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Today’s “Ask a Progressive Christian” with ProgressiveChristianity.org Board Member Rev. Dr. Mark Sandlin Q: Is the Bible the Inerrant Word of God?

It isn’t just Jesus’ birthday. The whole of creation is reborn.

The great Christian monk Thomas Merton once compared the spiritual life to the search for a path in a field of untrodden snow: “Walk across the snow and there is your path.”

This collection of 200 dialogue and dialogue-related quotations is gathered from a wide range of sources – ancient and modern.

Each day you will receive a different email message from this enlightened hot mind. Every day the one who is eternally alive will throw a ray of his light into the depths of your life. Every day a different facet of the comprehensive revelation I have described will flash its brilliance into your soul.

Home is more than a house. It is a sacred location, a place of aspirations and dreams, of learning and habit, of relationships and heart. Home is the geography of our souls.

“Love is what God is, love is why Jesus came, and love is why he continues to come, year after year to person after person… May you experience this vast, expansive, infinity indestructible love that has been  yours all along. May you discover that this love is as wide as the sky and as small as the cracks in your heart no one else knows about, and may you know, deep in your bones, that love wins.”

My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.

And this is it. This is the life we get here on earth. We get to give away what we receive. We get to believe in each other. We get to forgive and be forgiven. We get to love imperfectly. And we never know what effect it will have for years to come. And all of  it…all of  it is completely worth it.

I need a God who is bigger and more nimble and mysterious than what I could understand and contrive. Otherwise it can feel like I am worshipping nothing more than my own ability to understand the divine.

Spirituality emerged as a fundamental guidepost in Wholeheartedness. Not religiosity but the deeply held belief that we are inextricably connected to one another by a force greater than ourselves–a force grounded in love and compassion. For some of us that’s God, for others it’s nature, art, or even human soulfulness.

“I do not believe that just because you’re opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-lief. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don’t? Because you don’t want any tax money to go there. That’s not pro-life.  That’s pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.” 

“Look into your own heart, discover what it is that gives you pain and then refuse, under any circumstances whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else.”

“The Christian life is not about pleasing God the finger-shaker and judge. It is not about believing now or being good now for the sake of heaven later. It is about entering a relationship in the present that begins to change everything now. Spirituality is about this process: the opening of the heart to the God who is already here.”

If there is any one message the Bible delivers, it is the message that God loves outcasts and that Jesus was born into the world an outcast to rescue and renew outcasts from religion gone bad. He was born poor and died poor, yet the legacy of love he left us, the legacy of inclusion and acceptance and understanding, will endure forever.

God’s grace is not defined as God being forgiving to us even though we sin. Grace is when God is a source of wholeness, which makes up for my failings. My failings hurt me and others and even the planet, and God’s grace to me is that my brokenness is not the final word … it’s that God makes beautiful things out of even my own shit.

When John accuses “evildoers” of leading gullible people into sin, what troubles him is what troubled the Essenes: whether—or how much—to accommodate pagan culture.

Christianity did not begin with a confession. It began with an invitation into friendship, into creating a new community, into forming relationships based on love and service.