Sermons from open icon baptist church

Being “inclusive” doesn’t end the old habit of exclusion – it just relocates it. Jesus offers a different yoke instead.

Fear-driven religion and fear-driven politics run on the same engine. Paul knew it. Abraham discovered it. Grace is the only thing that breaks the cycle.

Faith is not a mental exercise — it's the reaching, grasping, hoping of beggars who trust that God's grace will prevail.

An ancient icon of the Trinity shows us a table of radical hospitality — and calls us not just to sit at it, but to become it.

Jesus offers living water to a world sold counterfeit spirits — but bad experiences with cheap substitutes needn't put us off the real thing.

When everything familiar has gone and the new thing hasn't arrived yet, the disciples' upper room is closer to home than we might think.

Paul in Athens, a Muslim Uber driver, and a Georgian bishop walk into a sermon — and together reframe what Christian interfaith encounter could look like.

Philip asked Jesus to show him God. The answer dismantles centuries of angry-God theology — and exposes the retributive impulse hiding in all of us.

Jesus came that we might have life in abundance — but abundant life can't be hoarded. The moment we try to secure it for ourselves at others' expense, it stops being life at all.

When the executed one comes back, everyone expects retribution. The shock of resurrection is that he doesn't.

Psalm 16 began as a farmer's prayer about good land and steady faith — and became something bigger without leaving the earth behind.

The resurrection doesn't restore what we lost — it reveals what we were always becoming: living icons through whom the world might glimpse the life of God.

When Jesus says "I am," he's not just making a claim — he's pulling a thread that runs from a burning bush through a valley of dry bones to a man walking out of a tomb.

The desire for a fair universe is real and grief-filled – but Jesus steps outside that framework entirely, and invites us into something better.

Context changes everything. Where, when and how we encounter life changes what we seek and long for from God and faith. Adaptive faith allows for the constancy of God in our ever-changing lives. It also requires us to be fluid - like water!

A church discerns its new name while remembering that identity is not possession, but a journey of love shaped by God’s call to be a blessing.

In a world ruled by suspicion and blame, the gospel announces an abundance that was never earned and cannot run out.

Jesus’ Transfiguration reveals God’s liberating glory, calling us to justice, humility, and fearless love amid oppression.

Jesus calls us to be salt and light by living a public embodied faith that tells the truth, resists indifferent silence, and makes God’s justice and love visible in the world.

The call to live the beatitudes is not about turning them into a guilt-inducing to-do list, but about living a life that is a blessing to others.

In both the Christian church as well as the wider world, there is increasing division. Is there a way we can become genuine peacemakers in both church and world?

Salvation – reconciliation with God and with one another – is relational rather than transactional, and it begins with a willingness to see, listen and learn.

Insert variable An evolving understanding of being God's chosen people reveals the call to focus on being a blessing to others and the world.

Epiphany reminds us that we have no monopoly on the truth and always have more to learn from people of other faiths and backgrounds.

At New Year we are called to see God's grand vision of fullness and abundance for all the world, and reset our sense of mission accordingly.