The glory that has been seen in Jesus can shine forth in us, but there will be obstructions to be purged and commitments to be made first.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on Luke (Page 2)
The call to love our enemies is not a new law to slave at, but a call into a culture of love so wild and free and strong that no one can hate it out of us.
There is a fundamental culture clash between those who put their trust in God and those who pursue wealth, comfort and celebrity.
Jesus’s agenda, which we are called to follow, is about healing, liberating and gathering in the excluded, not purifying the community by excluding anyone.
In baptism we follow Jesus in being “ordained” and empowered for mission.
The childhood picture of Jesus’ development calls us to ensure that our relationship with God is our primary allegiance, our first responsibility and the foundation of our identity.
Young. Woman. Pregnant. Unmarried. How does Mary the mother of Jesus speak to you today?
If the message of Christmas is real, then our preparations for it need to be radically life-changing.
The doctrine of the Trinity teaches us how to take sides when the Bible brings us conflicting voices, especially over persistent issues like ethno-nationalism, racism, war, and genocide.
Christ is always stretching the boundaries beyond what we can comprehend, and his ascension stretches his presence to encompass even what seem to us to be his absence.
The physicality of the resurrection is a mystery that assures us that God values and honours us as whole, embodied humans, even if our bodies are damaged or worn out.
God reaches out to us through babies and elderly folks with a message of love and redemption that cuts through the theological justifications of empire and warmongering and calls us to peace.
The the birth of Jesus we see the beginning of a peace mission that is not based on force but on patience, forgiveness and presence.
Jesus calls us to look to the new things God is doing and seeks to humbly cooperate with them and bear witness to them.
Jesus meets us in our doubts and discombobulation and gives us instead a community of joyful hope.
Whether or not you can accept the idea of a personal devil, there are forces of evil in the world that are bigger and more powerful than our own inner flaws, but conscious and united, we are stronger still.
The particularity of Jesus’s identity scandalises our tribal sensibilities, but our attempts to erase such details in favour of a more “universal” truth inevitably fail to convey the good news of God with us.
Jesus comes to break us free from oppressive understandings of God and of God’s expectations of us.
The global social breakdown of which Jesus speaks is caused by the failure of our old oppressive ways of maintaining peace, but God has promised us a better way on the other side.
Jesus’s perplexing teaching on marriage and singleness calls us into a new network of relationships in which all are fully valued.