"Jesus sought to challenge and change Israel's expectations.  He was conceived by the Holy Spirit but out of wedlock.  He was born in Bethlehem but in the humblest of environments.  His arrival was announced by angels but to a bunch of shepherds.  He lived in Egypt as a refugee.  He grew up in an insignificant backwater town called Nazareth.  Jesus did everything he could to enter into the world in a way that communicated that while he was indeed the Messiah, he did not come in power to militarily or politically overthrow their Roman oppressors and establish another earthly kingdom.  But changing those expectations was one of the biggest difficulties that Jesus faced throughout his earthly ministry."

“There is divine beauty in learning...To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps. The books I have read were composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, teachers and disciples. I am the sum total of their experiences, their quests. And so are you.”

“People need to be taught how to live as part of a body, how to understand and live out our roles as a member of a church, citizen of a nation, and resident of a community. In our self-centered, narcissistic, individuaistic, expressionist age, we are incompetent in the arts of living together.  We may be naturally social and political animals, but we still have to acquire the cultivated virtues of citizens. Churches must help form us into better political animals.”

“The doctrine of the imago Dei, that human beings are created in the “image and likeness of God,” is central to Christian life and practice and touches, perhaps even helps to form, every other doctrine of the Christian faith in one way or another.”

"History and Scripture teaches us that there can be no reconciliation without repentance. There can be no repentance without confession. And there can be no confession without truth."