For Jesus, compassion was more than a quality of God and an individual virtue [though it was indeed that]: it was a social paradigm, the core value for life in the community. To put it boldly: Jesus was political. He directly and repeatedly challenged the dominant...
The implication of Christology for worship is that it is to be both fully divine and fully human. Over-divinization and over humanization are always heretical and usually the easiest routes to follow. The balance of fully human and fully divine is always the most...
Life, with its achievements and challenges, its joys and sorrows, gifts us with many opportunities to grow and serve. We serve when we willingly share the wisdom we have gleaned from our life experiences. The spirit of our life is made visible in the spirit of our...
One of the greatest challenges of the spiritual life is to receive God’s forgiveness. There is something in us humans that keeps us clinging to our sins and prevents us from letting God erase our past and offer us a completely new beginning. Sometimes it even seems as...
Lent has begun, and we need to live in this dark place between the ashes and the bread and wine, between the declaration of our mortality and the declaration of Christ’s redeeming work. Lent is a time to reckon with the reality of the darkness. We do so with hope,...
To believe in Christ’s rising and death’s dying is also to live with the power and the challenge to rise up now from all our dark graves of suffering love. If sympathy for the world’s wounds is not enlarged by our anguish, if love for those around us is not expanded,...
On our soul-tending journey, our ultimate desire is for our lives with God to “catch fire” in such a way that we can set ablaze the spiritual lives of others. The challenge is to move beyond our traditional understanding of “being Christian” and enter together young...
An angel appears to Joseph in a dream to explain the situation. When Joseph wakes, he must make decisions about marrying Mary and caring for her and the child. He acts on complete faith and trust. Acting on faith and trust is a tremendous challenge today. In our...
The Kingdom is served in greater ways when Christians and churches are collaborating and cooperating to proclaim the Gospel and minister to human need… The call and challenge for each individual, each church, and for all of us as a Fellowship, is to be the presence of...
Gratitude keeps us clear that not only do our gifts and our challenges come from God, but that our gifts and challenges are essentially one and the same… Without gratitude, our enjoyment of the world shrinks into cramped self-indulgence and the unscratchable itch of...