Even to this day, grace remains hard to swallow. Religiosity and moralism go down easier than free forgiveness..

What are you going to do with your freedom?.

If God seems to be in no hurry to make the problem of evil go away, maybe we shouldn't be, either. Maybe our compulsion to wash God's hands for him i….

Older women are like aging strudels - the crust may not be so lovely, but the filling has come at last into its own..

Jesus came to raise the dead. He did not come to teach the teachable; He did not come to improve the improvable; He did not come to reform the reform….

A lost sheep is, for all practical purposes a dead sheep. It is the admission that we are dead in our sins---that we have no power of ourselves eithe….

Grace is the celebration of life, relentlessly hounding all the non-celebrants in the world. It is a floating, cosmic bash shouting its way through t….

We are not saved by what Jesus taught, and we are certainly not saved by what we understand Jesus to have taught. We are saved by Jesus Himself..

The world is by no means averse to religion. In fact, it is devoted to it with a passion. It will buy any recipe for salvation as long as that formul….

Preachers are stewards whom the Lord has ‘set over his household servants to provide them with food at the proper time.’ After all the years the chur….

Christianity is not a religion; it is the announcement of the end of religion..

...there is therefore now no condemnation for two reasons: you are dead now; and God, as the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, has been de….

I like a cook who smiles out loud when he tastes his own work. Let God worry about your modesty; I want to see your enthusiasm..

Lord, please restore to us the comfort of merit and demerit. Show us that there is at least something we can do. Tell us that at the end of the day t….

Perhaps you see, therefore, why I think taste must come before nutrition? Our infatuation for the quasi-scientific has left us easy marks for con men….

We are so impressed by scientific clank that we feel we ought not to say that the sunflower turns because it knows where the sun is. It is almost sec….

Why do we marry, why take friends and lovers? Why give ourselves to music, painting, chemistry or cooking? Out of simple delight in the resident good….

Do you seriously envision St. Paul or Calvin or Luther opening bottles of Welch's Grape Juice in the sacristy before the service? Luther at least wou….

For all its rooted loveliness, the world has no continuing city here; it is an outlandish place, a foreign home, a session in via to a better version….

... the divine knowing - what the Father knows, and what the Word says in response to that knowing, and what the Spirit broods upon under the speakin….

We were given appetites, not to consume the world and forget it, but to taste its goodness and hunger to make it great..