In a way, I need a God who is bigger and more nimble and mysterious than what I could understand and contrive. Otherwise it can feel like I am worshipping nothing more than my own ability to understan...
I wrote once in a prayer, Dear God, your work in the world is always done by sinners, or else it would never get done; help us to realize this and practice the grace and forgiveness you first gave us....
I started to imagine Mary tugging at the shirt of Jesus and saying, I will not keep silent. I will obey you and I will tell others to obey you but I will not keep silent. People are thirsty. In John's...
I need a place to confess that I don't have everything figured out. Christianity is not a program for avoiding mistakes; it is a faith of the guilty. There is no right or perfect way to be. We learn f...
I also had to deal with the fact that I simply could not express the level of antiracist outrage I wanted to, knowing something that no one else would know unless I said it out loud: despite my politi...
How is it that Judas, who betrayed Jesus once and was filled with remorse, became the villain, while Peter, who denied Jesus three times and wept bitterly, became the rock on which the church was buil...
But that so rarely works. And if our hearts and brains don’t acknowledge these kinds of truths, they don’t just go away. They burrow into our bodies. For me, any truth I try to push aside seems to see...
But I cannot pretend, as much as sometimes I would like to, that I have not throughout my life experienced the redeeming, destabilizing love of a surprising God.
Being part of Christ’s bizarro kingdom looks more like being thirsty and having someone you don’t even like give you water than it looks like polishing your crown.
And then he went from Saul to Paul, from being the best at being a Jew to being the best at being a Christian. Only, at some point he realized that no one could really pull that off. That’s when Paul...
And the thing about grace, real grace, is that it stings. It stings because if it's real it means we don't deserve it. ... And receiving grace is basically the best shitty feeling in the world.
The violence and fear, it’s still always worth it to love God and to love people. And always, always, it is worth it to sing alleluia in defiance of the devil, who surely hates the sound of it. On the...
The Christian faith, while wildly misrepresented in so much of American culture, is really about death and resurrection. It’s about how God continues to reach into the graves we dig for ourselves and...
Sometimes the best thing we can do for each other is talk honestly about being wrong.
Considering the question, what’s the difference between Judas and Peter,*3 I’ve wondered what would’ve happened if Judas would have had a forgiving encounter with the resurrected Christ in the same w...
When the forces that seek to defy God whisper if in our ears—if God really loved me, I wouldn’t feel like this… If I really am beloved, then I should have everything I want… if I really belong to God,...
What happens in the Kingdom of God parable I was given is that a landowner goes out and hires laborers in the morning and agrees to pay them the daily wage. But then every few hours he goes and finds...
We weren’t a ship of fools so much as a rowboat of idiots.
Those most qualified to speak the gospel are those who truly know how unqualified they are to speak the gospel.
This is our God. Not a distant judge nor a sadist, but a God who weeps. A God who suffers, not only for us, but with us. Nowhere is the presence of God amidst suffering more salient than on the cross....