"God's passion in Jesus Christ is Good. Profoundly Good. Utterly Good. It's good because it shatters our insistent belief in conditionality - and forces us to reorient our very understanding of Love around the life-giving sacrificial desire of God embodied in Jesus complete and total solidarity with humanity at all costs.

Jesus' passion is also essentially good because it makes clear the reality that desire and suffering can exist side by side - that love can live wholeheartedly in that tension. I need to hear that right now. I need to know that Love can live in the midst of my suffering, in the midst of this isolation. I need even to remember that much of my suffering is just a result of the depth of my heart's yearning for relationship."

"I don't want to be Christian any time other than right now. I don't want to be church any time but right now, because right now is the time when we see Jesus at work in the world more powerfully than ever.

It's right now that we're recognizing just how important we are to each other. It's right now that we are choosing, like the Samaritan on the Jericho road, to save stranger's lives. It's right now that we are holding each other so fervently in prayer. It's right now that we are acknowledging the fullness of each other's humanity and being bound together in common purpose for the Love of God's creation. It's right now that we can identify most fully both with Jesus' loneliness and his eternal abiding connection to the God of all things."

"We don't get to decide when Love shows up.

And we don't get to decide what it looks like.

Throughout this season of Lent, the church is reading a lot from the Gospel according to John. These readings focus on something very specific and, it turns out, very timely. In John's Gospel God is Love, and Love shows up in Jesus and by and large people have no idea what to do with him, with Jesus, with Love, with God. And the reason they don't know what to do with Love when it's right in front of them? Because it doesn't look the way they expected."