Sermons

The light of Christ reaches the world through those who will bear the wounds of love.

Jesus was born to reveal and fulfil what God had long sought to do; set people free to live joyously as God’s children.

The nativity story proclaims the basic themes of the gospel message; God enters into our suffering world as a victim of our violence, and is rejected by most but recognised by the nobodies.

As God’s people, we celebrate life in the face of death, because we know that the victory of life has been secured.

For both God and us, time can drag when waiting for change, but patience is salvation when forgiveness is offered as a means of change rather than as a reward for change.

Stories of life, worship and ministry from the new church we have helped to plant in Warrnambool, where more than half of the congregation are children.

God has created a world that becomes healthy, free and full of life when its nations honour and care for the most vulnerable. Nations that fail to build cultures of compassion and care are doomed to destroy themselves.

While we are called to be a sharing community and thus to have no need of worry for tomorrow, you can’t look to others to provide you with the fruits of a life lived in generosity and prayerfulness.

Jesus’s quest for reconciliation is far wider and more discomfortingly radical than our tendency to jump on the bandwagon of popular justice causes.

Today, as in Jesus’s day, two fundamentally different visions of God and God’s expectations compete. Jesus calls us to side with the one that centres on love rather than the one that centres on concerns for holiness.

Modelling ourselves on those who model themselves on Jesus is a healthy pathway to fulfilling the image of God within us.

God invites us to live joyously, boldly and freely in the midst of mystery, but we are frequently tempted to grasp for something more tangible and certain.