Grace means there is nothing I can do to make God love me more, and nothing I can do to make God love me less. It means that I, even I who deserve the opposite, am invited to take my place at the table in God’s family.
To believe in Christ’s rising and death’s dying is also to live with the power and the challenge to rise up now from all our dark graves of suffering love. If sympathy for the world’s wounds is not enlarged by our anguish, if love for those around us is not expanded,...
I have a priest friend who points out that the opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty. I think God intended that—it is a way of making us creative instead of smug in our belief. God plants in us the seed to love and worship God, and the seed is enough to make us...
My hope is to interpret the life and example of Jesus in a redemptive and relevant way. Each generation must do this with Jesus, lest it be forced into stale beliefs that strain credibility and diminish life. For the joy of Christian faith is not to be found in the...
Jesus was not interested in making people religious, but leading them to a loving relationship with himself, and therefore with God. He offered forgiveness and healing to sin-sick souls as the basis of new life, opening up a path of discipleship, compassion and...
Conversion is a lifelong process of letting God remove the scales from our eyes so that we can more and more embrace the reality of God’s overwhelming love for us.
Satan blogging: I despise it when they are able to see that love (ugh!) extends beyond the boundaries of their tribe, nation, or family. It means they no longer become defined by the order they are born into. It dawns on them that all these orders are not absolutes to...
We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know [Christ] in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone anymore. Heaven is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is...
Some communities are defined by proximity, structured of wood or stone or brick and bound by lines on a map. But the community of believers is made of holy, living stones cemented with the mortar of Christ’s love, crossing all lines, and having no permanent address.
Community is not built through sitting in the same building and singing the same songs. It is forged in the fires of life. When we know each other deeply—the good, the bad, and the ugly—community is experienced. Roots grow deep when we know we are loved by others and...