Barack Obama: The Audacity of Hope

I was quite pleased to hear that Barack Obama had formally declared his intentions to wade into the 2008 Presidential race. These are early days yet, and of course the race is still wide open, but I've been an admirer of Mr Obama since his electrifying speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention (transcript), in which he rousingly proclaimed "Hope in the face of difficulty, hope in the face of uncertainty, the audacity of hope: In the end, that is God's greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation, a belief in things not seen, a belief that there are better days ahead."

It would be great if he eventually did win the presidency, but more importantly, regardless of outcome, I do hope that he conducts himself with humility and grace, especially given his open profession of his faith. In a wonderful speech about the role of religion and politics in society, he speaks of how he came to this faith. (Slate magazine notes that Obama "doesn't recount the story of his conversion in order to establish his religious bona fides; he does it in the service of a broader argument ... for a 'deeper, fuller conversation about religion in this country'".)

I was not raised in a particularly religious household, as undoubtedly many in the audience were. My father, who returned to Kenya when I was just two, was born Muslim but as an adult became an atheist. My mother, whose parents were non-practicing Baptists and Methodists, was probably one of the most spiritual and kindest people I've ever known, but grew up with a healthy skepticism of organized religion herself. As a consequence, so did I.

It wasn't until after college, when I went to Chicago to work as a community organizer for a group of Christian churches, that I confronted my own spiritual dilemma.

I was working with churches, and the Christians who I worked with recognized themselves in me. They saw that I knew their Book and that I shared their values and sang their songs. But they sensed that a part of me that remained removed, detached, that I was an observer in their midst.

And in time, I came to realize that something was missing as well -- that without a vessel for my beliefs, without a commitment to a particular community of faith, at some level I would always remain apart, and alone.

And if it weren't for the particular attributes of the historically black church, I may have accepted this fate. But as the months passed in Chicago, I found myself drawn - not just to work with the church, but to be in the church.

For one thing, I believed and still believe in the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change, a power made real by some of the leaders here today. Because of its past, the black church understands in an intimate way the Biblical call to feed the hungry and cloth the naked and challenge powers and principalities. And in its historical struggles for freedom and the rights of man, I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world. As a source of hope.

And perhaps it was out of this intimate knowledge of hardship -- the grounding of faith in struggle -- that the church offered me a second insight, one that I think is important to emphasize today.

Faith doesn't mean that you don't have doubts.

You need to come to church in the first place precisely because you are first of this world, not apart from it. You need to embrace Christ precisely because you have sins to wash away - because you are human and need an ally in this difficult journey.

It was because of these newfound understandings that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street in the Southside of Chicago one day and affirm my Christian faith. It came about as a choice, and not an epiphany. I didn't fall out in church. The questions I had didn't magically disappear. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side, I felt that I heard God's spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth.

The Crowd or the Cross

This is a fantastic little video. I first saw it at a friend's church's Easter service in New York and it's stuck in my mind ever since. The graphics are great and it lays out very succintly the choice that we all must make - so who will we follow?

The lyrics to the song in the video can be found here.

Movie of My Life

I feel like I'm living in a movie of my life
Someone else is playing me
someone I don't really like
I am just an extra and I don't have many lines
I'm just standing in the shadows of the
Corners of my mind

While the scene goes on
And the story rolls along

I'm just watching me and my life
I'm just watching my days go by
Can't I stop this action for a while
And find out "who am I supposed to be?"

I feel like I'm sleeping and the dream that I've dreaming
Is the nightmare I'm afraid I just might live when I'm awake
Will I miss my only line?
Will I miss my time to shine?

While the scene goes on
And the story rolls along

I'm just watching me and my life
I'm just watching my days go by
Can't I stop this action for a while
And find out "who am I supposed to be?"
Cuz that don't look like me

If I lose myself in life
Would you remind me please
To play my part as I'm assigned
And you'll direct the scene

by Justin McRoberts
from the album Intersections

I first heard this song when I was in New York, and it is one that always speaks so powerfully to me. I love everything about this song - the words, the music, his voice. For whenever I feel lost, disconnected, afraid... I find myself coming back, again and again, to the same unchanging truth.


A man's steps are directed by the LORD.
How then can anyone understand his own way?

Proverbs 20:24

Show me your ways, O LORD,
teach me your paths;
guide me in your truth and teach me,
for you are God my Saviour,
and my hope is in you all day long.

