Only when the world models itself on the self-sacrificial love and mercy we have seen in Jesus will it be saved from the cycles of apocalyptic violence and chaos.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on Mark (Page 4)
Every coin you are holding already belongs to God: every bitterness, every hurt, every disappointment. Do not hold a single one back.
Jesus wants to lift us beyond the deadening conformity that seeks to silence us and confine us to a stunted life.
In Christ we have been given a new identity that dissolves the labels of first and two-thirds world, and invites us all to be poor.
Jesus’s invitation is radically open and inclusive, and we need to guard carefully against our own culturally conditioned instincts to start narrowing and policing it.
The things that make Jesus the perfect leader to lead us into new life are probably the same things that would make us turn our backs on him and seek to follow others.
God promises the best for us if we follow the way of Jesus, and faith is actively trusting that that pathway will indeed be the way of life.
There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that another person can do to you that can make you unclean or defiled in the eyes of God.
We have been adopted as the children of a king who does not withhold his love until we comply, who does not ask us to sing for our supper, who does not use us or abuse us, but longs to bind up our wounds.
God is most likely and able to work through those who accept their own weakness and don’t try to forcefully assert their own power and influence.
Despite our often minimal vision for ourselves, and our feeling of not being important to God, Jesus Christ is committed to bringing us to the fullness of life and wholeness.
God calls us to faithful expressions of the Culture of God which usually look unimpressive and unruly when judged by the world’s usual standards of success.
Satan casts out satan all the time in our divisive attempts to protect ourselves by demonising and expelling others.
Jesus calls us to turn away from pathways of judgement and condemnation and to follow him on the harder path of love and new life.
Lent is a time to walk knowingly into the wilderness, to face the Accuser and the wild beasts that emerge when we live out our identity as God’s children.
Expecting God to always appear as an exalted triumphant victor blinds us to the reality of God’s glory which is made known in suffering, self-sacrificial love.
Jesus urges us to take stock, to recognise the sicknesses which warp us and the demons which colonise our hearts and our minds, to renounce them so that we become free to minister to one another, and to proclaim the good news in our words and our lives.
Jesus calls us to model a pattern of love and generous inclusion, and to avoid the demonic temptations of exclusion and pride.
Advent is preparing us for the coming of the Lord, that already and not-yet event for which people have lived and worked and prayed for millennia.
Jesus calls us to courageously follow him through a world of apparently apocalyptic violence towards the advent of hope and peace.