Grief and suffering bring us close to the heart of the suffering God and can open us to God’s transforming and resurrecting power.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on Grief
After horrendous suffering and loss, the most courageous and ultimately transformative response is to reinvest in life and love with passion and hope.
Faithful lament, even enraged and despairing lament, takes us close to the heart of God, though we usually can’t perceive God when we are there.
The experience of winter is God’s gift, inviting us to silence, healing and new depth of life.
It is in the midst of our tears that we discover that Jesus is not dead, but more alive than ever.
God will walk with us in suffering and work redemptively within it, but God is not powerful enough to just remove it.
Jesus’s encounter with Thomas and the first disciples can show us a thing or two about living under lockdown and hoping for a miracle to save us.
Jesus leads the way towards a new experience of life that is so utterly alive that death is powerless to threaten, limit or constrain it.
In the face of monumental devastation and suffering, God speaks a word, and the word becomes flesh.
There are plenty of reasons to despair of the future, but Jeremiah and Jesus show us a pathway of hope that overcomes despair.
Facing an epidemic of depression and despair, Jesus calls us to follow on a tear-stained path of prophetic faithfulness.
If you set yourself against the other, you also cut yourself off from the Father who loves you both. You diminish yourself, cut off the other, and break the Father’s heart.
In a world that is hell-bent on self-destruction, Jesus calls us to gather to him and to love faithfully and vulnerably with him, rather than surrendering to the hate and fear.
It is not from the halls of power but from humble places that the love which offers wholeness and healing and peace erupts into life.
Suffering raises painful unanswerable questions, but Jesus leads us into a life where the sharing of our honest questions is part of shaping a community of healing and hope.
The life that Jesus calls us too will not be found and enjoyed until we give up trying to engineer the life we dreamed we were supposed to be living.
In the face of tragedy, we naturally cry out “Why?” Jesus meets us in the suffering and helps us find the path of life.
Jesus went up the mountain and was transfigured, and we assume that it was a wonderful experience. And so it was, but maybe not in the way we think. What if the glory of God revealed in the face of Jesus at that moment was the face of utter human vulnerability?
Meeting us on the road of despair, Jesus reveals to us that suffering and defeat are God’s means of bringing new life and hope.
Jesus died an apparent failure, but in his resurrection, the failure’s power over us is broken for ever.