Switching on the lectern light and clearing his throat, the preacher speaks both the word of tragedy and the word of comedy because they are both of them of the truth and because Jesus speaks them both, blessed be he. The preacher tells the truth by speaking of the...
I feel certain that God was there in lower Manhattan on 9/11, with every soul, in the midst of that sheer terror and raw evil. This gives me comfort. If the thought of finding God in such horrendous circumstances seems strange, perhaps it is because we are out of...
While we have the gift of life, it seems to me the only tragedy is to allow part of us to die--whether it is our spirit, our creativity or our glorious uniqueness.
The real tragedy is that we see people as entities or merely as things. Too seldom do we see people in their true humanness. A spiritual myopia limits our vision to external accidents. We see men as Jews or Gentiles, Catholics or Protestants, Chinese or American,...
It may well be that the greatest tragedy of this period of social change is not the glaring noisiness of the so-called bad people, but the silence of the so-called good people.
Nor is it adequate in certain cases to blame God’s lack of response to our prayers on a higher will for us that, for now, requires a no. No doubt what sometimes appears to us an evil is the very explosion necessary to blast us awake to the destructiveness of our...
We must become relevant and reverent. Worship must become the meeting place between the eternal and the contemporary. We tend to love the altar so much that we refuse to set it on fire. Yet God comes in the flames. Our God is a consuming fire. Each generation must...
More than anything else, the cross says that God can and must be seen in all things, but most especially in the seemingly sinful, broken and tragic things. The place of the supposed worst becomes the place of the very best. The mystery of the cross teaches us to be...
Faith can coexist with tragedy, can survive it, and…we carry it with us in spite of—or perhaps because of—our wounds.