Who can stay awake in this night of God? Who will not be as if paralyzed by it? Jesus' friends were protected from its terrors by a profound sleep. Luke, the doctor, and other witnesses speak of a "bloody sweat" which fell on the ground from the wakeful, imploring...
01556 – Participation, not Substitution
It's about participation in Christ and not substitution by Christ. And we...are invited to travel with Jesus through execution to resurrection. The Last Supper is about bread for the world, God's justice against human injustice, a New Passover from bondage to...
01489 – The Purpose of Our Deliverance
Christians, we have maintained, are those who through confrontation with death are given new freedom from the sting of death and so a new freedom for voluntary service to others. Surely if this claim has any truth in it, then it is not our own suffering but the...
01350 – You are Risen!
You are risen in power and wonder;You are risen out of the shambles of death and terror and doubt and fear;You are risen to turn the world to peace and justice and freedom and well-being;You are risen with healing wings to cure our diseased hurts and our public...
01349 – We are Loved!
We are not loved because we are so beautiful and good. We are beautiful and good because we are loved. from Theology of Joy
01308 – Following Jesus as “The Way”
The metaphor of blindness and seeing is not only prominent in the teaching of Jesus, but also found in stories about his giving sight to blind people. There are three, two in Mark and one in John. They clearly have a metaphorical meaning, even as one or more may well...
01306 – Jesus Revealed a God of Nonviolence
In his nonviolent teaching, life, and death, Jesus revealed a God of nonviolence. The God who delivered an enslaved people in the Exodus was now seen as the deliverer of all humanity from oppression. The violence associated with God in the biblical tradition was...
01273 – Regular Practice of Prayer
Throughout his Gospel, Luke shows us Jesus praying. Jesus prays before he calls his disciples, before asking them who he is, at the time of his transfiguration, before teaching his disciples how to pray, on the night of his arrest, and at his death. For Luke, what is...
01263 – Love Always Wins; God Does Not Lose
The Cosmic or Universal Christ is the divine lure, a blinking, brilliant light set as the Omega Point of time and history that keeps reminding us that love, not death, is the eternal thing. Love, which is nothing more than endless life, is luring us forward, because...
01247 – Faith: Propositional Truth vs. Personal Experience
When the nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said that God is dead, he was not making an ontological point. He was making an existential point. He was not announcing that God had died, but that our experience of God had died. This was due, in part, to...