I’m frustrated and sad to think of all the good people who have abandoned Christianity because they felt they had to choose between their faith and their intellectual integrity or between their religion and their compassion. I’m heartbroken to think of all the new ideas they could have contributed had someone not told them that new ideas were unwelcome.
At least for a moment, the religious leaders got it: Jesus hung out with sinners because there were only sinners to hang out with.
Most of the people I’ve encountered are looking not for a religion to answer all their questions but for a community of faith in which they can feel safe asking them.
I often wonder if the role of the clergy in this age is not to dispense information or guard the prestige of their authority, but rather to go first, to volunteer the truth about their sins, their dreams, their failures, and their fears in order to free others to do the same.
What sparked my imagination as a little girl stirs my faith today, reminding me that a misogynistic king running a dangerously dysfunctional superpower is nothing new and nothing God can’t handle. Maybe a little biblically inspired dark comedy is just what we need “for such a time as this.
Our best answers in defense of Christianity have always been useless clanging symbols unless our lives have inspired the world to ask.
I don’t know which Bible stories ought to be treated as historically accurate, scientifically provable accounts of facts and which stories are meant to be metaphorical. I don’t know if it really matters so long as those stories transform my life.
Rereading the texts of terror as a young woman, I kept anticipating some sort of postscript or epilogue chastising the major players for their sins, a sort of Arrested Development–style “lesson” to wrap it all up – “And that’s why you should always challenge the patriarchy!” But no such epilogue exists.
On the days when I am hungry – for community, for peace, for belief – I remember what it was like to feed people Jesus, and for people to feed Jesus to me. And those pieces of memory multiply, like the bread that fed the five thousand, spilling out of their baskets and filling every hollow space. Communion doesn’t answer every question, nor does it keep my stomach from rumbling from time to time, but I have found that it is enough.
But “the first act of the Christian life,” says Schmemann, “is a renunciation, a challenge.” In baptism, the Christian stands naked and unashamed before all these demons – all these impulses and temptations, sins and failures, empty sales pitches and screwy labels – and says, “I am a beloved child of God and I renounce anything or anyone who says otherwise.”12.
Millennials aren’t look for a hipper Christianity... We’re looking for a truer Christianity, a more authentic Christianity. Like every generation before ours and every generation after, we’re looking for Jesus – the same Jesus who can be found in the strange places he’s always been found: in bread, in wine, in baptism, in the Word, in suffering, in community, and among the least of these.
Every good Christian knows that the best way to insulate yourself from criticism or input is to say that God wants whatever you want.
I began to suspect that perhaps the problem lies not in God’s goodness but in how we measure it. Laxmi and Kanakaraju and the women and children at the AIDS ministry, they prayed for basic things – food, shelter, health, peace – and they did not always receive. Yet I saw in their eyes the kind of joy and spiritual connectedness that most Christians I know long for.
When we understand the function of origin stories, both in our culture and in our lives, we can make better sense of those found in Scripture.
To be a priest,′ writes Barbara Brown Taylor, ’is to know that things are not as they should be and yet to care for them the way they are.
The more I learned, the less I felt I knew. The less I felt I knew, the more I listened.
I may be on Eastern Standard Time, but my muse is on Pacific.
I thought faith would say, ‘I’ll take away the pain and discomfort, but what it ended up saying was, ‘I’ll sit with you in it.
Churches should be the most honest place in town, not the happiest place in town. – Walter Brueggermann.
When you stop trying to force the Bible to be something it’s not – static, perspicacious, certain, absolute – then you’re free to revel in what it is: living, breathing, confounding, surprising, and yes, perhaps even magic.