With every step we take towards God’s economy, we will become more powerful in our witness to God’s saving action and love for the world, and be filled ever more deeply with God’s good grace.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on Virtues (Page 2)
Lent is a time to walk knowingly into the wilderness, to face the Accuser and the wild beasts that emerge when we live out our identity as God’s children.
As we gather with the saints of all times to worship the crucified victim, we are immersed in a culture that is so at odds with the values of this world that those who truly embrace it just appear odd for now, but strangely and alluringly familiar too.
Jesus honours, commends and models a set of attitudes, or stances toward the world, which can and will change the world, but embracing them is no small challenge.
When God is moving to do something new among us, it almost always seems scandalous, immoral and offensive to many, and is just as likely to involve those who are regarded as morally suspect.
It is human nature to think that our ways are God’s ways, and so to shun those whose ways seem alien or disgusting to us, but Jesus calls us to recognise God at work in others, however different.
The pathway to a life of joy and gratitude is to imitate Jesus in filling our minds with things which are worthy, honourable, merciful and loving.
The ten commandments are not a measure of our moral accomplishment, but a gift offered to God by a grateful covenant people.
The gospel calls us on a road to healing and wholeness, but its steps are so deceptively simple (which doesn’t mean easy) that we often don’t take them seriously and so don’t do them.
In Advent, we wait to discern more carefully the One for whom we wait, and the One who waits for us.
Perhaps when law and order perpetuate injustice, God is on the side of the scammers and swindlers.
God is always acting, but often in surprising and paradoxical ways. The ways of God often reverse human expectations.
Joseph is an admirable model of the willingness to put calling and values ahead of convenience or reputation.
The gospel calls us on a road to healing and wholeness, but its steps are so deceptively simple (which doesn’t mean easy) that we often don’t take them seriously and so don’t do them.
Christians are to be known for what they do rather than what they abstain from.