Faithful waiting for for the fulfilment of God’s promises can leave us feeling compromised and alienated in the world around us.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on Hope (Page 4)
The coming kingdom culture confronts the world’s violence by redemptively suffering and absorbing it, not by reciprocating it with even greater violence.
The imminent arrival of God’s messiah asks each of us to take up the identity of witnesses who open the way for God to be known.
We can face the unknown future with confidence because we know that the one who holds the future loves us and can be trusted.
When God calls us to invest in the places we live, it is a call to active agents of positive change, not compliant patriots.
Facing an epidemic of depression and despair, Jesus calls us to follow on a tear-stained path of prophetic faithfulness.
Lived faith is the way to life in God, but it passes through a baptism of fire.
In Christ’s ascension onto the mysterious cloud, we are gathered together into his mysterious presence.
We have been drawn into an unstoppable rumour that keeps interrupting the dominant story of fear, hostility and death.
Jesus sets out to reshape our view of the relationships between sin, repentance and disaster, and if possible, to call us out of our spiral into global self-destruction.
It is with the love of Christ taking charge of us, that we can venture into combat with the wrongs of our time without being dragged down by the very same demons that we oppose.
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.
The baby whose coming is awaited will turn the world upside down (not just the lives of its parents!), and our counter-cultural observance of Advent is a necessary preparation of ourselves for that reality.
Angry prophets who tell us the hard-to-hear truth about ourselves pave the way for a new world to emerge.
The task of being changed into what God calls us to be involves a radical break with the established norms of our world.
The coming of Christ to transform the present world into the Kingdom of God will be earth-shattering, but we easily lose sight of it in our anticipation of “another Christmas”.
The collapse of the institutional church and other social structures will be painful for all of us, but it is not ultimately a threat to mission of Jesus.
What is the legacy you will leave? Live into life and love the way you want it to be, because whatever you choose will live on after you.
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.
Glimpses of the transformed world that God makes possible transfix us and leave us hungering for more.