Psalm 25:4-5

Tell me the truth about love

It has just occurred to me that I have a penchant for admiring the work of writers who attended Oxford, struggled with their homosexuality all their lives, and eventually returned to Christianity. Actually, I only have in mind two writers but then they are both great favourites of mine. When it comes to favourites, there is another writer who could be mentioned alongside the first two, but then he went to Cambridge, swung every which way sexually, and, as far as anyone can tell, never returned to Christianity. The first two writers are Oscar Wilde and W. H. Auden, and the third, Lord Byron. Though Wilde and Auden were publicly villified for their homosexuality (Wilde more so than Auden), I think that they both recognised in Christianity something that the more extreme elements of the Religious Right are often loathe to remember: that we are all sinners who stand on equal ground before the cross of Christ.

Auden saw in Christianity "a radical levelling principle that eliminated hierarchies and distinctions between people—smart and stupid, even good and bad—and left them all sinners in a single boat." He wrote: The Catholic faith [i.e., the ideal Christian faith], while it condemns no temperament as incapable of salvation, flatters none as being less in peril than any other. In the same way [a Christian] has to make his public confession of belief in a church which is not confined to his sort, to those with whom by nature he feels at home, for in it there is neither Jew nor German, East nor West, boy nor girl, smart nor dumb, boss nor worker, Bohemian nor bourgeois, no elite of any kind [and in a sense no "gay" or "straight", either] ; indeed there are not even Christians there, for Christianity is a way, not a state, and a Christian is never something one is, only something one can pray to become.

cited in The New Yorker

In a time where ethnic and tribal divisions were everything (perhaps they still are), the apostle Paul's words were absolutely revolutionary (and Auden almost certainly had this in mind when he wrote the previous paragraph): Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all. Therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.

Colossians 3:11-14

Which brings me back to the question that I often ask myself, one that Auden clearly asked himself too -

So what is love?

(I love this poem, by the way.)


Some say that love's a little boy,
And some say it's a bird,
Some say it makes the world go round,
And some say that's absurd,
And when I asked the man next-door,
Who looked as if he knew,
His wife got very cross indeed,
And said it wouldn't do.

Does it look like a pair of pyjamas,
Or the ham in a temperance hotel?
Does its odour remind one of llamas,
Or has it a comforting smell?
Is it prickly to touch as a hedge is,
Or soft as eiderdown fluff?
Is it sharp or quite smooth at the edges?
O tell me the truth about love.

Our history books refer to it
In cryptic little notes,
It's quite a common topic on
The Transatlantic boats;
I've found the subject mentioned in
Accounts of suicides,
And even seen it scribbled on
The backs of railway-guides.

Does it howl like a hungry Alsatian,
Or boom like a military band?
Could one give a first-rate imitation
On a saw or a Steinway Grand?
Is its singing at parties a riot?
Does it only like Classical stuff?
Will it stop when one wants to be quiet?
O tell me the truth about love.

I looked inside the summer house;
It wasn't ever there:
I tried the Thames at Maidenhead,
And Brighton's bracing air.
I don't know what the blackbird sang,
Or what the tulip said;
But it wasn't in the chicken-run,
Or underneath the bed.

Can it pull extraordinary faces?
Is it usually sick on a swing?
Does it spend all its time at the races,
Or fiddling with pieces of string?
Has it views of its own about money?
Does it think Patriotism enough?
Are its stories vulgar but funny?
O tell me the truth about love.

When it comes, will it come without warning
Just as I'm picking my nose?
Will it knock on my door in the morning,
Or tread in the bus on my toes?
Will it come like a change in the weather?
Will its greetings be courteous or rough?
Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.

January 1938
XII, Twelve Songs
W. H. Auden

Happy 2007! (Raining light)

Christmas Greetings: East Timor PM to Osama

East Timor's Prime Minister, Jose Ramos-Horta, sent a message of peace and goodwill via the BBC to Osama bin Laden. Ramos-Horta won a Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent resistance to the Indonesian occupation of his tiny homeland, which won its independence in 1999 in a U.N.-sponsored ballot. Listen to his message here.

ON this occasion when we are celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ, my words, words of peace, are sent to my brother somewhere in the mountains, in the caves, of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Osama bin Laden. Yes, I consider you to be a brother.

We share some common beliefs, beliefs that come from God the Almighty, that teach us about love and compassion. Yes, there are some differences between yourself, my brother Osama bin Laden, and myself. The differences are that while you seem to have a profound resentment towards those who have done centuries of harm to Muslims, and today to Palestinians - I do understand those grievances - and yet I fail to understand why you carry this resentment, this anger, on to attacking innocent civilians, and that includes also Arabs and Muslims who do not share your vision of Islam.

