But unless we make space for grief, we cannot know the depths of the love of God, the healing God wrings from pain, the way grieving yields wisdom, comfort, even joy. If we do not make time for grief, it will not simply disappear. Grief is stubborn. It will make...
Compassion isn’t supposed to be a liability to us. It’s supposed to be the default setting of our hearts. It’s hardly something to be ashamed of or embarrassed by. Benevolence isn’t supposed to be a character defect. In fact, our lives as followers of Jesus should be...
We American Christians will always be tempted to allow our own freedom, liberty, rights, and comfort to dictate how we exercise loving our neighbor. Jesus will keep asking us to allow the love of neighbor to dictate how we exercise our own freedom, liberty, rights,...
[from his time as an inmate at Auschwitz:] The experiences of camp life show that humanity does have a choice of action. There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed. Humanity can preserve a...
What to do with our losses? . . . We must mourn our losses. We cannot talk or act them away, but we can shed tears over them and allow ourselves to grieve deeply. To grieve is to allow our losses to tear apart feelings of security and safety and lead us to the painful...
If we were to accept large areas of life as pure gift, we would be forced to acknowledge that we are not in control. Were we to live as recipients rather than makers, we might feel dependent and diminished, like clients of some cosmic welfare system that demeans our...
I feel certain that God was there in lower Manhattan on 9/11, with every soul, in the midst of that sheer terror and raw evil. This gives me comfort. If the thought of finding God in such horrendous circumstances seems strange, perhaps it is because we are out of...
For many believers--and even communities of faith--congregational song has played an important role in shaping the content of faith and in facilitating the remembering of that faith. It has been a recurring testimony that in times of sorrow, crisis, or need, assurance...
In worship there is divine action. In our celebration of Christ, something happens. There is an action from above: the Holy Spirit delivers Christ and the benefits of Christ’s death and resurrection to the worshipers. In other words, in worship our relationship with...
Pentecost is Babel turned right side up: all speech is unified because it is God, no longer people, who is building toward the heavens. The story of Pentecost goes further than its historical reality. It is also a parable that urges us into the knowledge that the...