"Actually...if you get a feel for this story we find ourselves in, I think you'll come to realize that it has room for all the other stories too. It doesn't exclude them, or mock them, or despise them. I believe it's the story in which all other stories can find themselves too."
"That matter comes from an idea in the mind of God, an idea that is expressed in a meaning - making word, "
Let there BE...?"
"The Jewish story says the world as created was good, even very good. But it didn't say
perfect. Perfect is more of a Greek concept. Can you see that? Perfect has all the baggage of Greek idealism: ideal, unchanging, complete, fully formed, all that stuff. But that's not the universe that God creates, as I read the story, especially in light of science, and even more, in light of a later part of the story that is more eschatalogical."
"To be called, to hear your calling, or to find your vocation are all ways of saying that you have signed up with this higher purpose or mission in life. You're not just here for your own agenda, or for a company agenda. You wnt to be part of God's ongoing creation of the world - agains all the forces that are working against that creative process. You want the wold to become the kind of world God dreams for it to be."
"Go back before creation. If God is the only thing that exists, and the only being that is, then God needs to creat time, so that the universe can be itself, become itself, with some kind of freedoms and authenticity. Otherwise, it's just a puppet universe that's rea, I think we would expect it to happen just as evolution says: the universe would develop, over time, writing its own story, so to speak. It's a story of becoming, of unfolding, of novelties emerging and possibilities being explored and diversity flowering. And best of all, it's not finnished yet. We're still in process, still young, still moving ahead toward what we're going to be when we're all 'grown up.' And each of us, through our lives, through our choices, by cooperating with God or by withholding or cooperation, plays a part in the continuing evolution of God's creation."
"And for the disciple to call Jesus master would mean... yes, it would mean that no one else could take the raw materials of life - skin and bone and blood and space and time and words and deeds and waking and sleeping and eating and walking - and elicit from them a beautiful song of truth and goodnes as Jesus did."
"As members of the church of Jesus Christ, we must fulfill our national duties within the context of out larger global calling: to go into the whole world with God's saving love."
"Jesus really was, and is, about saving more than just human souls after they die. He really is about saving the world - human history, creation, the whole thing, the whole process from beginning to end, as you said, from alpha to omega. So I guess what you're helping me to see is that the whole idea of the incarnation of Christ is far more radical than we realize. It's not just God entering creation, and especially human history. It's God taking creation, including human history, into his heart, and declearing eternal solidarity with it. He's really with us in... the process, the story, the unfolding."
"On the back wall was an especially moving painting. The quotation had to do with work being the prayer of our hands, and there were many brown, weathered hands pictured, one holding a fishing net, one working in a garder, one holding a chald to a blackboard, one cooking, one holding nothing, but clearly showing a scar in the palm."
