Nathan has been a pastor of our Church since 1994.
There is no hell where the love of God in Christ cannot reach us.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons by Nathan Nettleton (Page 30)
The way to enter the life of God is found in Jesus, in relationship with the incarnate life of God.
The decision to repent and accept Christ’s gift of forgiveness and life involves a life change which includes a new willingness to honour and serve Christ in the stranger.
When hopes have been extinguished and all is despair, God comes back.
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.
Being born of water and Spirit involves becoming as vulnerable and dependent on God as a newborn baby is on its parents.
The revelation of what God is on about in Christ will always upend our expectations and disrupt our lives.
In the face of monumental devastation and suffering, God speaks a word, and the word becomes flesh.
A modern paraphrase of a homily for the Feast of the Nativity by Ephraim the Syrian (306-373CE) taken from his second Christmas hymn.
The coming Christ will continually confound our expectations, no matter how well informed or righteous they may be.
The Cross is the tree at which we come to know the fullness of good and evil, and as we choose to bear the consequences of good and evil, it becomes for us the tree of life.
God is deeply hurt and offended by our rejection of God in favour of things that are worthless, but Jesus has made possible both our forgiveness and our reconciliation.
God has given us a new identity and a new allegiance in his kingdom, and our loyalty is now to truth and compassion regardless of their consequences for the interests of any other communities or kingdoms.
The world will try to domesticate the gospel and get it to reinforce the world’s status quo and moral codes, but as people identified with Christ on the cross, we live the radical (and offensive) life of the new creation.
Christian ascetic discipline is not about earning God’s acceptance, but about banishing the demons so that we can live life more fully in the here and now.
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.
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.