Category: Sermon

We are pointed to Advent truth: that Christ comes suddenly, tenderly but disruptively – spraying God’s graffiti of hope across the walls of our lives.

Let’s lift our eyes to the King that we did not expect. Not to the thrones of this world, but to the King who reigns from the cross. The Shepherd who gathers the scattered. The Saviour who remembers the forgotten. The Lord in whom all things hold together.

Malachi ends with hope so gentle it almost feels fragile: “The sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings.” God’s justice is not cold. God’s truth is not cruel. God’s light is not violent. It is the rising sun – the warmth that thaws the frozen, the light that reveals the path, the dawn that says, “There is a future, and it is full of healing.”

Their sacrifice, like Job’s words, is written in stone – a testimony not only to death, but to something deeper: to love that would not be erased.

We are reminded of shared love and companionship that united in God’s love, we continue to love and be loved by those who are enfolded in his presence.

The Bible does all of that, but something more mysterious happens as well: when we open the Bible, the Bible opens us too. It’s the Book that reads us.

Sometimes, perhaps, we need to wrestle with God’s identity and our own – and we might just get hurt, damaged, cracked in the process.

The mustard seed of faith is already planted within us. It’s Christ himself. He has withheld from us nothing. We already have enough. We already are enough.

Let’s not leave Lazarus lying outside our gates. Let’s mind the gap —of wealth, race, indifference, division—with the love of Christ. For in the end, it will not be our comfort that defines us, but our compassion.

In the year 2000, adverts had to grab a persons’ attention within 12 seconds. By 2013 that had dropped to 8 seconds. The attention span of a goldfish is said to be 9 seconds. So, longer than humans now. And if you’re Gen Z, then your attention needs grabbing in 1.3 seconds.

The Blues is more than music. It’s a theology of brokenness and hope, pain and survival. Written on dusty roads and freight trains, on back porches and in bars. It tells the truth about suffering and injustice, sin and redemption. A theology which embraces Good Friday as well as Easter Sunday.

On top of everything else, the Sabbath had been commercialised, used for individual interest and gain. Here the prophet really goes to town, as well he might in our society today. Remember the Sabbath was to be holy. People were to do no work.

There’s a very close relationship between the words ‘faith’ and ‘hope’. As we’ve seen they are often used interchangeably. But there is a difference.

Thanks to underground fungal networks, trees share water, nutrients even signs of danger. There are parallels with our lives too – and there’s something to be said about prayer and the wood-wide web.

Between Sarah and Abraham the practice of hospitality with their guests is extra-ordinary. We don’t tend to consider the spread of food that they put on together but it’s of truly heroic, epic proportions.