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The church is always at its worst when it’s running government. It’s at its next worst when it’s collaborating with government—especially collaborating in an uncritical ways as it did with the [aboriginal] residential schools. It’s at its best and most powerful when it’s resisting government. Its role is to be interrogative in a modern way.

My business is to meddle with the world.

According to the U.S. Supreme Court (Lynch v. Donnelly, 1984), the traditional courthouse nativity scene displayed at Christmas has become "a passive symbol." In a 1984 case upholding a 40-year-old tradition in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, of erecting a city-sponsored Christmas display (which included Santa Claus), Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote that it "engenders a friendly community spirit" and "serves the commercial interests" of the merchants. Without intending to, Chief Justice Burger delivered in those words a prophecy as clear and as excruciating as any in Scripture. The birth of the Messiah, which so terrorized Herod, has in our day become a passive symbol, one that serves our culture's commercial interests.

Love of God correlates with occupation of land; consequently, love of God means to order the land in ways that are congruent with Yahweh's character; this character, we know everywhere in Scripture, is marked by mercy, graciousness, steadfast love, compassion, fidelity, generosity, and forgiveness.

To clasp hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.

Concern for peace, whether Jewish or Christian, is part of the purpose of God for all eternity. God is by nature a reconciler, a maker of shalom. For us to participate in the peacemaking purposes of that kind of God is not just morality. It is not just politics. It is worship, doxology, praise.

When the economy is geared to the arming of the heavens rather than the development of the heart, neighbors and nations must learn to cry out their dissatisfaction together.

[T]he demand for radical love of God is indistinguishable from the radical love of those who have no claim on us. So prayer comes to focus on that vortex: where freedom to give and receive the abundance of God’s love spills over into, comprehends, includes, becomes the essence of the splendour of love of the vulnerable and the dispossessed.

The object of redemption is not that we should be rescued from the world, but that we should be rescued for it. For life!

Oh, Lord, I’ve made you a place in my heart, and I hope now you’ll leave it alone.