Jesus was short on sermons, long on conversations; short on answers, long on questions; short on abstraction and propositions, long on stories and parables; short on telling you what to think, long on challenging you to think for yourself.
Dear ones, the world in which we live is challenging and complicated enough without intentionally adding to our burdens. There is no spiritual discipline commended to our embrace that is designed just to make us feel badly. There is no labor suggested in our tradition...
This is a pivotal moment for the church in America. It is a challenging time but also an exciting time. We are not just stewards of this space. We are stewards of this moment.
All of us might wish at times that we lived in a more tranquil world, but we don't. And if our times are difficult and perplexing, so are they challenging and filled with opportunity.
If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
To read the gospels in the spirit with which they were written, it is not enough to ask what Jesus did or said. We must ask what Jesus meant by his strange deeds and words. He intended to reveal the Father to us, and to show that he is the only-begotten Son of the...
We don't develop courage by being happy every day. We develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity.
In these challenging, difficult times [pandemic], we are discovering a wisdom that we needed all along, and that wisdom is that we are all connected. We are not separate. We used to think that we caught diseases as individuals: "I'm sick; you're not." But now we...