Volume 3 Issue 19

• We shall have to repent in this generation, not so much for the evil deeds of the wicked people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. –Martin Luther King, Jr.
  
• Before God can deliver us we must undeceive ourselves. –St. Augustine of Hippo
  
• O how much self-discipline, nobility of soul, lofty sentiments, we can treat ourselves to, when we are well and everything we touch prospers—Cheap: scarcely better than believing success is the reward of virtue. –Dag Hammarskjold
  
• Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate. –Dietrich Bonhoeffer
  
• We Americans live in a country that consumes an enormous and disproportionate amount of the world’s resources. We live under an administration that subordinates human rights abroad to American economic interests. We waste billions of dollars creating weapons of nuclear destruction while millions of humans starve. For the contemporary Christian, one crucial test of moral and religious conversion must remain the ability to name these forces as antichrist; for the Christian convert who refuses to confront the principalities and powers of this world and summon them to repentance and to the obedience of faith succumbs to hypocrisy and inauthenticity. –Donald L. Gelpi
  
• Genuine evangelism will spark repentance not only for our personal histories but also for our collective histories….To convert to Jesus Christ is to rise above both personal ego and cultural blindness. –Jim Wallis
  
• The prophets called Israel to repent,…They sought to transform their social world so that the future would be different: “Seek the Lord and live! Seek good, and not evil that you may live!” (Amos 5:6, 14-15) The purpose of the prophets was not to reveal the future, but to change it. The crisis announced by the pre-destruction prophets thus had both present and future dimensions. The future crisis was the threatened end of society, and the present crisis was the need to change the state of affairs that was leading to the catastrophe before it was too late. –Marcus J. Borg
  
• It is time to break the silence. The profound disillusionment caused by the return of the Bush administration to four more years in the White House has numbed me. Mary and I have been contemplating the heretofore unthinkable: leaving the country. While not having yet ruled that possibility out, its escapist implications have been sobering to the point that we are obliged to conscientiously exhaust all of the alternatives. Lent 2005 is the most appropriate time for such a process.
  
• Lent is a uniquely Christian observance, although this doesn’t mean that it is without it corollaries in the world’s other faith traditions. Self-denial and penitence are the prescribed methods for making the forty day journey (not counting Sundays) leading to the events of Holy Week that culminate in the Resurrection. How this tradition has been perverted and trivialized will be painfully obvious in the Mardi Gras revels this coming Tuesday as nominal Christians around the globe prepare to have their foreheads imposed with Wednesday’s ashes as a sign that the attempt to give up chocolate may last until the orgiastic beheading of confectionary bunnies on Easter morning.
  
• I am going to make a concerted effort to observe a more faithful and meaningful Lenten season this year. I am suffering from extreme disappointment and painful feelings of betrayal, and I need to find out for myself if there really is life beyond this grave in which I find myself. In the spirit of responsibly answering the call to which I am ordained, I am choosing to share my journey with all who care to join me. Starting Ash Wednesday I will post a brief Lenten devotional each day on the “Sermons” page until Easter. This cyber-ministry began as “Easter and Beyond” but will for the present focus its attention on just making it to Easter. If successful, then it will perhaps be appropriate to again consider the beyond.
  
• Until next time…….Shalom!