Urban Vineyard

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.