The knowledge that we are loved by God and the tenacious sharing of that love break the power of the world’s systems to lock us in to destructive cycles overwork, over consumption, and compliance with injustice and war.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on Reconciliation (Page 5)
We have become exiled from our destiny as God’s children, but Jesus has been born among us to reveal to us and restore us to that destiny.
In God’s coming reign, things we find impossible to reconcile will be reconciled.
Jesus commits himself to the path of redemptive suffering in preference to either fight or flight, and he calls us to follow him in that commitment.
Reconciliation begins with my ‘self’, and then, as I let go the fears, the guilt, the self justification, I might just possibly become an agent for peace.
The message of the cross cuts against everything that would divide us from one another, and so cuts against everything that would drive us out.
One of the most controversial aspects of Jesus’ message was that it moved all the fences. Jesus redrew the boundaries of the Kingdom of God to include very definitely those who previously had been excluded. He blew away the social and geographical limitations imposed by the pious Pharisees & other religious leaders. According to Jesus, God’s kingdom knew nothing of the political, social or religious boundaries placed on it by these groups.
The unity of the churches, as an expression of reconciliation, is integral to the message of good news in Christ.
All of us, oppressed and powerful, are invited to act against violence and exploitation, to leave behind the oppressive ways and walk towards a new way of life.
Jesus acted out the parables that he was telling in his encounters with people, expressing the nature of God who seeks after us and rejoices in our being found and restored. God invites us to be people like that.
When God accepts and gifts those who are supposed to be excluded according to our theology, then its time to change our theology to a rule of love instead of a rule of purity.
There is no such thing as a ritual-free space, and performed well or performed badly, rituals change things, change people’s lives.
It is only by letting go of our tribal need to define who is in and who is out, that any of us shall, in the end, show forth a kingdom which is from God.
If we are committed to the way of Jesus more even than we are to each other, we will end up doing what is truly best for each other and for all God’s creation.
If Abraham is our common father in faith, and like him we are justified and made whole by our faith in God’s mercy, then Christians, Jews and Muslims might find unity in sharing, humbly, in the wonder of that gift together.
Our worship is a part of a cosmic liturgy of praise to the One who was slaughtered in reconciling a suffering universe to God.
Christ is our high priest, the sole mediator between the world and God, but as the body of Christ we share in Christ’s task of reconciling earth and heaven.
Christian progressives must not despise those who feel insecure about change, and Christian conservatives must not despise those who take new ways.
Fights and divisions in the church are a sign of how far we still have to go, but if we don’t run from them, God will use them to mature us and grow our ability to love.
Our experience of being reconciled to God through Christ provides the inspiration and the model for the work of reconciliation across the various divides within our world.