Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I believe God gives people the right to say no, to resist, to refuse, to reject, to cling to their sins, to cling to their version of their story.
For Jesus, heaven and hell were present realities. Ways of living we can enter into here and now. He talked very little of the life beyond this one.
Look at the size of the universe and look at what we're discovering about string theory. There's a wide-eyed sense of we're just getting started here.
I think what's happened in the modern world, there's a lot of people that sound very smart and it's very compelling and alluring, but it leaves you empty.
One truth is that suffering raises profound questions with the universe. The other truth is that grace, gift and generosity also raise profound questions.
Love demands freedom. It always has, and it always will. We are free to resist, reject, and rebel against God's ways for us. We can have all the hell we want.
I believe that God is with you, that there is a presence. I believe this God is for you. I don't think the universe is a cold, dead place that is indifferent.
My experience as a pastor is lots of people have really toxic, dangerous, psychologically devastating images of God in their head, images of a God who's not good.
The world is desperately in need of people who will break themselves open and pour themselves out for the reconciliation of all things- that's what the world needs.
This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus' message of love, peace, forgiveness and joy that our world desperately needs to hear.
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.
When the female voice is repressed and stifled, the entire community can easily find themselves cut off from the sacred feminine, depriving themselves of the full image of god.
The danger is that in reaction to abuses and distortions of an idea, we'll reject it completely. And in the process miss out on the good of it, the worth of it, the truth of it.
When you forgive somebody, when you are generous, when you withhold judgment, when you love and when you stand up to injustice, you are, in that moment, bringing heaven to earth.
We need a childlike trust that God is good... ultimately we are OK. That is a simple, beautiful pure thing that can be complicated ferociously by all sorts of intellectual categories.
Your life is a gift. Before anything else can be said about you, for some reason the universe (or God, or being, or force, or reality, or whatever you name it) chose to give you life.
I believe that God is love. I believe that Jesus came to show us this love, to give us this love, to teach us about this love, so that we could live in this love and extend it to others.
It takes quite a spine to turn the other cheek. It takes phenomenal fortitude to love your enemy. It takes firm resolve to pray for those who persecute you. (with reference to Matthew 5)
It's as if Thomas Kinkade and Dante were at a party, and one turned to the other sometime after midnight and uttered that classic line "You know, we really should work together sometime.
God gives us what we want. For people who want nothing to do with peace, joy, reconciliation and peace... God will give you what you want. I see people make unbelievably destructive choices.
The vibrant, real historic Christian faith is very wide and leaves lots and lots of room for varying perspectives. It's very diverse and wide, that's part of it's strength, life and vibrancy.
I thought that Christian was a noun, a person looking for authenticity. I never understood that idea that a band could be Christian or something could be Christian. But it just can be and is.
We can choose the way of compassion, the way of forgiveness, the way of generosity. Or we can choose other paths and those have very real consequences in the world. This is absolutely crucial.
For many, 'desire' is a bad word, something we're supposed to 'give up for God.' That kind of thinking can be really destructive because it teaches people to deny their hearts, their true selves.
To elevate abstract doctrines and dogmas over living, breathing, embodied experiences of God's love and grace, then, is going the wrong direction. It's taking flesh and turning it back into words.
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
What's interesting is, if you take the scientists and the theologians, the really good ones, they end up both filled with this wide-eyed sense of wonder and awe about look at this world we live in.
Creating and sharing beautiful things has provided me with the inspiration that we can do things we never thought we could do and that we will get to see wonderful things we never thought we would see.
At the center of the Christian tradition since the first church have been a number who insist that history is not tragic, hell is not forever, and love, in the end, wins and all will be reconciled to God.
The great German scholar Helmut Thielicke once said that a person who speaks to this hour’s need will always be skirting the edge of heresy, but only the person who risks those heresies can gain the truth.
The interactions I have are with people who are very kind and very grateful and they say very overwhelming things to me. Somebody who doesn't like what I do or doesn't understand it, then it wasn't for them.
Suffering is traumatic and awful and we get angry and we shake our fists at the heavens and we vent and rage and weep. But in the process we discover a new tomorrow, one we never would have imagined otherwise.
I'm interested in painting the most beautifully compelling pictures and images and metaphors and stories and explanations possible that will put Jesus in language for a world that desperately needs to hear it.
Being a pastor for 20 years I realized that the labels, agnostic, atheist, believer, everybody's human and everybody wants to know what kind of universe we're living in, and everybody's living according to a story.
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 know the people.
This breath, and this moment, and this life is a gift and we are all in this together. We all have countless choices every day to close down or stand up straight and open up, and take a big breath and say YES to the gift.
That may sound a big vague, but what has struck me in city after city is that despite our differences and diversity, there's a common humanity we all share. In many ways we're all searching and longing for the same things.
Agape doesn't love somebody because they're worthy. Agape makes them worthy by the strength and power of its love. Agape doesn't love somebody because they're beautiful. Agape loves in such a way that it makes them beautiful.
Over the years, I've realized that I have as much in common with the performance artist, the standup comedian, the screenwriter, as I do with the theologian. I'm in an odd world where I make things and share them with people.
This is why for thousands of years Christians have found the cross to be so central to life. It speaks to us of God's suffering, God's pain, God's broken heart. It's God making the first move and then waiting for our response.
To be honest with you, I am passionate about all the people out there who want to know Jesus, they want to know God, and they are sick of a system that is hung up on a bunch of things that have nothing to do with the love of God.
We live in a world where we have friends, neighbors, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, people we journey with for years who are gay. And we need to love, affirm and all of us together work on the real problems that we have in the world.
The Christian faith is mysterious to the core. It is about things and beings that ultimately can't be put into words. Language fails. And if we do definitively put God into words, we have at that very moment made God something God is not.
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 destructive, because God made us human.
Often the people most concerned about others going to hell when they die seem less concerned with the hells on earth right now, while the people most concerned with the hells on earth right now seem the least concerned about hell after death.
We embrace truth wherever we find it from whoever says it however we come across it. It's a big beautiful exotic heartbreaking mysterious world we live in and it's our home and we get to explore and learn and affirm truth wherever we find it.
There's way too much wonder and mystery all around us to not stay open to more that's going on here. You can wake up, and sense and feel and taste and hear a whole world right here within this one, right here in this breath you're about to take.
Fear wants us to become obsessed with some event or person in the future, a year, a month, even a day. It also wants us to look backwards not at our successes, but our short-comings and our failures. Fear losses it's grip when we stay in the now.
What does happen constantly with all kinds of people I meet is they say "I had this encounter with Jesus, can you help me understand it..." The labels, more than ever, simply aren't big enough to contain what the cosmic Christ is up to in the world.
I embrace the term 'evangelical,' if by that we mean a belief that we together can actually work for change in the world, caring for the environment, extending to the poor generosity and kindness, a hopeful outlook. That's a beautiful sort of thing.