There may be no English word as bent and broken by casual misuse, or drained of blood by idealizing admirers and apologists, or grossly caricatured by huckstering detractors, as church.

The passion of Jesus is lonely only as all our deaths are lonely. He is with us in the loneliness of death, too. And so, he and we are not alone even there. The same blow that strikes him dead, strikes us all dead, and it strikes us in the same way.

And yet a dream of God--THIS God--is no ordinary dream, nor night terror... It is an apocalyptic vision. As such it makes manifest what good people do not want to see, perhaps cannot see. It manifests above all that there is a tomorrow that no yesterday can dictate. But it does so with the ambiguity that accompanies every call to revolution. "The Reign of God is coming," it says, "and it is coming for you!

...theology waits as it works. It waits for its lungs again to be filled. Without the renewing breath of the Spirit it cannot speak.