus’ values were God’s values, that Jesus’ people were God’s people.
The risen Christ is extravagantly generous and excruciatingly unwilling to settle for pious platitudes in return.
The experience of the resurrected Christ may not be as instantly transformative as we’ve often thought, but those who seek Christ’s self-revelation will grow into his mission.
God’s love is like a refuge from the storm, like the hospitality of a generous host, like the continuing delight of a bridegroom for his bride, and like the alchemical power of the miracle-worker transforming even our fear and inconstancy into the power to love, forgive, and cherish.
The resurrection has broken open many old certainties, and our ethics must now be grounded in the new things God is doing, characterised by radically inclusive love, rather than in the old restrictions.
God has promised that if we stay connected to him, then he will give us the energy and the love to go out from our comfort-zones into the alien territory of those who need God’s love most of all.
The message that salvation is exclusively in the hands of the risen Christ may be unfashionable, but it is the only message of salvation we have to offer.
As the victim of the ultimate in human evil, the risen Christ is the One who can offer the complete forgiveness, to us, and through us to the rest of the world.
God invites us to be immersed in another possible reality, to look at the world with the dark and contrary light that comes from the cross of Jesus.
Christ crucified is both a sign of the ultimate consequence of evil, and of the ultimate victory of Christ over evil through the power of suffering love.
The world is full of offers of poisoned cups to quench our thirst, but Jesus offers us his own Spirit to sustain us in the wilderness.
The wound of abandonment which haunts every human being will find its healing in Christ who is everywhere present as the authority and power of God.
We go out not to take Christ to others, but to meet Christ among them and reconnect his story and theirs.
We are called not to know, but to be known, not to see, but to be seen by God, who gazes upon us with a love so wide and long and deep that it surpasses all our imaginings.
The impossible life of peace, joy, justice centred in the other, only becomes possible because God makes it possible.