In an us-and-them world, people hope to find a way to get God on their side, but Jesus confounds our expectations of God siding against others.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on Repentance (Page 2)
The refining fire made known in Jesus is not targeting “morality” issues, but our hatreds, hostilities and inhospitableness.
The ‘death of the self’ in baptism, modelled in Jesus, enables us to live openly and generously instead of fearfully and defensively.
Thanks be to God, we are in safe hands. God who has been the author, will also be the finisher of our faith.
In order for God to come to us as the healer and the liberator of souls, we must be prepared to let go of every religious pretension, every cultural certainty, every economic doctrine, every aspirational rule.
A sense of shame can be God’s invitation to accept healing and new life.
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.
There are no passengers in the Kingdom – those who accept the call must go on to clothe themselves in righteousness.
God calls us to new beginnings, and we have to let go of old certainties to embrace them.
The risen Christ confronts us with both the gruesome consequences of our violence and the terrifying shock of grace.
In the encounter with Jesus, our self-delusion and our scapegoating are painfully exposed, but with the possibility of forgiveness and freedom.
The decision to repent and accept Christ’s gift of forgiveness and life involves a life change which includes a new willingness to honour and serve Christ in the stranger.
The revelation of what God is on about in Christ will always upend our expectations and disrupt our lives.
Repenting of our past ways and following Jesus does not guarantee us safety from disaster, but it certainly opens the way to an abundance of life that is beyond what any disaster can destroy.
Extravagant grace can be terrifying because it asks nothing of us but a complete change of life!
The story of Jonah nurtures our own life of faith, revealing that God can work his purposes out even in and through people like Jonah and us.
Many of us want the faith story to go according to our script, but the call of Jesus crashes through our dominant religious and cultural understandings and aspirations.
Although the coming Christ is brings our deepest hopes to fulfillment, the transition will be traumatic and we still fear his coming because of our unhealthy investments in the present.
Jesus calls us to accept forgiveness and get on with a life and faith that do not revolve constantly about trying to make up for mistakes.
Summing up the previous section of the gospel, Bartimaeus is a model disciple – one who sees who Jesus is, has no pretensions to power, leaves everything, and follows Jesus on the way.