While the final judgement of each individual is rightly left to God, we are called to ensure that we are found to be loving, merciful and trustworthy by the world around us.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on Church (Page 2)
When we offer hospitality to, and accept hospitality from, anyone who comes – every sinner, wretch, reprobate, and wicked woman – we will encounter Christ and experience forgiveness.
God’s Holy Spirit gathers us into one body where our differences are not erased or downplayed, but boldly offered in love and service of one another.
The Revelation’s surprising image of the absence of church buildings in the fulfilled holy city is a helpful reminder that they have always been a risky concession and that their dangers need to be carefully avoided.
It is as members of the body that you are given the gifts that are needed for this body to serve in this time and this place.
Good gossip, listening in love to each other’s stories and seeking the presence of God, helps us to build connection and community and to grow in love.
It is in our woundedness, this woundedness we try to avoid and would rather not acknowledge, that we find our identity as the body of Christ, our identity as the church.
We are not added to a particular church flock in order to be in the “right” group, but in order to learn, with Christ, to love others and lay down our lives for the world.
We are a ragtag bunch, but in witnessing to God’s mercy and love, we become the people of God together.
God’s mission is much bigger than us, and to play our part in it, we need to live freely and fearlessly and maintain a humble and faithful connection with the traditions and wisdom of the wider Church.
Our identity as a community of Jesus’s followers is primarily expressed in love, gratitude and hospitality, not in compliance with a negative code of conduct.
The good news of the Kingdom always seems disreputable and dangerous and unwelcome, and it asks of us a whole new way of being God’s gracious people in a world of hatred and violence.
The Spirit is there for us where ever we gather in the one place for that one purpose.
The Lord’s Prayer is given to us, the Church, as a model to shape all our praying.
Christ calls us together into a spirit-filled body in the face of demonic forces that would seek to drive us apart and trick us into the fatal error of going it alone.
God invites us to say “yes” to the Spirit, to be open to seeing ourselves beyond the constraints others place on us and to be open to forming new community with God and with God’s world.
God speaks prophetically through the Church and through some individuals, and the prophetic task is inseparable from humility, constructiveness, graciousness, love, patience and generosity.
Our One God and Father feeds us with one bread so that we might grow up into Christ and be the missional community the Spirit is leading us to become.
Jesus will be there for us in the midst of the storms, but we are to stay together in his boat rather than jump ship in a misguided “display of faith”.
God is with us everywhere, whether we realise it or not, but there is still value in honouring special places of promise and revelation.