William Sloane Coffin

“God is love, as Scripture says, and that means the revelation is in the relationship. 'God is love' means God is known devotionally, not dogmatically. 'God is love' does not clear up old mysteries; it discloses new mystery. 'God is love' is not a truth we can master; it is only one to which we can surrender. Faith is being grasped by the power of love.”

“We are not slaves but children of our Father, free to do good, free to sin. So when in anguish over any human violence done to innocent victims, we ask of God, 'How could you let that happen?' it's well to remember that God at that very moment is asking the exact same question of us.”

“But as regards love, I am sure the Bible is right: the opposite of love is not hate but fear. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.”

“...for if you lessen your anger at the structures of power, you lower your love for the victims of power.”

“Learning, and especially unlearning, can take place only in the absence of defensiveness.... [W]e can drop our defenses only when we love and are loved.”

“Many of us overvalue autonomy, the strength to stand alone, the capacity to act independently. Far too few of us pay attention to the virtues of dependence and interdependence, and especially to the capacity to be vulnerable.”

“Too many religious people make faith their aim. They think 'the greatest of these' is faith, and faith defined as all but infallible doctrine. These are the dogmatic, divisive Christians, more concerned with freezing the doctrine than warming the heart. If faith can be exclusive, love can only be inclusive.”

“Love, and you are a success whether or not the world thinks so. The highest purpose of Christianity--which is primarily a way of life, not a system of belief--is to love one another.”

“He who loves father and mother more than me is not worthy of me.' That's not really cruel. Loving Christ more than our fathers and mothers simply saves the love we have for our parents from idolatry.... God, as the source of love, is the proper head of every loving household.”

“Love measures our stature: the more we love, the bigger we are. There is no smaller package in all the world than that of a man all wrapped up in himself.”

“A friend...risks her friendship for the sake of her friend.”

“To love is surely to support and to encourage--but not necessarily to approve. Quite the contrary! If we love one another we will help one another fight against our evil dreams.”

“No sermon on love can fail to mention love's most difficult problem in our time--how to find effective ways to alleviate the massive suffering of humanity at home and abroad. What we need to realize is that to love effectively we must act collectively...”

“...love does have a reward. Just as the proper benefits of education are the opportunities of continuing education, so the rewards of loving are to become yet more vulnerable, more tender, more caring.”

“And if we exalt freedom as Christians, we must remember that freedom is grounded in love.”

“Prophets from Amos and Isaiah to Gandhi and King have shown how frequently compassion demands confrontation. Love without criticism is a kind of betrayal. Lying is done with silence as well as with words.”

“Love is to make us more human, and that demands that we care so much for each other that we have not to be nice but to be honest. We have to be honest, for most real faults are hidden and therefore demand an outside revealer.”

“Fear destroys intimacy. It distances us from each other; or makes us cling to each other, which is the death of freedom.... Only love can create intimacy, and freedom too, for when all hearts are one, nothing else has to be one--neither clothes nor age; neither sex nor sexual preference; race nor mind-set.”

“But if we hate evil more than we love the good, we become damn good haters.... However deep, our anger, like that of Christ, must always and only measure our love.”

“Hope criticizes what is, hopelessness rationalizes it. Hope resists, hopelessness adapts.”

“The banality of guilt is that it is such a convenient substitute for responsibility. It's so much easier to beat your breast than to stick your neck out.”

“As for loneliness, it too has deep roots in selfishness, for its anguish stems less from having no one with whom to share one's burdens, more from having only one's burdens to share.”

“But what I am beginning to suspect is that most guilty people reject the possibility of forgiveness not because it is too good to believe, but because they fear the responsibility forgiveness entails. It's hell to be guilty, but its worse to be responsible.”

“...there is more mercy in God than sin in us.”

“Remember also that scars of all sorts are all right. Scars are wounds that have healed, not without a trace, but have healed nonetheless. Think of all the scar tissue around Christ's heart, Jesus our wounded healer.”

“If we misconceive God as Father Protector,...then each disappointment reduces what may confidently be affirmed about God. And this is how most people lose their faith.”

“In the Holy Land are two ancient bodies of water. Both are fed by the Jordan River. In one, fish play and roots find sustenance. In the other, there is no splash of fish, no sound of bird, no leaf around. The difference is not in the Jordan, for it empties into both, but in the Sea of Galilee: for every drop taken in one goes out. It gives and lives. The other gives nothing. And it is called the Dead Sea.”

“And if God is a suffering God, if this whole universe is borne on a heart infinite in compassion, then the more we suffer in his name the closer we come to him.”

“[When things go badly] Instead of becoming alienated from their faith in God, wouldn't it make more sense for them to become alienated from their mislaid hopes in human beings, alienated from shallow notions of automatic progress, from sentimental notions about the 'nobility of man'?”

“As all of us who strive to be good parents know, love is self-restricting when it comes to power.... Likewise God has left his servants freedom of choice.”

“We want God to be strong, so that we can be weak. But He wants to be weak so that we can be strong.”

“Jesus is both a mirror to our humanity and a window to divinity, a window revealing as much of God as is given mortal eyes to see. When Christians see Christ empowering the weak, scorning the powerful, healing the wounded, and judging their tormentors, we are seeing transparently the power of God at work.”

“The consequences of the past are always with us, and half the hostilities tearing the world apart could be resolved today were we to allow the forgiveness of sins to alter these consequences.... if we were to say of ourselves, 'The hostility stops here.”

“The world owes me a living'--that's passive. 'I owe the world and God a life'--that's active.”

“Joy is the most important Christian emotion. Duty calls only when gratitude fails to prompt.”

“God provides minimum protection, maximum support--support to help us grow up, to stretch our minds and hearts until they are as wide as God's universe.”

“...in home after home I have seen Jesus change beer into furniture, sinners into saints, hate-filled relations into loving ones, cowardice into courage, the fatigue of despair into the buoyancy of hope.”

“The joy that is of God is not opposed to earthly pleasures. Rather it infuses them with a foundation of meaning.”

“It is bad religion to deify doctrines and creeds.... Doctrines, let's not forget, supported slavery and apartheid.... Moreover, doctrines can divide while compassion can only unite.”

“We must guard against being too individualistic.... Christ is born to bring hope and joy also to whole communities of people--the exiles, the deported, the tortured, the silenced.”

“Spirituality means to me living the ordinary life extraordinarily well. As the old-church father said, 'The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”

“What is faith? Faith is being grasped by the power of love.”

“[D]are to act wholeheartedly without absolute certainty.”

“Because our value is a gift, we don't have to prove ourselves, only to express ourselves...”

“It is not because we have value that we are loved, but because we are loved that we have value. Our value is a gift, not an achievement.”

“And if we are not yet one in live at least we are one in sin, which is no mean bond because it preludes the possibility of separation through judgment.”

“Socrates had it wrong; it is not the unexamined but finally the uncommitted life that is not worth living.”

“I also was persuaded that the woman most in need of liberation was the woman in every man just as the man most in need of liberation was the man in every woman.”

“Christ came to take away our sins, not our minds.”

“Christians have no business thinking that the good life consists mainly in not doing bad things. We have no business thinking that to do evil in this world you have to be a Bengal tiger, when, in fact, it is enough to be a tame tabby—a nice person but not a good one. In short, Pentecost makes it clear that nothing is so fatal to Christianity as indifference. ”