Sermons

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.

When hopes have been extinguished and all is despair, God comes back.

Our struggles against evil, temptation and suffering are all framed by the security of God’s unshakable love and resolve to bring us safely to fullness of life.

Being born of water and Spirit involves becoming as vulnerable and dependent on God as a newborn baby is on its parents.

We are humble servants who are strengthened and empowered by the Spirit to enter into the redeeming work of God.

The revelation of what God is on about in Christ will always upend our expectations and disrupt our lives.

In the face of monumental devastation and suffering, God speaks a word, and the word becomes flesh.

A modern paraphrase of a homily for the Feast of the Nativity by Ephraim the Syrian (306-373CE) taken from his second Christmas hymn.

The coming Christ will continually confound our expectations, no matter how well informed or righteous they may be.

In the pain of discouragement, God keeps whispering to us: I am still with you, and the future has possibilities you have not dreamed of. So take courage, keep at it, hold on, don’t give up.

When we do not live lives of gratitude, which would actually expand our sense of the world in which we live, God still does not rescind his gifts.

The Cross is the tree at which we come to know the fullness of good and evil, and as we choose to bear the consequences of good and evil, it becomes for us the tree of life.