Today, as in Jesus’s day, two fundamentally different visions of God and God’s expectations compete. Jesus calls us to side with the one that centres on love rather than the one that centres on concerns for holiness.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on judgement (Page 2)
God invites us to live joyously, boldly and freely in the midst of mystery, but we are frequently tempted to grasp for something more tangible and certain.
When we use the biblical law to reinforce a worldview of sin and punishment, we doom ourselves to live in a judgemental world, a world from which Jesus offers to break us free.
Jesus calls us to turn away from pathways of judgement and condemnation and to follow him on the harder path of love and new life.
Judgement is not something God angrily inflicts on us, but simply the fulfilment of our own decisions.
Pray for all people and let God do the judging. The world may be an evil place but you are God’s children and evil has been overcome.
God’s love for us is so great that God will do anything to give us a way out of the self-condemnation and self-destruction of continuing to live in conformity with the world’s ways.
Jesus is angered by our trivialising of religion that inoculates us against the claims of a holy God, and calls us to clean out the crassness and commercialism and approach God on God’s terms.
The Church will always contain more than its fair share of maliciousness, pettiness and nastiness, but the temptation to try to weed it out is a temptation to abandon the way of Christ and make things worse.
God is deeply hurt and offended by our rejection of God in favour of things that are worthless, but Jesus has made possible both our forgiveness and our reconciliation.
Grace is the opposite of karma, that most ancient and persistent of human laws which proclaims that we get what we deserve. We do not get what we deserve, and thank Christ we don’t!
Christian progressives must not despise those who feel insecure about change, and Christian conservatives must not despise those who take new ways.
People judge one another by their conformity to certain expectations (which vary from group to group), but God is only interested in our willingness to come into the loving intimacy he offers to all.
Christ has identified himself with the poor and needy and we will be judged on how we respond to his need.