Nathan has been a pastor of our Church since 1994.
The saints of God are engaged in a war between conflicting empires battling for control of the world, but Jesus has radically transformed our understanding of how we fight.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons by Nathan Nettleton
When we respond to others with judgement and contempt instead of empathy and compassion, we fail to understand God and live God’s love for others.
The relationship between God’s work and our work in salvation is not a puzzle to be solved, but a mystery to be lived in prayer and faithful discipleship.
Jesus constantly seeks to upend our prejudices in order to breakdown and overcome our divisive tribalism.
Healthy spirituality requires an honesty about our experience of pain and confusion in the real world, and that means that lamentation is a part of healthy prayer.
Even in the face of a catastrophic collapse of the world as we know it, God calls us to imagine and invest in a beautiful future.
In order to find our way into the good news of life in all its fullness, we need to first stop denying and distracting ourselves from the bad news we are drowning in.
Despite first appearances, Jesus’s call to “count the cost” of following him is not so much about ensuring we can succeed as it is about ensuring we can faithfully persevere in the face of failure.
In the face of social breakdown and environmental catastrophe, we are called, not to angry protest, but to creative expressions of love, compassion, and hospitality.
Our call to bear witness to the culture of God comes at a time when we face the real prospect of doom and destruction, and so must contend with that.
We all get trapped in demonic and dehumanising social structures, but Jesus unmasks the truth so that we can be set free.
When we fear for our own safety, we condone the violence that promises to protect us, and we use religion to justify it, but Jesus wants to free us to rise above the fear without resorting to hatred and violence.
The Christian understanding of God as Trinity is not so much something you have to make sense of, but a call to recognise that God is by nature relational, and that we are invited into the triune relationship of love.
The Church born when God poured out the Holy Spirit, is one in which barriers of ethnicity, language, sex, age, and social status are transcended and all are equal in Christ.
Christ’s story – the crucifixion of the truly good and its resurrection and coming victory – is the whole story of God’s work in the world and the whole story of the Bible.
The ascension is the completion of the cosmic liturgy that frees us from our entanglement in sin, lifts us into the holy of holies, and sends us forth as the body of Christ for the world.
Jesus wants to heal us from all that would diminish us, and he also wants us to cooperate with that by really wanting it and envisioning ourselves free.
In our worship we drink in the vision of heaven and earth made one so that our yearning might be fuelled; strengthening us against despair and empowering us to strive for the renewal of the world.
Resurrection keeps happening and keeps changing the world and overcoming the hostile deathly powers despite our inability to believe.
True forgiveness, which we encounter most fully in the risen Christ, does not gloss over the past but revisits it fully and carefully that we may be fully set free from it.