We must not be frightened nor cajoled into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. We must go on struggling to be human, though monsters of abstractions police and threaten us.
01776 – A New Friendship
Many new friends have come into my life...Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, New Agers, and others—including lots of atheists and agnostics, too. One of the most dramatic of those friendships began in the aftermath of 9/11/2001. Like a lot of churches, our little...
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...
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...
01274 – Jesus Modeled Flexibility
Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be broken. This beatitude cannot be found in Matthew 5's listing, but it certainly has clear biblical principle behind it. Dr. David Schroeder, in his study on discipleship, asserts that discipleship is not so much about...
01121 – Music: A Gift from God
Music is a lovely gift of God which has often wakened and moved me. Music drives away the devil and makes people forget all wrath, unchastity, arrogance, and the like. My heart bubbles up and overflows in response to music, which has so often refreshed me and...
01104 – “Sacred Questioning”
I believe deliverance begins with questions. It begins with people who love questions, people who live with questions and by questions, people who feel a deep joy when good questions are asked. When we meet these people--some living through history and art--things...
00685 – Love as God Loves
To say that we believe that God loves the poor, judges in their behalf, wills their deliverance but do nothing ourselves to free the poor, to hear their pleas, to lift their burdens, to act in their behalf is an empty faith indeed. To say that God is love and not...
00200 – Christ: True Word of God
It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him. We must not use the Bible as a sort of encyclopedia out of which texts can be taken for use as weapons.