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 on Apocalypse
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.
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 wait for a Saviour who will bring the Kingdom of God – a kingdom of which we see many foretastes and which we strive to live for in the here and now.
Perhaps amidst the increasingly depressing state of the world, Jesus is calling us to learn the path of faithfulness from those who never win.
Both contemporary and ancient understandings of the rainbow sign point to God’s expansive love overcoming our fears and hostilities.
Many parts of the Bible can be and often are weaponised as tools of oppression, but when we read it critically, with and through the teachings and example of Jesus, it calls us to liberation and life.
If we keep imitating one another, paying back violence with vengeance, the world will be consumed in an escalating fury, but Jesus rescues us and gives us a life-giving example to follow.
Jesus did not come with the goal of making some gentle improvements to the status quo, but to disable the status quo by exposing its lies and revealing its victims. Without our culture being radically converted by that, the result is escalating chaos, to which Jesus offers himself as a victim and calls us to do the same.
The Advent break in of God in Christ is underway, bringing disruption of a status quo that our world needs to be free of, and liberation from the imprisonment of sin.
The global social breakdown of which Jesus speaks is caused by the failure of our old oppressive ways of maintaining peace, but God has promised us a better way on the other side.
Adversity, violence, and suffering can come as a consequence of not just sin, but of radical love, but with love it can strengthen and sharpen us for fullness of life.
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.
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.
God created the earth and gave it to us, but mistreated, it rebels. Jesus, rising form the earth, redeems the earth, so that if can again be our true home.
In the face of monumental devastation and suffering, God speaks a word, and the word becomes flesh.
We can face the unknown future with confidence because we know that the one who holds the future loves us and can be trusted.
Global chaos marked by war, terror and injustice is growing inevitably, and as followers of Jesus we stand in witness against it, knowing that God is with us to the end.
There are plenty of reasons to despair of the future, but Jeremiah and Jesus show us a pathway of hope that overcomes despair.