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.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on Hospitality
In the face of social breakdown and environmental catastrophe, we are called, not to angry protest, but to creative expressions of love, compassion, and hospitality.
The Church born when God poured out the Holy Spirit, is one in which barriers of ethnicity, language, sex, age, and social status are transcended and all are equal in Christ.
All-in commitment is unfashionable, but it is often what God needs from us to allow the richest blessings to flow.
Living water is for all of us that would like to try it. When we try it, our lives change and instead of being thirsty we become a spring. As a result, our neighbours can try it too.
In baptism we are adopted into a new family that is radically inclusive of those who have been cut off.
God’s Providence usually works by people, moved by the Spirit of God, sharing when they have more above their own needs.
God comes to us in unexpected ways, and the break with conventional religious respectability is even more earth-shattering than the break with conventional reproductive biology.
Jesus seeks out and embraces the outcasts, taking upon himself the hatred and hostility that had been directed at them.
Jesus challenges us to bring our lives to where God is active, to share in building the kingdom of God.
Jesus calls all who are worn out from maintaining appearances as hosts to relax into the humility of being guests.
Inviting Christ into your dwelling means being renovated from the inside out.
Being missioners needs to be patterned on Jesus if it is to have any integrity at all, and so it will be characterised by intentional engagement, genuine curiosity, deep listening, allowing others to be a blessing to us, and trusting ourselves to God.
The only measure of our progress in Christian faith is our love for others, including those we are least inclined to love.
God’s love is passionate, attentive, tender and ardent. Jesus the bridegroom comes and woos God’s people in every generation.
The visitation story is a powerful introduction to the gospel of God’s lavish and overwhelming love for us, and to God’s hospitality as we see it in Jesus.
God calls us to beware of simple solutions that actually violate the laws of love and hospitality towards the strangers.
Paul’s word play on drunkenness is both a useful contrast and a useful comparison for Christian living.
The culture of God rises in defiance of the empires of this world, but it will look more like an annoying outbreak of self-sown, invasive weeds than an alternative empire.
When theology and discipleship follow the path of God, they take us beyond an obsession with borders to a new engagement with the kingdom of God, present and tangible in all the earth.