If anybody didn't have a messiah complex, it was Jesus
Holism is when two plus two equals infinity.
The priest's work, the priest's service, was understoon as an act of worship. Theis was Gods desire at Sinai - thst everybody would understand their roles as priests. Thst everybody would worship God...
What we do comes out of who we believe we are.
Love is giving up control. It’s surrendering the desire to control the other person. The two—love and controlling power over the other person—are mutually exclusive. If we are serious about loving som...
No one has ever done this before. No one has ever been you before. This exact interrelated web of people and events and places and memories and desire and love that is your life hasn't ever existed in...
God has to punish sinners, because God is holy, but Jesus has paid the price for our sin, and so we can have eternal life. However true or untrue that is technically or theologically, what it can do i...
Seeing where
Whether we are reading the Bible for the first time or standing in a field in Israel next to a historian and an archaeologist and a scholar, the Bible meets us where we are. That is what truth does
We cannot earn what we have always had. What we can do is trust that what God keeps insisting is true about us is actually true.
God is in the best, and also the worst. God is in the presence, and also in the absence. God is in the power, and also in the powerlessness.
God is always present. We’re the ones who show up.
When we deny the spiritual dimension to our existence, we end up living like animals. And when we deny the physical, sexual dimension to our existence, we end up living like angels. And both ways are...
As a pastor, you get invited into the most poignant moments of people's lives. Whether it's a wedding or a funeral or a hospital visit, you get invited into the center of the event, whether or not you...
The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God.
It's all—let's use a very specific word here—miraculous. You, me, love, quarks, sex, chocolate, the speed of light—it's all miraculous, and it always has been.
He writes to his friends in Ephesus: I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened. When people ask you what the Bible is about, do you answer: It’s about becoming more enlightened? Because th...
The myth of redemptive violence - Caesar, peace, and victory - is in people's bones so deeply, we aren't even aware of it. You crush the opposition that's how we bring peace.
Suffering, it turns out, demands profound imagination. A new future has to be conjured up because the old future isn't there anymore.
What happens is our lives become so heavily oriented around the expectations of others that we become more and more like them and less and less like ourselves. We become split. I was split.I had this...