What Should We Do? - 4th Sunday of Advent

John the Baptist sets the table for us to be ready to receive Jesus into the world.  Luke 3 shows us that many different people heard John’s call to repentance and asked “what shall we do?”  This Advent season we look to reorientate our hearts by reordering our lives through the act of generosity.

Luke 3:1-20

Matthew 6:21

Ephesians 3:14-21

Samuel Wells

“The problem is that the human imagination is simply not large enough to take in all that God is and has to give. We are overwhelmed. God’s inexhaustible creation, limitless grace, relentless mercy, enduring purpose, fathomless love: it is just too much to contemplate, assimilate, understand. This is the language of abundance. And if humans turn away it is sometimes out of a misguided but understandable sense of self-protection, a preservation of identity in the face of a tidal wave of glory.”

One Who Is More Powerful - 3rd Sunday of Advent

John the Baptist sets the table for us to be ready to receive Jesus into the world.  Luke 3 speaks of a fire that will come with the messiah. This Advent season we eagerly wait for Jesus to be revealed as a fire that brings light and heat to our lives and for the life of the world.

Luke 3:1-20

Malachi 4:1-6

John 1:6-9

John Wesley

“I felt my heart strangely warmed.”

Thomas Merton

"It is important to remember the deep, in some ways anguished seriousness of Advent, when the mendacious celebrations of our marketing culture so easily harmonize with our tendency to regard Christmas, consciously or otherwise, as a return to our own innocence…. But the Church, in preparing us for the birth of a Savior and a King of Peace, has more in mind than seasonal cheer. The Advent mystery focuses the light of faith upon the very meaning of life, of history, of man, of the world and of our own being. In Advent we celebrate the coming and indeed the presence of Christ in our world.."

Henri Nouwen

“What needs to be guarded is the life of the Spirit within us. Especially we who want to witness to the presence of God’s Spirit in the world need to tend the fire within with utmost care…Our first and foremost task is faithfully to care of the inward fire so that when it is really needed it can offer warmth and light to lost travellers.”

Dorothy Day

"Early generations of Christians faith was a bright fire that warmed more than those who kept it burning."

Rabbi Jonathon Sacks

"Religion is like fire. It warms, but it also burns, and we are the guardians of the flame."

Padraig O’Tuama

"Prayer is a small fire lit to keep cold hands warm."

Preparing the Way - 2nd Sunday of Advent

John the Baptist sets the table for us to be ready to receive Jesus into the world.  Luke 3 reveals to us that the light was coming in a very dark time. This Advent season we are learning to eagerly wait while we endure the darkness and difficulty of these days.

Luke 3:1-20

Isaiah 42:1-4

Isaiah 53:2-3

John 3:30

John Ortberg

“Who you become while you’re waiting is as important as what you’re waiting for.”

Ronald Rolheiser

"We spend about 98 percent of our lives waiting for something else to happen to us…. sometimes we are just waiting for our bus to arrive, for our workday to end, or for a cherished friend to visit. But at other times our impatience is deeper and we ache for a new season in our lives, a new person to fall in love with, a more meaningful career, or for the courage to finally face up to a nagging problem. We are always waiting. In that sense, we are always in “advent”.  We long for someone or something to come along and bring new meaning into our lives. For us, as Christians, we see that new meaning in the coming of Christ. The season of Advent is a time to get in touch with our longing, our aching, our frustrations."

Walter Brueggemann

“Decrease what is old and habitual and destructive in your life so that the new life-giving power of Jesus may grow large with you: Decrease what is greedy, what is frantic consumerism, for the increase of life-giving truth-telling in your life, truth-telling about you and your neighbour, about the sickness of our society and our enmeshment in that sickness. Decrease what is hateful and alienating, for the increase of healing and forgiveness, which finally are the only source of life.”

Saint Teresa of Avila

"

Let nothing disturb you;

Let nothing make you afraid;

All things pass;

But God is unchanging,

Patience is enough for everything.

You who have God, lack nothing.

God alone is sufficient.

"

Matt, Amy and Dave take time to explain what a sabbatical is, what it will look like for Matt, why right now was the right time and what it means for St Clair now and moving forward.

Then I Saw - 1st Sunday of Advent

John receives this vision on the Island of Patmos while in Isolation and after persecution. When John is in isolation thats when he sees Jesus. The vision John gets is not what he expects. The one at the centre of reality is the Lamb that was slain". This upends our view of how the world is. Where is our attention? Who do we look too during this time?.

