“Many people find comfort in the ideas of a divine plan or of the prosperity gospel. It’s comforting for many people to imagine that God must have a plan for everything. It’s comforting for many people to imagine that if they just stay strong and keep their faith, everything will be okay. It’s comforting, at least, until someone else uses these ideas to try to wipe away your pain. Hence the bittersweet title of Kate Bowler’s book: ‘Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved.’”

“If You Want to Walk on Water, You’ve Got to Get out of the Boat. That was the title, some years back, of a popular book written by John Ortberg. And the title reflects what is surely the most common take on this story. Peter had the right idea getting out of the boat, and stepping out on faith…Like Peter, we must heed this invitation, find the courage needed to swing our legs out over the boat’s side, and then step out into the waters…But something tells me this won’t do.”

“Like every founding myth, in other words, Hamilton tells us at least as much about how we imagine ourselves today as it does about what happened years ago. And so I find it completely delightful that this bizarre tale from Genesis is how the Bible tells the story of the founding of the people of God. Because the moment when Jacob wrestles with God is like the Bible’s equivalent of the Declaration of Independence: it’s one of a handful of turning points in the relationship between God and humankind.“

“Back in late February and the first week of March, as we all made a few last trips to the grocery store, people stocked up on what they imagined to be the essentials. Some people filled their broom closets with toilet paper. I bought about 300 diapers. And all across America, yeast and flour disappeared from the grocery-store shelves.”

“Well, you have never seen such pathetic vegetables in your life. Tiny lettuce plants shriveled up even smaller than the seedlings we’d bought from the store. Bulbous zucchini two inches long and covered in tiny squirrel chew-marks. The only things that really grew well were the herbs, and that just meant I was trying to add mint to everything until Alice finally got sick of it sometime in mid-July. But the tomatoes were a different story.”

“St. Paul knows that we live before an unknown future, and he’s casting around for what he can trust, who he can trust to give him directions. ‘Who can save me from this dead body?’ he asks. You could say that Romans 7 is about a man struggling with the future as he finds himself doing what he doesn’t what to do. He longs for a reconciliation in himself that is half glimpsed, half heard.“

“God had promised that Abraham would be the ancestor of many nations—and indeed, in some ways he’s become the spiritual ancestor of all the Abrahamic traditions, of all Jews and Christians and Muslims, four billion of us in the world today. And yet at this point in the story, that great lineage hangs by a thread. Abraham nearly kills his own son, nearly cutting off God’s promise to create a great people, nearly ending the story of the great love affair between God and the people of God before it’s really begun.”

“I remember sitting with a woman in the transept of the church an hour or so before the service one Sunday. She was bent over a little and weary, and I could tell that she was out of breath. She was sweating a little bit too. ‘Ma’am, is everything okay?’ She went on to tell me about how her husband had decided, after twenty-seven years, that he’d had enough… ‘I took the long way here this morning to your church, through the park, and here I am. To be honest, I’m just looking for a little peace.’ … I’ll never forget her, and I thought about her this week: out of breath and looking for peace. It feels a little bit like our society right now.”

“Back in 2008, Tania Luna founded Surprise Industries as a way to tap into our culture’s yearning to be surprised. For a small fee, Luna’s company would surprise you or your family or your company. You just paid a little monthly subscription fee, and you literally have no clue what will happen. Surprise Industries might show up at your workplace and unleash a hundred puppies. Or they might tee up a flash mob, or bring a circus act to your doorstep… Surprises, Luna discovered, have a paradoxical feature. They tell us we were wrong; yet paradoxically, we still yearn for this.”

“Today is Trinity Sunday, the Sunday after Pentecost, when good preachers give bad sermons and bad preachers give you a blow-by-blow of Athanasian Creed. For my part, I’m stuck this week on the words of the Second Council of Constantinople in 553: ‘One of the Trinity was crucified in the flesh.’ In other words, to believe in the Holy Trinity—to say that Jesus is God—is to say that when Jesus of Nazareth suffered and died on the Cross, God suffered and died on the cross. And so it is that ‘theologically speaking,’ as the great American theologian James Cone writes in his final work, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, ‘Jesus was the “first lynchee.”’”

“Although we long to be in each other’s homes, we do find common healing in God’s home - the outdoors. That is where we can find relief right now… and it is outdoors that different people can find the different gifts of the spirit - some are awed, some find counsel in walks with friends, some study nature and build their knowledge on family hikes, some share wisdom about planning a vegetable first garden, some seek understanding of their own muddled, frustrated thoughts sitting on the front steps at midnight with their mom, some find that the holiness of our sanctuary is also any space outside where they can see other people again, strangers or family or neighbors, kept safer by open air, wind, the Holy Spirit.”

“If you were to look up depictions of the Ascension, and if you were to scroll past a lot of the pictures of Jesus levitating upwards like Buzz Lightyear, you might come across a strange image with two feet at the top of the icon, rising over the heads of the disciples, dangling down. Usually, you just see Christ’s ankles, hanging over the scene like a chandelier, and his feet are arched down like wings, splayed apart… It’s a strange scene, these disciples around their sacred object, in the midst of worship. Not beholding the Trinity, not behold Jesus reigning in power; lost in wonder, love, and praise, as they stare at a pair of wounded feet.”

“The Epicurean gods are absent and quiet, and you should be too. The Stoic God is present, but loveless, and you should be too. And then here comes Paul crashing into the Roman world with a message about a very different kind of God. For Paul and for most other Jews, God was not the petty and capricious superhuman of Greek folk religion, nor was God the indifferent-but-happy Creator of the Epicureans or the universal Mind of the Stoics. God comes to us in the world, but God is not of the world. God interacts with us, but God doesn’t act like us.“