For Jesus, heaven and hell were present realities. Ways of living we can enter into here and now. He talked very little of the life beyond this one.

We need a childlike trust that God is good... ultimately we are OK. That is a simple, beautiful pure thing that can be complicated ferociously by all sorts of intellectual categories.

Fear wants us to become obsessed with some event or person in the future, a year, a month, even a day. It also wants us to look backwards not at our successes, but our short-comings and our failures. Fear losses it's grip when we stay in the now.

[The Bible] has to be interpreted. And if it isn’t interpreted, then it can’t be put into action. So if we are serious about following God, then we have to interpret the Bible. It is not possible to simply do what the Bible says. We must first make decisions about what it means at this time, in this place, for these people.

Jesus is God's way of refusing to give up his dream for the world.

Being a pastor for 20 years I realized that the labels, agnostic, atheist, believer, everybody's human and everybody wants to know what kind of universe we're living in, and everybody's living according to a story.

I am for marriage. I am for fidelity. I am for love, whether it's a man and woman, a woman and a woman, a man and a man.