I come from a small country, East Timor, that was invaded by the largest Muslim country in the world. I lost brothers and sisters, yet I do not hate one single Muslim, I do not hate one single Indonesian. That's the only difference between you and me, my brother Osama bin Laden. I beg you to rethink and extend your love, your solidarity, your friendship, the same ones you feel about Palestinians, extend to the rest of the world, extend to Europeans, to Christians. You will then win them over that way, more than through hatred and violence. I thank you, may God Almighty and Merciful, bless us all.


If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.

Hermann Hesse

C. S. Lewis writing just after the second world war.

EVERYONE says forgiveness is a lovely idea until they have something to forgive, as we had during the war. And then to mention the subject at all is to be greeted with howls of anger. It is not that people think this too high and difficult a virtue: it is that they think it hateful and contemptible. "That sort of talk makes them sick," they say. And half of you already want to ask me, "I wonder how'd you feel about forgiving the Gestapo if you were a Pole or a Jew?"

So do I. I wonder very much. Just as when Christianity tells me that I must not deny my religion even to save myself from death by torture, I wonder very much what I should do when it came to the point. I am not trying to tell you ... what I could do--I can do precious little--I am telling you what Christianity is. I did not invent it. And there, right in the middle of it, I find "Forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us." There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven. There are no two ways about it. What are we to do?

It is going to be hard enough, anyway, but I think there are two things we can do to make it easier. When you start mathematics you do not begin with calculus; you begin with simple addition. In the same way, if we really want (but all depends on really wanting) to learn how to forgive, perhaps we had better start with something easier than the Gestapo. One might start with forgiving one's husband or wife, or parents or children, or the nearest N.C.O., for something they have done or said in the last week. That will probably keep us busy for the moment. And secondly, we might try to understand exactly what loving your neighbor as yourself means. I have to love him as I love myself. Well, how exactly do I love myself!

Now that I come to think of it, I have not exactly got a feeling of fondness or affection for myself, and I do not even always enjoy my own society. So apparently "Love your neighbor" does not mean "feel fond of him" or "find him attractive." I ought to have seen that before, because of course, you cannot feel fond of a person by trying. Do I think well of myself, think myself a nice chap? Well, I am afraid I sometimes do (and those are, no doubt, my worst moments) but that is not why I love myself. In fact it is the other way round: my self-love makes me think myself nice, but thinking myself nice is not why I love myself. So loving my enemies does not apparently mean thinking them nice either. That is an enormous relief. For a good many people imagine that forgiving your enemies means making out that they are really not such bad fellows after all, when it is quite plain that they are. Go a step further. In my most clear-sighted moments not only do I not think myself a nice man, but I know that I am a very nasty one. I can at look some of the things I have done with loathing and horror. So apparently I am allowed to loathe and hate some of the things my enemies do. Now that I come to think of it, I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man's actions, but not hate the bad man: or as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner.

For a long time I used to think this is a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life--namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact, the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.

Consequently Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere, he can be cured and made human again.

From The Joyful Christian

A Christmas Gift

This being the season that it is I’ve been thinking about gifts, giving and receiving. I wasn’t as well-prepared as I would have liked to been this year, gift-wise. I was quite organised with the cards, but not so much with the gifts. There were times in which I found myself being presented with a gift that I had not prepared to reciprocate. Then came the attendant feelings of guilt, and feeling that I had let the other party down; because they had given me a gift I felt obliged to have had one prepared for them too (which I didn’t, not really). Sometimes, giving a gift is so much easier than receiving one, especially when you have nothing to give.

We sang this song at church and at our Christmas Eve party.

As little children
We would dream of Christmas morn'
Of all the gifts and toys
We knew we'd find
But we never realized
A baby born one blessed night
Gave us the greatest gift of our lives

We were the reason
That He gave His life
We were the reason
That He suffered and died
To a world that was lost
He gave all He could give
To show us the reason to live

As the years went by
We learned more about gifts
The giving of ourselves
And what that means
On a dark and cloudy day
A man hung crying in the rain
All because of love, all because of love


God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing - or should we say ‘seeing’? there are no tenses in God - the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath’s sake, hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is a ‘host’ who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and ‘take advantage of’ Him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves.

C. S. Lewis in The Four Loves

In the Christian story God descends to reascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity; down further still, if embryologists are right, to recapitulate in the womb ancient and pre-human phases of life; down to the very roots and seabed of Nature He has created. But He goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined world up with Him.

