If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk

Did I underline everything in this book? I think I may have.

‘I often envision an exasperated Jesus coming back, and the first words out of his mouth to his followers as his feet hit the pavement being “You had one job: Love. So, what happened?”'

“Jesus' gentle challenge has always pulled those of us willing to listen into the discomfort that comes with expanding our understanding of just how big a love we're talking about here and what the implications are for us: the way we live and move through the world, the kind of audacious kindness we're being asked to practice.”

“Jesus wasn't asking people to register for a religion but inviting them into a way of being in the world individually and collectively, a way of being that is rooted in a propulsive love for humanity.”

“Religious people often talk about the thin places, those rare moments when the wall between humanity and divinity becomes like onion skin and we can see through to something beyond...This was a holy moment, a sudden clearing in the clouds. Without a hymn or a prayer or a pew or a minister, God felt present and close. It was a religious experience in the greatest sense of the words. It couldn't be quantified or contained, and the overwhelming peace of the moment can't be accurately described as much as I'd like to. This was God unboxed. It was divinity digging itself from the sand. It was a beautiful upsizing, breaking out of the shell. You know what that feels like, don't you—an awe that escapes description and explanation?”

“People deserve a God who so loves the world, not a God who chooses America First; whose creation begins without divides and borders and walls, because there is only a single, interdependent community. People deserve a God who touched the leper and healed the sick and fed the starving and parted the seas and raised the dead—not a quivering idol who builds walls and drafts bathroom bills and launches social media crusades against migrant families.”

“Despite our pedigree or profession or our claims of blessed assurance, none of us really knows what we're doing here. You and I and Mother Teresa and Franklin Graham and the guy on the corner with a bullhorn condemning random pedestrians and the awkward high school student handing you your value meal—we are all working with incomplete information on the infinite, and we could all use a little kindness and a bit of mercy.”

‘There's a dangerous hubris involved in claiming any kind of moral authority or precise theological clarity other than “Here's the best guess I can make based on the available information—though I very well may be wrong.” (I'd love more Sunday sermons like that, and I think most church people would too.)'

“That's the paradox of a right-sized God: God must be big enough to speak creation into being and set time into motion, and yet personal enough to know why those words of criticism I heard one day when I was five years old still make me feel insecure at fifty-one. God is architect of both the Milky Way and my heart. That's a lot to ask and even more to make much sense of.”

“The daily task of the believer is to lean into the acts of kindness and hospitality that you most resist, toward the people you least want to bless—to aspire to a place just slightly higher than you feel capable of reaching, because that's how renovation happens, within and around you.”

“If we were to reflect and have honest conversations with one another—and more importantly, with people outside our gatherings—we'd likely find that the most serious wounds to the body of Christ have been self-inflicted. The Church is not fighting the rebellious, faithless, heathen world, as I'd always been taught, but itself.”

“If God is God, there's no other option: they are each made of God stuff, no matter how bitter, cruel, or petty they might be or how unlikable you find them or how difficult to like they indeed might be.”

“I've always joked that I was going to start a new church: The Church of Not Being Horrible. Our mission statement would simply be Don't be horrible to people. Our what we believe doctrinal statements would be replaced by how we treat people promises: Don't treat them as less worthy of love, respect, dignity, joy, and opportunity than you are.”

“The central question at any given moment in the Church of Not Being Horrible is, Am I being horrible right now? If one concludes that they are, they endeavor to not do so. They lean into authentic relationships and they allow other people to help them see their blind spots of privilege, prejudice, and ignorance (the stuff that tends to make us horrible) and then they respond with an activated life that moves with a new intention. In other words, our sacred calling is to be decent, to be kind, to be compassionate, to be whatever it is that we believe this place is lacking: to be the kind of people the world needs—and it definitely needs less horrible these days.”

“The myth of local churches is that their health is determined by their lack of conflict and the absence of turbulence, but just as with enduring marriages and lifelong friendships (or my big, loud Italian family), sometimes relational honesty generates bombastic exchanges, creates unpleasant conversations, and yields genuine discomfort, and these things aren't necessarily signs of sickness, but proof of life. The most transformative communities are places where people live together in the unknowing, admitting that they're trying to figure out the un-figure-out-able, and giving each other a break when they understandably fall on their faces.”

“There is something transformative and sacred in belonging. When we are received as we are, we can drop our defenses, breathe deeply, and trust that we don't need to earn or deserve a place; that unlike so many other places we find ourselves, there are no prerequisites or qualifiers hindering us there, no hidden agendas waiting to ensnare us, no eventual bait-and-switch coming. If there's anything spiritual community should do, it's this. It should give people a sense of found-ness. People experienced this in Jesus' presence, whether priest or prostitute, whether revered soldier or shamed pariah, whether confidently pious or morally bankrupt.”

“And religious conservatives certainly haven't cornered the market on rightness tribalism. We left-leaning Christians are as prone to it as anyone...“

“Maybe we should check our halos and egos at the door.”

“The United Church of Christ has long used the tagline God Is Still Speaking, and that's only part of the story. If God is God, not only is God still speaking, but God is capable of speaking to and through each of us in ways that are entirely specific and fully unprecedented. It's a beautiful prayer to reflect on what good news you're bringing to the people you encounter in this life, what kind of gospel you've been preaching.”