Love was compressed for all history in that lonely figure on the cross, who said that he could call down angels at any moment on a rescue mission, but chose not to - because of us. At Calvary, God accepted his own unbreakable terms of justice.

I have yet to find any support in the Bible for an attitude of smugness: Ah, they deserve their punishment; watch them squirm.

Jesus was a master of grace: he attracted sinners and moral outcasts even as he offended the religious and responsible people of his day.

The church works best not as a power center, rather as a countercultural community - in the world but not of it - that shows others how to live the most fulfilled and meaningful life on earth. In modern society that means rejecting the false gods of independence, success, and pleasure and replacing them with love for God and neighbor.

As Ecclesiastes tells it, a wholesale devotion to pleasure will, paradoxically, lead to a state of utter despair.

At Calvary, God accepted his own unbreakable terms of justice.

Prayer enters the pool of God's love and widens outward.