Urban Vineyard

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.