Topic: Grace

Kindred is beautiful – and it always draws a line (usually without realising). A sermon on Joseph, Jesus, and grace beyond the boundary.

Mary and Elizabeth welcome each other with nothing to prove. A funeral homily on hospitality, vulnerability, and receiving favour.

Faith is not a mental exercise — it’s the reaching, grasping, hoping of beggars who trust that God’s grace will prevail.

In a world ruled by suspicion and blame, the gospel announces an abundance that was never earned and cannot run out.

The hope born at Christmas does not erase, deny, or hide from the horror of a violent world, but meets us in the midst of it.

When we respond to others with judgement and contempt instead of empathy and compassion, we fail to understand God and live God’s love for others.

The relationship between God’s work and our work in salvation is not a puzzle to be solved, but a mystery to be lived in prayer and faithful discipleship.

If you set yourself against the other, you also cut yourself off from the Father who loves you both. You diminish yourself, cut off the other, and break the Father’s heart.

God’s ways of abundance and grace are almost incomprehensible to those of us who have been shaped by the world’s ways of scarcity and merit based rewards and punishments.

Jesus’s agenda, which we are called to follow, is about healing, liberating and gathering in the excluded, not purifying the community by excluding anyone.

In the nativity we see the light of living grace, in all its vulnerability, shining into the darkness of the world’s violence and divisiveness.

Christ’s grief gathers up our griefs and achieves the promise of a day when tears will be no more.