The New Testament offers a wealth of images of God. God is not only like a forgiving father, but also like a mother hen longing for her straying offspring and a woman searching until she finds one lost coin. God in Christ is Lady Wisdom, divine Word, the Light of the...
If God forgives us instantly and completely, then who are we to sulk in despair over our failures? If God finds no pleasure in condemning, then we have no right to find some sort of sadistic pleasure in self-contempt. To allow the sins of yesterday, or even an hour...
Surrender—putting one’s life at God’s disposal—is the most truly Christian prayer. It is the prayer of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane—”Not my will, but thine.” It is the heart of the prayer Jesus taught the apostles—”Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth...
The acceptance of the fact that Christian existence is based on and permeated with God’s forgiveness in Christ through the Holy Spirit strikes simultaneous deathblows to attitudes which can be described as musical legalism and musical lawlessness. Musical legalism can...
We all need to apologize, and we all need to forgive, for humanity to have a sustainable future. Otherwise, we are controlled by the past, individually and corporately. History easily devolves into taking sides, bitterness, holding grudges, and the violence that...
We do not always think of repentance as worship, but it can be much easier to sing a rousing hymn than to turn away from our favorite sin. A sinful act involves worship of the wrong kind, submitting ourselves at that moment to serve the appetites of our pride or lust,...
We need Lent! Our forebears were wise to put its 40 days into the calendar to keep us mindful of the great sacrifice of Christ and the immense love of the Father, the overwhelming grace-full—and grotesque—suffering of the Trinity. In these post-modern times, sin and...
The feeble gospel goes back to Jesus as our model, our example, and is much concerned with moral injunctions. It sees his teaching as a fine set of ideals at which to aim. It may not do much harm but it has no power to change your life: it is a faith built in sand...
Lent is a time of hunger—hunger for truth-telling and a genuine repentance that flows from such truth-telling; and hunger for forgiveness from One who knows the truth about us but who nevertheless comes to us with the offer of amazing grace. from Journal for...
When we examine the broad spectrum of Christian proclamation and practice, we see that the only thing made essential on the right wing of theology is forgiveness of the individual’s sins. On the left it is removal of social or structural evils. The current gospel then...