The word “scapegoating” originated from an ingenious ritual described in Leviticus 16. According to Jewish law, on the Day of Atonement, the high priest laid hands on an “escaping” goat, placing all the sins of the Jewish people from the previous year onto the animal....
Human nature, when it is seeking power, wants either to play the victim or to create victims of others. In fact, the second follows from the first. Once we start feeling sorry for ourselves, we will soon find someone else to blame, accuse or attack—and with impunity!...
Brothers and sisters, if we don’t believe that every crucifixion—war, poverty, torture, hunger—can somehow be redeemed, who of us would not be angry, cynical, hopeless? No wonder Western culture seems so skeptical today. It all doesn’t mean anything, it’s not going...
The Left Behind series is not significant for its literary merits, which are few, but because it is the latest example of "end-time" eschatology, the belief that we are living out the final pages of history. It may seem like trivial pulp to sophisticated readers, but...
To read the gospels in the spirit with which they were written, it is not enough to ask what Jesus did or said. We must ask what Jesus meant by his strange deeds and words. He intended to reveal the Father to us, and to show that he is the only-begotten Son of the...
As the parable of the Ten Virgins was about the happiness of the bridegroom at his wedding, so this one is about the ebullience of the lord's joy at throwing his money around. It is the theme of the divine party again, the party that lurks beneath the surface of...
The attempt to divide the world into tidy categories of oppressor and oppressed or victimizer and victim oversimplifies the more complex realities of histories and habits of sin and evil. While it is undeniably true that many people have suffered--and continue to...
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...
How do we come to realize love? By surrendering to life just as it is. Gradually our eyes open. I think of a good friend who buried her young son. Years later someone asked her if she felt that he had been cheated by life because his years were few. Her response was...
Whether on the stage of world history or in the individual human heart, the reign or rule of God is like seed growing of itself: pregnant, mysterious, fruitful. As a man scattering seed on the ground, we work at preaching and teaching, at supporting each other, at...