Jay hugged me hard when I left. He was going back to Colorado in a few days. “I don’t believe in God,” he said. “But sometimes when I’m up in the mountains above the tree line, it’s like whoa, you know: There’s a big, big love.” “I know,” I said. Christianity wasn’t...
You wonder how long my love will last? Find your answer on a splintered cross on a craggy hill. That’s me you see up there, your maker, your God, nail-stabbed and bleeding. Covered in spit and sin-soaked. That’s your sin I’m feeling. That’s your death I’m dying....
Who, then, is the ultimately guilty one in this fiasco of the cross? Have we, even now, glimpsed the full dimensions of the crisis hanging over human history? …Clearly, as he hangs alone in desolation on the cross, and then is buried in the cold, malodorous...
So the church announced a season of Lent, from the old English word lenten, meaning “spring”—not only a reference to the season before Easter, but also an invitation to a springtime for the soul. Forty days to cleanse the system and open the eyes to what remains when...
Do not bother looking for Lent in your Bible dictionary, because there was no such thing back then. There is some evidence that early Christians fasted forty hours between Good Friday and Easter, but the custom of spending forty days in prayer and self-denial did not...
The Christian community is a community of the cross, for it has been brought into being by the cross, and the focus of worship is the Lamb once slain, now glorified. So the community of the cross is a community of celebration, a Eucharistic community, ceaselessly...
It is, of course, impossible to exaggerate the importance of the historicity of what is commonly known as the Resurrection. If, after all His claims and promises, Christ had died and merely lived on as a fragrant memory, He would only be revered as an extremely good...
The crowd at Jesus’ crucifixion challenged him to prove himself by climbing down from the cross, but not one person thought of what actually would happen: that he would die and then come back. …The style fit God’s pattern and character. God has always chosen the slow...
Let us not mock God with metaphor,analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages:let us walk through the door.The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,not a stone in a story,but the vast rock...
Easter morning is the Sunrise of the coming of God and the morning of new life and the beginning of the future of the world. The laughter of the universe is God’s delight. It is the universal Easter laughter in heaven and earth.