For your consideration, my opening notes in in our poverty, the book:

THE JESUS story began for me many years ago, and it was a story that began with a given: Jesus is the Son of God. From the given flowed many claims, demands and concerns; claims of what was right and wrong, demands to be good, and concerns of not being good enough. For a while, that approach worked for me. The given was enough, and I could be good enough. Yet in time it ceased to be—perhaps because I ceased to be.

I think that my problem with the story was that it was too big in all of the small places, and too small in all of the big places. It increasingly became a story that seemed to have itself backwards. Somewhere along the way, I decided it was all but completely wrong.

But by that time it had already become a story that I could never fully let go, and maybe this was the point of it all in the first place. If so, it served its purpose well, and to it I will forever be in debt. Whatever the case may be, I have had to rewrite the story for myself—a process that I now realize will continue for the rest of my life.

I will always think of God in terms of particular ancient stories and with the accent of a particular religious language, but I have learned that what matters far more than the stories and the language is the meaning of the stories, and the messages the language is trying to convey. I have learned that finding a way to see God clearly is the only thing that matters—that in the midst of a world that can seem ambiguous, arbitrary, pointless and even malevolent, we are in fact awash in a sea of immeasurable love. This I have come to know beyond any shadow of doubt.

What we must do is discover the vision to see this love, and find the courage to submerge ourselves and drown within it. This is the great challenge of the Jesus story, and it is the sheer depth of this challenge, rather than any intellectual debate, that has caused serious emphasis upon Jesus' story to often be viewed with great skepticism. Jesus called us to accept more than we are willing to accept, to reject more than we are willing to reject, to love more than we are willing to love, and to give more than we are willing to give. Jesus called us to live within the reign and rule of God, and we are typically unwilling to do so. This is why people like you and me killed him.

Yet while most of Christianity focuses upon Jesus' death, I believe we must choose to think instead of his life. I fully understand that as far as Christian doctrine is concerned, the death and resurrection of Jesus are of paramount importance. But I can never escape the feeling that to focus upon them to the exclusion of everything else is a way to cheat at believing the story. It seems to me all too convenient to say that Jesus died for us, and that is the end of that—than to say Jesus called us to live like he did, and that this is the beginning of everything.