Inclusive Church part 3 – What about where it says…?
Matthew 7:15-20 The Bible doesn’t have a lot to say about sex or gender. The law, the prophets, the teaching of Jesus and the early Church, all say a great deal more about justice, about faithfulness to God, about community, and ultimately about the way we relate to one another.
Inclusive Church
Matthew 11:28-30 | Galatians 5:13-15 I really shouldn’t need to be preaching this sermon. We shouldn’t need to be having a series on the Church being inclusive. The Church is supposed to be the people of Jesus, Jesus’ followers. And if you read through the gospels, the accounts that we have of the life of […]
The Armour of God
Ephesians 6:10-20 So we come to the final chapter of the book of Ephesians, and to this well-known piece of imagery, the armour of God. Now I would really like to be able to assume that we here in Roseville aren’t likely to choose to interpret the imagery of ‘the armour of God’ as an […]
Disagreeing with Paul
Ephesians 5:15-27 You have no idea how tempting it is, when you have decided to preach on the book of Ephesians, and you get to chapter 5, to choose the first half the chapter instead of the second. You can’t preach on everything, after all, and the first half contains what is probably the key […]
Someone is wrong
Ephesians 4:1-16 I talked last week about the way that this letter to the Church at Ephesus spent the first three chapters laying out some key theological themes, and that at the heart of the letter was Paul’s absolute insistence that in the Church the division between ‘us’ and ‘them’ (for the Hebrew people the […]
Ephesians 3
Ephesians 3:7-21 The letter to the Ephesians breaks rather neatly into two halves; the first three chapters, which lay out a chunk of Paul’s theology – his argument for unity, that we are called together in Christ, united by the work of Jesus, in order that we might together be reconciled with God. The good […]
Weeds
1 Samuel 15:35-16:7 | Mark 4:30-32 Right back at the beginning of Mark’s Gospel the author gives us a one sentence summary of Jesus’ preaching: “Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good […]
Sabbath
Mark 2:23-28 Jesus and his friends are going through a field, and some of the group, start to pluck heads of grain. Maybe they are hungry, maybe it was just the way you pull grass, or leaves off a bush, as you walk, a sort of fidgeting, I supposed you’d call it. Whatever the reason, […]
Pentecost
Ezekiel 37:1-14 Ever felt like a dry bone? In Ezekiel’s day, the people of Israel certainly did. Not long before they had been part of something exciting, something vital; they had been part of the people called to be the people of God, and it had really meant something. They’d been a nation of that […]
Ascension
Luke 24:44-53 I’ve always found the story of the ascension rather odd. As with many of the accounts of Jesus after the resurrection, the imagery used by the gospel writers is a strange mixture of the real and surreal. Jesus, Luke takes pains to tell us, presented himself to his friends as alive, with many […]
Communion
Exodus 12:14-20 | Luke 22:7-23 Different Christian groups, you’ve probably noticed, can be quite different. Within Australia, we have a wide variety of Christian churches, worshipping God in their different way, with different music, and styles of prayer, different understandings of the Bible, different buildings… even different types of tea after the service. Even here […]
After the resurrection
John 20:19-31 What do you say after the resurrection? The gospel writers each spend a large chunk of their work on the days leading up to the death of Jesus, to the crucifixion itself, and to the events of Easter Sunday, the miracle when death ran backwards and Jesus was alive and with them again.
Triumphant Humility
Mark 1:1-11 | Philippians 2:5-11 And so we draw towards the end of Lent. Ahead of us lie the last supper, the Garden of Gethsemane, the betrayal of Jesus by Judas, the trial, Peter’s denial, the crowd crying for the release of Barabbas, the crucifixion, the thief on the cross next to Jesus, his death, […]
Jesus’ Prayer
John 17:20-26 This week I was at a Synod event, organised by UME, Uniting Mission and Education, at which a surprising number of the organisers, and a high proportion of those attending, were recent arrivals from other denominations – mostly Baptists and Anglicans, many of them former leaders in their denominations, but now identifying with, […]