C. S. Lewis in Miracles

In this season of giving we remember most of all, God’s gift of love. Infinitely costly yet freely, and gladly, given.

For to us a child is born
to us a Son is given
and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Isaiah 9:6

Perhaps the greatest challenge that we all face is learning how to receive a gift that is, all at once, both incredibly humbling and hopelessly exhilarating.

Heartfelt thanks to all my dear family and friends.

Wishing everyone a joy-filled Christmas season, and a very blessed New Year.

In the bleak midwinter

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
in the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Our God, heaven cannot hold him, nor earth sustain;
heaven and earth shall flee away when he comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
the Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
but his mother only, in her maiden bliss,
worshipped the beloved with a kiss.

What can I give him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
if I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
yet what I can I give him — give my heart.

by Christina Rossetti

love has made me hollow, love has made me whole

I came across this beautiful, moving poem in a wonderful book called "Finding God at Harvard - Spiritual Journeys of Thinking Christians." It's a collection of essays published in 1996, and this poem was written by one Poh Lian Lim. She's a doctor who grew up in Malaysia and graduated from Harvard in biochemistry, before receiving her M.D. from Columbia University. She is currently practising in the States.


De Noche

I am hollow for loving
without return.
I am chambered, echoing
only your name.

falling from wretched fingers,
a handful of shriveled grass
died this long hot shimmering summer,
in the little well-loved garden;
to the eyes worn with wearied hope
the rains never came
(and tears cannot sustain life).

a whole year the wound waited,
willful with venom, throbbing with desire;
alternatively a fever and a shaking chill,
bone-deep, world-vast, consuming as a fire.

rising on a morning sweet with spring
the light spills warm onto the windowsill
the violets purr, delighting in the sun.
all the world is radiant blue and gold;

and far beneath, the distant traffic hum
beside the gray-blue Hudson
murmurs ten o'clock silences
and a leisurely cup of coffee.

and wondering if I'm missing much
of that lecture when it's really
so much nicer sitting here,
listening to the gurgle of pipes;

till, piercing deep and twisting
some thought of you comes, swifter than desire
(vivid sunlit flickers of the now-closed past)
pain catches on my breath; I recognize
familiar as only an adversary is,
in one vast inchoate cry
blotting out all affections and appetites merely human,
my old and hopeless yearning.

I wrestle, reaching wildly for a grip
on this pain that lives by the pulsing of my heart;
and in the darkness of my unknowing,
bitter with tears,
flung out like rope into the abyss
paying out endlessly
prayer yet brings easing
for this one night.

I am come into a Presence.
passionate with patience
familiar as sorrow,
stern as a rock that questions dash against
and die like waves away

into a stillness
worn and dear as a mother's hands,
a space of mercy, a space or quiet
a dear and gracious place.

and shall I truly know
some day
that high, glad, lifting joy
that lilting happiness?

I am open to the earth and sky
washed by rain and dried by sun,
the scarecrow stands in empty fields
as happy and as free.
And wheeling seasons circle like the birds
in my embrace
transparent now of any fear

and love has made me hollow
and love has made me whole.

De noche iremos, de noche - By night we shall go, by night
que para encontrar la fuente - seeking to find the source
solo la sed nos alumbra - thirst alone our light
solo la sed nos alumbra - thirst alone our light


I don’t think I really understood heartbreak until last weekend. A dear friend’s father had passed away so very suddenly.

I went to the first memorial service on Friday, and the burial on Sunday. Seeing a family torn apart by grief, yet hearing my friend thanking God for so very many things, and singing hymns of hope as the coffin was lowered into the grave, I could not help but weep.

We are none of us, immune from hurt. It's a fact of life in the fallen world that we live in. Sheltered as I am, I never had such a close encounter with heartbreak until that day. Lesser things than death, like break-ups and broken relationships, break our hearts. The thought of being completely cut off from someone whom you have known and loved all along, never to see them or to speak to them again, things never again being the way they used to be, the end of a cherished relationship as it were… I don’t think I ever knew how badly I could hurt till that Sunday.

The only thing that comforted me in the midst of all that despair, was knowing that God himself is not immune to heartbreak. God himself knows exactly what it is like to lose a loved one. God himself suffered infinite heartbreak, ultimate loneliness, and complete abandonment when He was cut off from the Father on our behalves - My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? – so that the Father can say to us, I will never leave you nor forsake you.