Revelation 5:6-14

Darrell Johnson

“Revelation calls us to radical discipleship, to all out courageous loyalty to the lamb in a world feverishly worshipping the beast.”

Teresa of Avila

"When one reaches the height of human maturity they only have one question left "How can I be helpful?"

NT Wright

“The call of the gospel is for the church to implement the victory of God in the world through suffering love”

Walter Wink

"History belongs to the intercessors who believe the future into being. Even a small number of people, firmly committed to the new inevitability on which they have fixed their imaginations, can decisively affect the shape the future takes. These shapers of the future are the intercessors, who call out of the future the longed-for new present."

A brief teaching on why Sunday matters and how we anticipate continued change with our gatherings looking ahead.

God is Love - 1st John 4:16-21

The letter of 1st John gives us timely wisdom into what is essential for faith and how we grow in discipleship; learning to live the life of Jesus. 1st John 4:16-21 is a bold and simple reminder of the kind of life we are called to live.

1st John 4:16-21

Luke 6:32, 35

1 Thess 2:8

Jackie Pullinger

“I went up to a man and said ‘Jesus loves you’ but realized that it didn’t mean anything unless I did it.”

Barbara Brown Taylor

"In every circumstance, regardless of the outcome, the main thing Jesus has asked me to do is to love God and my neighbor as religiously as I love myself. The minute I have that handled, I will ask for my next assignment. For now, my hands are full."

Love One Another - 1st John 3:11-18

The letter of 1st John gives us timely wisdom into what is essential for faith and how we grow in discipleship; learning to live the life of Jesus. 1st John 3:11-18 shows us the way of love, that the way of Jesus is the way of love and that loving our enemies and giving to those in need is how we live as people of peace in a hostile and violent world.

1st John 3:11-18

1 Corinthians 12:31-13:1-8

1 Corinthians 10:16-11:28

Parker Palmer

“Violence is what happens when we don’t know what else to do with our suffering.”

Thomas Merton

"There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

Anne Lamot/p>

"You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do..”

We Shall Be Like Him: 1 John 2:28-3:3

The letter of 1st John gives us timely wisdom into what is essential for faith and how we grow in discipleship; learning to live the life of Jesus. 1 John 2:28-3:3 is an emphatic reminder that we are loved by God and being called his children means we can trust him through the inevitable hardships of life, which will shape us to be more like him.

1 John 2:28-3:3

Hebrews 10:19-11:40

Romans 5:1-5

2 Corinthians 2:18

Hebrews 12:1-12

John 3:19

Jacques Ellul

“Christians were never meant to be normal. We’ve always been holy troublemakers, we’ve always been creators of uncertainty, agents of dimension that’s incompatible with the status quo; we do not accept the world as it is, but we insist on the world becoming the way that God wants it to be.  And the Kingdom of God is different from the patterns of this world.”

C.S. Lewis

"God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

Rainer Maria Rilke

"Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.

You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.”

Pedro Arrupe

"More than ever I find myself in the hands of God. This is what I have wanted all my life, from my youth. But now there is a difference. The initiative is entirely with God. It is indeed a profound spiritual experience to know and feel myself to be totally in the hands of God.”

Do Not Love the World: 1 John 2:15-17

The letter of 1st John gives us timely wisdom into what is essential for faith and how we grow in discipleship; learning to live the life of Jesus.  1 John 2:15-17 helps us to see that we live in a world of disordered loves and that we have a part to play in how we shape our love and affection for God.

1 John 2:15-17

John 3:16-19

Genesis 3:4-6

Hebrews 12:2

James K.A. Smith

“Our idolatries are less like conscious decisions to believe a falsehood and more like learned dispositions to hope in what will disappoint. Our idolatries are not intellectual; they are affective—instances of disordered love and devotion. Idolatry is caught more than it is taught. We practice our way into idolatries, absorb them from the water in which we swim. Hence our idolatries often reflect the ethos of our environments.”

James K.A. Smith

"Being a disciple of Jesus is not primarily a matter of getting the right ideas and doctrines and beliefs into your head in order to guarantee proper behavior; rather it’s a matter of being the kind of person who loves rightly – who loves God and neighbor and is orientated to the world by the primacy of that love”