I don’t know exactly how Jesus is present in the bread and wine, but I believe Jesus is present, so it seems counterintuitive to tell people they have to wait and meet him someplace else before they meet him at the table. If people are hungry, let them come and eat. If they are thirsty, let them come and drink. It’s not my table anyway. It’s not my denomination’s table or my church’s table. It’s Christ’s table.
In the years preceding the Civil War in America, Christian ministers wrote nearly half of all defenses of slavery.
Sometimes God knows the kind of deliverance you need most is deliverance from your own comfort.
Tensions around issues of injustice must not be avoided in the name of an easy peace and cheap grace, but rather passionately engaged, until justice rolls down like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream.
Leadership isn’t a goal. Leadership is a role. Wisdom and strength are what we should pursue. Not leadership. Wisdom is discerning when to lead. Strength comes from practicing wisdom. Leadership is a role that changes hands depending on context. In that light, it is important to learn how to lead not because you want to be “a leader” but because when your wisdom and strength have placed you in a position of leadership, you don’t want to screw it up.
So after twelve months of “biblical womanhood,” I’d arrived at the rather unconventional conclusion that that there is no such thing. The Bible does not present us with a single model for womanhood, and the notion that it contains a sort of one-size-fits-all formula for how to be a woman of faith is a myth.
So my advice to women is this: If a man ever tries to use the Bible as a weapon against you to keep you from speaking the truth, just throw on a head covering and tell him you’re prophesying instead. To those who will not accept us as preachers, we will have to become prophets.
So convinced God lived in the boxes I’d constructed, I failed to look for God in God’s favorite place: the margins.
Acknowledging uncertainty doesn’t make a person less faithful; it just makes her more honest. Admitting how much we don’t know doesn’t make a person less faithful; it just makes him more candid – and perhaps more curious. Anne Lamott has chronicled the meanderings of the heart as well as anyone, and as she famously puts it, ” The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.
To love oneself well is to regard one’s place in the world with candor and grace, grounded in a humble realization of one’s strengths as well as a clear-eyed understanding of one’s weaknesses. To love oneself well is to be able to distinguish between what one wants and what one needs. To love oneself well means not to diminish the beautiful creature that God made nor to cultivate an outsize image of that same person.
There is liberation in not having to know everything and not having to impress everyone with that boundless knowledge.
Wholeheartedness means that we can be doubtful and still find rest in the tender embrace of a God who isn’t threatened by human inconsistency.
It’s not a story about how humans lost their worth; it’s a story about how humans lost their innocence. And most important, it’s not a story about how God turned away from creation but rather a story about how God, in God’s relentless way, moved toward creation while giving people the freedom to make choices, to test boundaries, to rebel, to wreak havoc, to grow up.
I remember the sense of invitation and joy I felt when I learned that the word “disciple” doesn’t mean “expert” or “preacher,” “lecturer” or “leader.” Instead, it derives from the Latin word discere- “to learn.” We’re learners. We’re all in process, all just partway through our studies, all nowhere near the completion of our educations.
Trying to keep in mind that how I respond to the death of my enemies says as much about me as it does about my enemies.
All Sabbath is rest, but not all rest is Sabbath. Rest is not Sabbath if your comfort is contingent on others’ discomfort. Rest is not Sabbath if it exacerbates inequity rather than diminishing it.
Love is what we were made to do. But even more than that, love is who we were made to be.
The telos of a human-your telos, my telos, our telos-is to love lavishly and indiscriminately because we have been loved lavishly and indiscriminately. We can be gracious because we are grateful. We can love because we have been loved.
That’s the alluring and mystical beauty of grace: people are drawn to it, even when they aren’t supposed to be and even when they don’t know why.
To interpret a piece of writing with the goal of “getting to the point” is to fail to recognize the wealth within and beyond it, because it takes on new life and new layers when it’s interpreted through the diverse lens of the many.