Jesus' response to suffering people and to "nobodies" provides a glimpse into the heart of God. God is not the unmoved Absolute, but rather the Loving One who draws near.

Rather, God has commissioned us as agents of intervention in the midst of a hostile and broken world.

Curiously, the righteous Pharisees had little historical impact, save for a brief time in a remote corner of the Roman Empire. But Jesus' disciples - an ornery, undependable, and hopelessly flawed group of men - became drunk with the power of a gospel that offered free forgiveness to the worst sinners and traitors. Those men managed to change the world.

As I look around on Sunday morning at the people populating the pews, I see the risk that God has assumed. For whatever reason, God now reveals himself in the world not through a pillar of smoke and fire, not even through the physical body of his Son in Galilee, but through the mongrel collection that comprises my local church and every other such gathering in God’s name. (p. 68, Church: Why Bother?)

... the core problem with Christians communicating faith: we do not always do so in love. That is an indispensable point to presenting faith in a grace-full way.

The Christian knows to serve the weak not because they deserve it but because God extended his love to us when we deserved the opposite. Christ came down from heaven, and whenever his disciples entertained dreams of prestige and power he reminded them that the greatest is the one who serves. The ladder of power reaches up, the ladder of grace reaches down.

True healing, of deep connective tissue, takes place in community. Where is God when it hurts? Where God's people are.