In my judgment the Christian faith does not lend itself to much preaching or talking. It is best propagated by living it and speaking it. When will you Christians really crown Jesus Christ as the Prince of Peace and proclaim Him through your deeds as the champion of...
Faith is better understood as a verb than as a noun, as a process than as a possession. It is on-again-off-again rather than once-and-for-all. Faith is not being sure where you’re going but going anyway. A journey without maps.
The story of Jesus enables me to envision God as One who genuinely cares for each and all of us. In Jesus, God confronts the Darkness face to face, Incarnate, for our sake. Jesus is Light to the gentle face of God. The story of Jesus says that God laughs with us in...
Yet faith happens in the in-betweens, the interruptions, the thresholds. It happens when I’ve left this room where I was in control, where I had my self-explanation, where I had my ego boundaries, where I had my moral sense of my own rightness and superiority.
Each of us is called to prophetic agony—to speak the Word, to do justice and righteousness. We are most truly ourselves when we live within God’s insecurity, acknowledging Yahweh’s sovereignty over creation, taking full responsibility as contingent creatures who yet...
The reason why our childhoods were one enthusiasm after another was that we hadn’t yet found an organizing center for our lives and a goal that would demand our all and our best. The Christian faith is the discovery of that center in the righteous God. Christian...
No ray of sunlight is ever lost, but the green which it awakens into existence needs time to sprout, and it is not always granted to the sower to see the harvest. All work that is worth anything is done in faith.
I have a priest friend who points out that the opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty. I think God intended that—it is a way of making us creative instead of smug in our belief. God plants in us the seed to love and worship God, and the seed is enough to make us...
Surrender is not so much a giving up as it is an opening up. It is a dynamic living and striving in the face of the unknown. When we surrender in faith we enter into the power of God, into the realm of all possibility.
This then is our dilemma: how to transmit faith from one generation to the next without falsifying it as a mere cultural appendage, the icing on the cake of Americanism, a family idiosyncrasy like a preference for crunchy or smooth peanut butter. For the fact that...