If the church is to flourish, we cannot build our religious lives around a gospel of fear, or a gospel of reward for our meanness. The Christian faith is not about being afraid of God. Fear may get us to submit but fear always leads to anger and resentment and...
When we limit change or even enjoyment in our lives to the times when everything falls into place just as we want it’s a bit like refusing to drive unless every stoplight we come across is green.
All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain. Creation has a pattern of wisdom; and we dare not shield ourselves from it, or we literally will lose our soul. We can obey commandments, believe doctrines, and attend church services all our lives and still...
Friendship is the reasonable passion for truly human fellowship; it is a mutual affection cemented by loyalty. The more people begin to live with one another as friends, the more privileges and claims to domination become superfluous. The more people trust one...
To be homeless the way people like you and I are apt to be homeless is to have homes all over the place but not to be really at home in any of them. To be really at home is to be really at peace, and our lives are so intricately interwoven that there can be no real...
Worship is a gift, a gift from God that allows us to achieve our full potential as persons, and a gift to God that acknowledges God as Creator and Redeemer. Without gifts at its center, worship does not occur. God’s people gather for worship not so much to receive a...
Christ lives in us and leads us, through mutual encounter and commitment, into a new future which we build together for one another.
Let us then tell the truth. Before the Gospel is a word, it is silence. It is the silence of our own lives, of your life and my life. It is life with the sound turned off so that for a moment or two you can experience it, not in terms of the words you make it bearable...
We cannot attain the presence of God because we’re already totally in the presence of God. What’s absent is awareness. Little do we realize that God is maintaining us in existence with every breath we take. …To become aware of God’s presence in our lives, we have to...
The most common greeting of the first Christmas was not ‘Merry Christmas.’ It was ‘Don’t be afraid!’ It took real courage and perseverance to be at the manger: Mary’s courage, Joseph’s commitment to Mary, the awestruck obedience of shepherds, and the politically...