"Because Good Friday is not about us trying to "get right with God." It is about us entering the difference between God and humanity and just touching it for a moment. Touching the shimmering sadness of humanity's insistence that we can be our own gods, that we can be pure and all-powerful." - Nadia Bolz-Weber

Nadia Bolz-Weber is a Lutheran pastor in Colorado. She is also six foot one, a black belt, and a best selling author. In fundamentalist circles she is seen as a raging liberal, and I'll admit that at times even I find some of her ideas pretty far off base. Then she preaches a sermon containing something like the above and I am reminded that the family of God is not about politics ("Give to Caesar what is Caesar's). I am reminded that the Apostles were a strange casserole that included Mathew, a Jewish tax collector for the Roman Empire- in other words a sell out- at one extreme and an anti-Roman insurrectionist at the other (Simon the Zealot). Jesus was able to unite this rag tag band because He got them serving a kingdom that is not of this world. Why would He do any less today.

As for the above quote from Ms. Bolz-Weber, it is rather unnecessary to expand further upon it. It is perfectly clear and well said. We do not pull ourselves up by our bootstraps to get right with God. To try to do so is itself often an attempt to be our own God. Instead, His holiness reminds us how far we fall short, and how desperately we need Him. The only way to getting "right with God" is God's grace poured out on us.

Through His grace we can enter that sad, essential difference between God and humanity. And then the differences among ourselves seem pretty insignificant.