Nathan has been a pastor of our Church since 1994.
The experience of winter is God’s gift, inviting us to silence, healing and new depth of life.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons by Nathan Nettleton (Page 9)
The culture of God rises in defiance of the empires of this world, but it will look more like an annoying outbreak of self-sown, invasive weeds than an alternative empire.
Jesus’s radical call to align ourselves with his new family trumps even our allegiances to our blood families, and asks us to shape our relationships in the church around a shared commitment to living out the will of God.
The recognition that in Jesus we see the exact likeness of the Father rescues us from fear and slavery and invites us to live as the beloved children of God.
If we surrender ourselves to the Holy Spirit, we lose some of our inhibitions about social conformity and are liberated to break down the boundaries that keep people apart.
If we want to understand how Jesus saves us and what Jesus saves us from, we are going to have to abandon the most widely taught explanation.
We mostly don’t see ourselves as either terrible sinners or as gloriously Christ-like, but in the resurrection we are called to fully imagine both as world-changing truths.
In determining our church’s way forward, we need to discern who we exist to serve, and it shouldn’t just be ourselves.
God will walk with us in suffering and work redemptively within it, but God is not powerful enough to just remove it.
Science, theology and reason can often lead to a sound set of ethical behavioural conclusions which then need to be set aside because, in reality, love demands something else.
Although we can’t prove that our faith isn’t another crackpot fraud, we can provide evidence by living lives of love, hope and hospitality.
In baptism we are anointed to reign with Christ over a new creation, but it is a reign of suffering servanthood, not of reckless force.
The child of God became a human, so that humans could become children of God.
God’s coming does not reinforce our social norms and hierarchies, but breaches them to reconcile and re-dignify those who the social order has sacrificed and cast aside.
Jesus calls us to resist the satanic desire to credit violence and disaster with meaning, and instead to acknowledge meaning and truth only in God’s suffering love and mercy.
In a world dominated by arrogant and exploitative leaders, Jesus models a gentle shepherding leadership that prioritises the reintegration of the broken over the drive for “success” and “efficiency”.
Self-interested leaders will frequently manufacture frightening images of an angry dangerous God to silence opposition and maintain their grip on power, but Jesus opens our eyes to these abuses and to the reality of a God of incorruptible love.
We are often afraid to face what must be faced in order to enter the new world God has promised, but God continues to promise an abundance of blessings when we overcome our fears and obey.
All creation waits impatiently for humanity to work and pray its way into the fullness of our identity in Christ, for only then will all creation be safe and free.
The stories of Moses, Elijah and Jesus on various mountain tops reveals a process of God’s self-revelation as the one who loves us and suffers for us.