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The french philosopher Blaise Pascal once quipped that "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." He was referring to our penchant for divergence and distraction when faced with the uncomfortable realities of our human fragility and finitude. In this sermon, Jonathan looks at two people in Mark's Gospel who, rather than seeking distraction, brought their hopeless situations before Jesus, told the truth about their lives, and let him meet them in their sorrow. Along the way, they experienced the consolation of God and the miracle of the kingdom. Jesus seeks to meet us as well in that place of truth telling about our lives.

In Mark 2:1-12, Jesus does something perplexing for a paralysed man; in response to the faith of his friends, he forgives the paralytic's sins. We, like the scribes, are baffled by this seemingly unauthorised gift. How can Jesus forgive if he hasn't already gone to the cross? The answer turns out to be that Jesus has always had authority to forgive; it is a gift he loves to offer us. Hear these words, therefore: God forgives you; forgive others, forgive yourself. Amen.

What is grace? And what does it have to do with the kind of kingdom Jesus spoke of? There is perhaps no-where better to go to understand that question than to Jesus' parable of the prodigal son in Luke 16. In this sermon, Makerita brings us back to the heart of the good news of God's grace which we find in the kingdom of God.

The parable of the unrighteous manager is one of the strangest stories Jesus ever told. In this sermon, Jonathan considers whether we might have misunderstood the character of the master in the parable and whether a reappraisal might reveal a fresh view on God. Once again, in this parable Jesus goes right to the heart of our anxieties about the future and reminds us that the only place of safety is in joining his radical work of repudiating mammon and entering the world of generosity that is the coming kingdom of God.

NOTE: The original live recording of this sermon was unfortunately lost so Makerita kindly has re-recorded her presentation for us and we are very grateful!

Jesus told the parable of the weeds and wheat to remind us that our lives are agonisingly caught between the present – where evil runs amok – and the future – where all shall be well. Like the servants in the parable, our temptation is to crusade out into the world in the name of justice to go and deal with evil, but Jesus, through the parable, reminds us that we have neither the wisdom, discernment nor the ability to root out the weeds. Indeed, such a crusade turns us into little devils along the way. So the parable leaves us in a difficult position. On it's own it seems to lead us into 'Christian quietism'; a kind of 'do nothing' approach to the weeds in our world. Such an amoral response doesn't line up with the rest of Scripture though; it seems completely out of step with the prophetic tradition, so there must be more going on than meets the eye. In this sermon, Jonathan opens up a larger view of the parable by putting into the conversation with the parable of the yeast in the dough. In the end, he suggests we are neither called into quietism or crusading when it comes to our response to the evil in the world and the evil in our own hearts. Instead, we are called into a dynamic partnership with God; trusting that he is the one who is reforming the world and reforming us. We add what looks to everyone else as something so tiny and insignificant, namely, our hidden act of faith, which on it's own achieves nothing, but when brought into the chorus of God's work, it is gathered up and brought to bear in the larger scheme of putting the world, and our own hearts, back to rights.

Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. He said: “In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared what people thought. And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’“For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care what people think, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually come and attack me!’”And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?”

The parable of Lazarus and the "rich man" is one of the more disturbing passages of our sacred scriptures, especially when viewed as a simple story about the rich getting punished and the poor being rewarded in the life to come. In reality the parable tells the story of two poor men; one who longed to be fed and one who clung to his world of self-sufficiency. In death, both were exposed as naked before God but only one was willing to acknowledge it. His failure to acknowledge his emptiness kept him locked out of communion with God and the saints. In this parable, Jesus provokes us to see that underneath appearances, our lives are lived in total dependence on the graciousness of God but if we refuse to say "yes" to the gift, trusting instead in our own power, we may find ourselves stranded between somewhere we don't want to be and somewhere we refuse to enter. The ultimate question in this parable, as in all of Jesus' parables, is 'how does this story help us to be "on hand" for that which is "at hand" but not "in hand?"' In this sermon, Jonathan suggests that there are two things needed: 1) a revelation from God and, 2) a concrete response, even if it's as small as a mustard seed (or onion - IYKYK), that creates a crack in which the light of God's new world can shine in.

In a break from our parables sermon series, John Peachy brings a fresh perspective on God's grace with the image of the family fridge upon which all the faces God delights in get placed. John asks the question "how do you make it onto God's fridge?" – or put differently, "how do you become one of God's favourites?" "How do you become the apple of his eye?" John then opens the Old and New Testaments to show that we are already irrevocably loved and wanted by God; we are the source of his great delight; we are already "on the fridge." The more we let that truth sink into our hearts and minds, the more the fruits of God's family likeness – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness etc – will begin to appear in our lives.

The parable of the barren fig tree (or as we read it, the parable of the gracious gardener) is inescapably concerned with the question of fruitfulness and judgement. It comes at the end of a long, and puzzlingly dark set of conversations between Jesus and the crowds following him. In this sermon, Jonathan continues our exploration of the kingdom of God through the lens of Jesus' parables.

The parable of the Good Samaritan is one of the most well known and beloved stories in all of Scripture. But as with all things 'familiar' we can easily fall into a trap of thinking we 'get it' when really it wants to 'get' us. Jesus' parables, as we have been emphasising in this series, were not morality tales – they were kingdom announcements and enactments. In this sermon, Makerita shows this to be the case by placing the parable back into it's kingdom context. Where we might have once focussed on how to be 'good samaritans', Makerita (following Luke, following Jesus) shows instead that this parable is really about the spilling over of the age to come into the present age. It is about the hiddenness of the kingdom being revealed in the most unlikely of people. In this sense, it is an invitation to open our eyes to the reality of the kingdom which is 'at hand' in the roads we travel every day. It is also a reminder that Jesus has come to find us and bring us back to health. Hallelujah.

In this week's sermon Jonathan explores Jesus' parable of the rich fool (Luke 12). In it, we see how Jesus invites us to release our grip on self-made security, and instead to trust in his life in place of our own. This trust is not abstract, however, it is enacted in practices of generosity within a community grounded in resurrection hope.

“Blessed is the one who will eat at the feast in the kingdom of God!” (Luke 14:15). In this sermon, Lloyd shows how Jesus disrupts our understanding of insiders and outsiders by introducing an image of the kingdom as a feast where "the poor, the blind, the sick and the lame" are revealed as the blessed ones who respond to the Master's invitation, while the rich, proud, sleek and strong reject what is on the table. Jesus' parables were designed to disrupt our certainties about how the world works, and this one certainly does that! Be blessed as you listen and respond.

NOTE: the first 12 mins of this recording have a compromised microphone so the sound quality is not great, but it does improve from there... The parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector is far more unsettling than it first appears. In this sermon, Jonathan shows how this parable exposes our addiction to 'measuring up' and believing we can justify ourselves before God. In a nutshell, Jesus used the parable to expose our need of grace —reframing God's work away from our desire to turn it into a self-improvement project. Instead, the real scandal of the kingdom is that God doesn't come to improve the improvable, perfect the perfectable, reform the reformable. Instead he comes to raise the dead. This is good news to those who recognise their 'deadness' but it's upsetting to everyone else. Fortunately, in the end we all recognise our need for grace and resurrection power; The invitation in this sermon is to start telling the truth about our lives now and to begin living in the resurrection ahead of schedule.

John continues our series of the Parables of the Kingdom looking at Jesus' parable of the lost sheep. He encourages us to recognise that Jesus is the good shepherd who has come to find us but also that we have been called to imitate Jesus in seeking out those who have wandered, to pray and seek until we find so we too can enter into the joy of seeing the lost come home.