When Jesus died on the cross, God the Son was cut off from God the Father – they who have known and loved each other for all eternity – so that we could be brought in from the dark. It must have been agony beyond comprehension. It must have been hell.

So maybe this is love. Unchanging, unfailing, and completely unconditional. Self-denying, self-giving, and utterly sacrificial.

So maybe this is freedom. So maybe this is peace. So maybe this is joy. To know that you are loved that much.

So the seasons whirl around me - the tender buds of spring, the bright blue heat of summer, the golden leaves of autumn, the silent snow of winter (there is a season for everything) - but I hold them all lightly in my embrace.

Transparent now of any fear.

Dominus Illuminatio Mea. The Lord is my light.

I know the heart of life is good

Two Sundays ago we went to watch The Philharmonic Orchestra play at the Esplanade. I’m not a massive classical music fan, more of a philistine than an aficionado, but we were there to watch Cherfy and some other friends play. The second, and longer, piece that the orchestra played was Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 in C major, more popularly known as “Leningrad”.

I confess to be largely clueless about a lot of the finer details of classical music. I never even made it past Grade I piano – I was (and still am) one of those bad Asian children who never properly applied themselves to the violin or the piano. However, I’ve often found myself enjoying symphonies about revolutions and wars, finding them vigorous and exciting. But in my limited forays into the world of classical music, this is the first time that I have found myself confronted with pain so stark and anger so raw.

The symphony was written in the midst of World War II, and is dedicated to the city of Leningrad. The German siege of Leningrad started in 1941 and was only lifted in 1944. Almost a million people died. The concert programme quotes musicologist Nicholas Slonimsky: "No composer before Shostakovich had written a musical work depicting a still-raging war, and no composer had ever attempted to describe a future victory, in music, with such power and conviction, at a time when his people fought for their very right to exist as a nation." The programme notes tell us that Shostakovich wrote the finale for the symphony, titled "Victory", while seeking refuge in Kuybyshev, having been evacuated from Moscow in the face of a looming German attack. The Moscow premiere of the symphony was performed to the sound of air raid sirens by musicians who were themselves ravaged by the war.

I simply could not imagine how Shostakovich could write of victory in the midst of despair, and how those musicians could play to the sound of falling bombs and wailing sirens. At the time it must have seemed like complete and utter madness. Or was it, a hope so improbable, so outrageous even, that it just might be true?

No it won’t all go the way it should
But I know the heart of life is good

sings John Mayer on his (rather excellent) new album, Continuum. 60 years on, many of us only know the second world war as a series of movie vignettes. Pearl Harbour. Schindler’s List. Saving Private Ryan. Life is Beautiful. But the horror of death and destruction remains a daily reality for so many. How do you know that the heart of life is good? How can you know that? Is that just the privilege of the lucky few who happen to have been born into conditions of (relative) peace and prosperity? Is hope the prerogative of the powerful? How do you look despair in the face and still hold out hope?

The Bible speaks of hope in the strangest of terms. Hope does not disappoint. Romans 5:5 Since when was hope ever certain? When faced with so much brokenness in the world, and in myself, I want more than just a vague altruistic belief that it will all be all right in the end. I want to know, for sure, that everything wrong will be put right. Is this nothing more than a naive fantasy, mere wishful thinking on my part?

When confronted with the premature death of a beloved brother, Jesus said to his grieving sister, "I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?"

"Yes, Lord," she told him, "I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world." John 11:25-27

Jesus raised her brother from the dead, bringing him out of the tomb alive.

It’s so amazing, that in the face of tragedy, death and despair, Jesus promises us more than just escape, or even compensation. He promises us resurrection, both spiritual and physical. The complete redemption of all creation. There will be hugging in heaven (as Tim Keller likes to say).

At the end of history, God will wipe away every tear from our eyes. No more death or mourning or crying or pain. God will make all things new. Everything sad is going to come untrue. Because nobody expresses this better, here is Dostoevsky once again.

I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, of the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they’ve shed; and it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify what has happened.

And so this is the certain hope that we have. I know that the heart of life is good, and that it will all be good in the end. Because at the heart of the universe is a God who does not stand aloof and apart from our suffering, but directly involves himself in it. Jesus suffered infinitely so that he could eventually defeat suffering once and for all without destroying us, for so very often we are such a large part of what is wrong with the world. But I know for certain, that one day everything will be put right, everything broken will be mended and made new, for when Jesus rose from the grave, triumphing over death, he gave us a taste of the coming victory.

Tim Keller's 9-11 sermon (based on John 11, preached the first Sunday after 9-11-2001) is freely available here.