I don’t believe in sin. Let me tell you why. First I had an overdose of hell-fire-and-damnation preaching in my childhood, so I am naturally—now—very skeptical about this kind of teaching.  But more than that, I have had a sea change in how I think about God and how God looks at us […]

         What if all Christians were to love one another? What if all the splintered Lutherans loved each other: the Missouri Synod people and the Evangelicals? the Presbyterian Church in the USA people loved the Orthodox Presbyterians and the other more conservative Presbyterians loved each other? the United Methodist people loved the African Methodist Episcopal […]

       The most important part of the listed sayings about love that I posted last week is the consistency of love. Either we are partially loving, loving some of the people around us and  manipulating everyone in the guise of love, OR we are totally loving everyone in our lives, no exceptions.        Love is […]

  Love is an openness to, a curiosity about, to desire to know better, to be connected to, to know in depth—a positive expectancy towards the object of love. Love is not assumptions and expectations about who someone else is. Love is allowing another to be who they are. Love is not manipulative or forcing […]

I am co-leading a Sunday School at my church on two contemporary figures, one Catholic—Fr. Richard Rohr(The Naked Now) and one protestant—Cynthia Bourgeault, an Anglican priest, (The Wisdom Jesus)who have had enormous influence on how I write about the Life of the Spirit. They both write and speak of non-dualistic thinking, beyond the either/or preferences […]

Extend your hospitality to all people, all kinds. Welcome them as if they were your best friend, a beloved member of your family. Think of the Parable of the Prodigal Son[1] and the sayings of Jesus about how God sends his sun to shine on the evil and the good and his rain to fall […]

       It’s a funny thing about loving ourselves: it sounds like such a simple thing to do–to turn the eyes of love on ourselves. But love is more demanding than that. We cannot love ourselves and continue the behaviors that come between us and God. Shortly after I surrendered my life to Christ, I was […]

       If we look at the two Great Commandments which appear in Matthew 22:37-40 and Luke 10:27 as the summary of all the New Testament teachings, we see that we are to love God with all of ourselves—heart, mind soul and strength–and to love our neighbor as ourselves. How can we do that? This is […]

Inside my house I can only hear the train whistle(from across town) or the church bells(from a ½ mile away) in the wee or early hours of the morning. I live pretty close to uptown Charlotte NC, but unless the traffic noise is nonexistent, I can’t hear these signals. The train whistle calls me to […]

“For God so loved the world…” is the theme of the whole Bible. This truth is evident in the creation story, in the lives of Abraham and Sarah, in the Exodus, throughout the history of the Hebrews/Jews, in the life and teachings of Jesus, and in the Epistles. GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD. There is […]