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History will end with the unbridled joy of a loving shepherd who celebrates the neighbourhood filling up with dead losers who don’t deserve to be there.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on Salvation (Page 3)
The Transfiguration is not about the remoteness of God, but about a promise that through the exodus of Jesus’ death and resurrection, we might with him shine, transfigured, with the blazing glory of God.
The love of God seeks us out, even when we least deserve it, and then calls us to love others similarly.
When we’re met by the living Christ, we’re not invited to simply change our opinions about some things in life, and go on as we have before. We’re called, we’re changed, we’re transformed from top to bottom, from the inside out. Life can never be the same again.
We grow into the likeness of Christ as we model ourselves on him, and he is a model of growth rather than a model of static perfection.
Jesus wants to lift us beyond the deadening conformity that seeks to silence us and confine us to a stunted life.
Advent is preparing us for the coming of the Lord, that already and not-yet event for which people have lived and worked and prayed for millennia.
What would happen if violence were met with bread, with blankets, with hospitals, with forgiveness of debts?
We can take our salvation and just return to normal life, but God calls us beyond normal into a wholeness that grows from praise, prayer and service.
God sees us as trapped in the rubble of a collapsing world and is desperately seeking to find and rescue us before it is too late.
God is all ready to heal and free us, but organised religion is not always so quick to agree.
Full-blooded Christian discipleship may cost us some precious relationships and a lot of blood sweat and tears, but we will have plenty of new supporters and it all all be well worth it in the end.
Salvation is about being set free to live life in all its fulness, even in the midst of conflict and suffering.
Jesus leads us in the way of redemptive freedom before the violence of the world.
God saves us by changing our hearts, but one of the great temptations for the church is to try to turn that back into a system of exclusion and control.
The Holy Spirit is poured out on us so that the liberating presence of Christ may be with us all everywhere, freeing us from fear to live and speak boldly of the new life we have tasted.
God’s covenant of love and grace is made unconditionally, not depending even on our response, and so the promises are made to our children whether they respond or not.
Jesus calls us to love and care for the world’s victims, and to refuse to participate in making more of them (even from among the victimisers).
The salvation of the world lies in Jesus’ model of non-retaliation.
In the birth of the baby we see the presence of God in smallness and obscurity, enabling us to see that small beginnings are no obstacle to big visions of the reign of justice and peace and freedom.