We need some Christians who are as crazy as the Lord. Crazy enough to love like Jesus, to give like Jesus, to forgive like Jesus, to do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with God--like Jesus. Crazy enough to dare to change the world from the nightmare it often is into...
When we limit our understanding of neighbor to our church, denomination, nationality, or religious persuasion, we take Jesus' name in vain. When we lift up this commandment of Jesus--to love our neighbors--we draw all people to God and one another. The chief...
In the midst of depression I once asked my spiritual director how I could be feeling such despair when not long before the depression hit I had been feeling so close to God? "Simple," she said. "The closer you get to light the closer you get to darkness." The deepest...
I would like to buy $3 worth of God, please, not enough to explode my soul or disturb my sleep, but just enough to equal a cup of warm milk or a snooze in the sunshine. I want ecstasy, not transformation; I want warmth of the womb, not a new birth. I want a pound of...
The use of song as a vehicle for conveying the Word of God has biblical precedent. It comes from a vignette near the end of the Israelite wandering in the wilderness. Moses and Joshua were summoned to the Tent of Meeting to receive final instructions from God before...
Years earlier I had read some writings of Jurgen Moltmann, a German theologian who argued that God "experiences" our sufferings and grieves with us. Our soul is so connected with God, he said, that it's impossible for the Divine Being not to share our aguish. Now...
People are hungry for love. Are we aware of that? Do we know that? Do we see that? Do we have eyes to see? Quite often we look but we don't see. We are all just passing through this world. We need to open our eyes and see. Since we cannot see Christ, we cannot express...
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...
Because God is the subject of worship, we must back up a step to recall that, before liturgy can involve the work of the people who offer their praise, it begins with the presence of God graciously inviting that response. It seems to me that some of the worship wars...
The God of biblical faith is the God who meets us at those moments in which for better or worse we are being most human, most ourselves, and if we lose touch with those moments, if we don’t stop from time to time to notice what is happening to us and around us and...