Do you understand why he upset them? I used to think the reason Jesus was crucified was because he picked a bad century. Now, it wouldn't make any difference. He could come to Louisville during this last decade of the 20th century and if he did the kind of preaching,...
Jesus experienced the silence of God in the company and companionship of his closest friends. Did they fail him? Yes, perhaps here more than anytime earlier in his ministry, but they did not fail him completely, at least not yet. They were with him--awake or asleep,...
To love is to know God precisely because God is love. The emerging community, at its best, can teach us again that love must be the first word on our lips and also the last, and that we must seek to incarnate that sacred word in the world. I recently heard a...
Doing the Gospel rather than just quoting it was the best way I could find out what God was up to. I didn't believe in dragging souls into some special club of the saved... My only sense of "mission" now was to show others that they, too, could feed and touch and heal...
To paraphrase William Sloane Coffin, a contemporary author and activist for us as Christians, God is defined by Jesus, but not confined to Jesus. To paraphrase Krister Stendahl, a New Testament scholar, former dean of Harvard Divinity School, and bishop of the Church...
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...
There is not a syllable in the Pauline letters that can be cited in support of Christians employing violence. Paul's occasional uses of military imagery (e.g., 2 Cor. 10:3-6, Phil. 1:27-30) actually have the opposite effect: the warfare imagery is drafted into the...
It's funny, isn't it? You can preach a judgmental and vengeful and angry God and nobody will mind. But you start preaching a God that is too accepting, too loving, too forgiving, too merciful, too kind...and you are in trouble.
A sobering truth about life in leadership is that we can be very busy and look very important, yet be out of touch with that place in the center of our being where we know who we are in God and what he has called us to do--that place where we are responsive to the...
I don't think that there's any conflict at all between science today and the Scriptures. I think that we have misinterpreted the Scriptures many times and we've tried to make the Scriptures say things they weren't meant to say. I think that we have made a mistake by...