“The God we worship is a mysterious multi-faceted God, whose peace passes all understanding. All we need to know is that the God we need, worship, and believe in is the God of love, and that God is present, and listening, and waiting.”

“The breakfast of grilled fish and bread by the shore of the Sea of Galilee is yet one more meal in our faith story. Even though the menu is different from the bread and wine that we take to be the Eucharistic feast, this is still a Eucharistic scene, and it teaches us a Eucharistic lesson.”

“It is only by first coming back into community with the other disciples that Thomas puts himself in a position to recover his faith. It is only through experiencing Jesus Christ bearing the permanent scars of his human life that Thomas can come to believe in the power of God to overcome sin and death.”

“No matter how pervasive evil seems, no matter how much death we bring into the world, death does not have the last word—death never has the last word—, because Christ’s body lives in the world.”

“That is the profound yet simple lesson of the resurrection: that God, and love, and life, are stronger than human sin, and hatred, and death.”

"I am because you are; I am because we are.” That fundamental redefinition of our existence on earth as a passionately intertwined community is what we try to live into every Sunday as we break bread and share the cup.”

“Our dinner party is a meal to which everyone is welcome, because in the faces of “everyone,” in the faces of those we see and those we don’t see, in the faces especially of the vulnerable and the outcast—in every one of those faces we see the face of Jesus Christ, the Lord, the Savior, the Redeemer, the King who invited us to this meal in the first place.”

“Mary is the one who shows us the new thing, and how we get to the new thing. We get to the new thing through a life of submission, a life of radical service, a life of ministry to the living body of Christ by serving the needs of others.”

“The father—the father who is the real center of this story—responds in a way that shows us what the life and teaching and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ shows us—that the real power of love is that it is boundless, measureless, and free.”

“We are not looking for a God who punishes, but rather a God who is merciful and forgiving, a God who feeds us with his own body and blood.”