God calls us to live out the gospel, not just to think about, not just to pray about it, but to live it. Jesus called us to action, not to change their thinking but to change their lives.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on Discipleship (Page 9)
The way to enter the life of God is found in Jesus, in relationship with the incarnate life of God.
The revelation of what God is on about in Christ will always upend our expectations and disrupt our lives.
In the pain of discouragement, God keeps whispering to us: I am still with you, and the future has possibilities you have not dreamed of. So take courage, keep at it, hold on, don’t give up.
In the face of powerful evil, our choice like Jesus’s choice is between the natural human instincts of flight or fight, and the third way of obedience to God.
Religious ritual and ethical living are both bound up together in the journey of following Jesus into the Realm of God.
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.
Lent can be a dark night filled with tears and mourning and loss, but it is worth it, for God’s joy comes in the morning.
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.
By preparing ourselves to die with Christ, we are raised and transfigured, new people with a new vocation.
Our faith is about grace – that God comes to meet us in the truth of who we are. God is far less threatened by the darkness in our lives than we are!
Many of us want the faith story to go according to our script, but the call of Jesus crashes through our dominant religious and cultural understandings and aspirations.
Darkness cannot conceal anything from God, but God who confronts us with truth and justice, and invites us to choose life and promises to help and bless us in that choice.
Those who insist that faith must satisfy their every ideology may miss out, while those who simply yoke themselves to Jesus will find the freedom and peace for which they yearn.
We go out not to take Christ to others, but to meet Christ among them and reconnect his story and theirs.
Living as God requires may not make sense in the world, but God will make it worth our while.
Jesus calls us to take the way less travelled, to leave behind the sin that entangles, to be welcomed by God, that we may have power to welcome and love even our enemies.
Even those whose actions are morally indefensible usually have attributes that challenge our own failings.
Our liturgical expression of faith can nurture but not substitute for putting our faith into action.
Following Christ may take us into costly confrontation with the powers of the world, and we cannot be protected from the costs of that, but Christ will bring us through to the land of promise beyond.