late Catholic bishop Dom Helder Camara: “When I fed the hungry, they called me a saint. When I asked why people are hungry, they called me a communist.”

Jesus came not to give us guilt but to give us life. We never fully arrive at the perfect lives or the perfect world we hope for, which is why grace is so magnificent. But we still must strive to see our hypocrisies and contradictions become less and less each day. We are all bound up in the filthy system, and if you find yourself particularly

for those of us who have nearly given up on the church, may we take comfort in the words of St. Augustine: “The Church is a whore, but she’s my mother.

“The church is like Noah’s ark. It stinks, but if you get out of it, you’ll drown.

Patting Mother Teresa on the back, someone said to her, “I wouldn’t do what you do for a million dollars.” She said with a grin, “Me neither.”

We can admire and worship Jesus without doing what he did. We can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things. We can adore his cross without taking up ours. I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor.

some of the most redemptive, life-giving moments happen around dinner tables and in our homes, where we cross the line and actually become a friend, not just a service provider.

“The Scandal of Grace,” I told the story of Bud Welch as I talked about how God’s love extends to all losers, whether Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Saul of Tarsus, Timothy McVeigh, or me. The program team showed a PowerPoint presentation using the “visual edition” of Philip Yancey’s work What’s So Amazing about Grace? In the PowerPoint,

It was Mark Twain who said, “It’s not the parts of the Bible I don’t understand that scare me, but the parts I do understand.”