Nathan has been a pastor of our Church since 1994.
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.
Nathan has been a pastor of our Church since 1994.
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.
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.
Repenting of our past ways and following Jesus does not guarantee us safety from disaster, but it certainly opens the way to an abundance of life that is beyond what any disaster can destroy.
Extravagant grace can be terrifying because it asks nothing of us but a complete change of life!
God consistently favours love and acceptance over purity, so when we are not sure, it is better to take a risk on love and acceptance.
It is always a shock to realise just who Jesus is and what he’s on about.
A modern paraphrase of the Nativity Sermon of St John Chrysostom, first Preached in Antioch in 386AD
In baptism, we have passed from the preoccupations of the present to the a life shaped by God’s future, and though the completion of that transformation may be painful, it is nevertheless the fulfilling of our deepest longings.
Religious ritual and ethical living are both bound up together in the journey of following Jesus into the Realm of God.
Christ is sacramentally present to heal and forgive when his people are open, honest and vulnerable with one another in seeking healing for their sickness and suffering.
Making the Church in the incarnate body of Christ is costly for God, and both challenging and salvific for us.
The answers to the questions about our future directions are not easy, but we can trust the God who holds our future in his hands.
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.
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.
The experience of resurrection results in joy and mission.
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.
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.
What God has promised, God will make good on, no matter what the apparent obstacles, and our job is simply to set about cooperating with the promise-maker rather than with the obstacles.
The Transfiguration points us back to Jesus’ baptism and forward to his resurrection, and reiterates that the only way from one to the other is the way of the cross.