” Eternal life begins, in each of the gospels, when our lives reflect a love for God and for our neighbor. We read scripture not to win a legal argument – but to become disciples of Jesus who practice mercy toward one another, and who live in trust and confidence that God offers that same …
Category: Inspiration
Even Aaron’s Beard Stands for Unity
“How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity! It is like precious oil poured on the head, running down on the beard, running down on Aaron’s beard, down on the collar of his robe. It is as if the dew of Hermon were falling on Mount Zion.” (Psalm 133 NIV).
Person to person, eye to eye, heart to heart . . .
For peace, people must meet across differences. … All need to change. Fear must be changed into openness. … It is only as we meet and share together person to person, eye to eye, and heart to heart that we discover what it means to be human and to discover the joy of being together, …
Don’t Divide.
“It’s only in mediocre books that people are divided into two camps and have nothing to do with each other. In real life everything gets mixed up!” Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago
Our Job: Love.
“Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy if anything can.” Thomas Merton, Letter …
Broken Body
“When Jesus took the bread and said, ‘This is my body which is broken for you’ (1 Corinthians 11:24), it’s hard to believe that even in his wildest dreams he foresaw the tragic and ludicrous brokenness of the Church as his body. There’s no reason why everyone should be Christian in the same way and …
Even when our differences matter, they don’t ultimately matter.
Each morning I receive an email from a website dedicated to the writings of my dad’s favorite preacher-writer, Frederick Buechner. Yesterday’s passage was entitled “Friends,” and the essence of its message was that, for each of us, there are some friends — only a few — who we count as friends “for no particular reason,” …
Love Stays
“To separate ourselves from a body of living Christians, with whom we were before united, is a grievous breach of the law of love. It is the nature of love to unite us together; and the greater the love, the stricter the union. And while this continues in its strength, nothing can divide those whom …
Wesley: Consensus, not Dissensus
Theologians of other traditions have long concurred that what set John Wesley apart — and, I submit, what we Methodists ought gratefully to embrace, reinforcing our unity — is that he “sought Christianity more in practical principles and sanctified affections than in orthodox formulas, and laid greater stress on the ecumenical consensus which unites than …
Give Me Thine Hand
Take a look at the photograph I’m using in the masthead of this blog. I chose an image of people holding hands not simply because it is a nice metaphor for “Staying Connected.” I chose it because hand-holding is a quintessentially Wesleyan metaphor, calling to mind a phrase, taken from 2 Kings 10:15, that John Wesley …