When folks ask me about my fascination with forgiveness and my dedication to it,  I tell  them that my life has been a laboratory in it.  I have needed forgiveness, and received it, in abundance. I have also suffered injuries that have required its practice if I was to heal. But I must confess another[…]

“Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” –Luke 24:32 Imagine that you and I grew up being taught that Jesus died to pay the price that God demanded in exchange for forgiveness of our sins, that God’s need for[…]

” . . . God likes us so much that he has, in a sense, made available in our midst a way to dis-entangle us from the mess we inhabit, before we even knew that it was a mess, and instead has invited us to share with God, at the same level as ourselves, in[…]

  When you visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, you descend a pathway at the base of two black granite walls inscribed with the names of more than 58,000 American servicepeople who died in that war.  The two walls form a kind of broad “V,”  like wings, one pointing south toward the nearby Lincoln[…]

“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you.” –John 14:27 On the first Sunday in May, I woke early for prayer and final preparation of a dialogue sermon on peace. The text was to be John 14:23-29, with particular attention to verse[…]

“Trauma inevitably brings loss . . . The survivor frequently resists mourning , not only out of fear but also out of pride. She may consciously refuse to grieve as a way of denying victory to the perpetrator. In this case it is important to reframe the (person’s) mourning as an act of courage rather[…]

“Sometimes, in order to be human, we have to hold G-d fully accountable, for existence, for sin, for suffering. And then we discover, like Job, at the bottom of things there is only this accountability, limitless, for everything, everlasting, otherwise known as love. But to get there we have to be human first, like Jesus.”[…]

  “Why is it worth it to continue?,” Patricia Garcia, President of CoMadres in El Salvador, is asked. Paty responds as a survivor of abduction, rape, and torture. She speaks as someone who had to flee from the threat of death even as a child, and as the citizen of a nation still bearing the[…]

“You took something precious away from me . . . I will never talk to her again. I will never be able to hold her again. But I forgive you and have mercy on your soul. You hurt me and you hurt a lot of people. But I forgive you.” The gracious words from the[…]

God is a lover who receives everything, forgives everything. The Gospel says, “You will know the mystery of salvation through the forgiveness of sin” (Luke 1:77). “Fore-given” means being given to beforehand, before you earned it, were worthy of it, or maybe even asked for it. Forgiveness breaks down the entire world of meritocracy. –Richard[…]