This Sunday’s readings: James 2:5-17

Reflections

Just as our love for God begins with listening to God’s Word, the beginning of love for other Christians is learning to listen to them.
~ Dietrich Bonhöffer

The woman says to herself and to anyone who will listen, “I thank you God that you didn’t make me and my husband Claude black. But if the choice was between making me black and making me white trash, God, I would rather you make me black. I couldn’t bear to be white trash.”

The book struck her directly, over her left eye. It struck almost at the same instant that she realized the girl was about to hurl it. Before she could utter a sound, the raw face came crashing across the table toward her, howling. The girl’s fingers sank like clamps around the soft flesh of her neck. (The Girl is ‘Mary Grace’)
~ Flannery O’Connor, Revelation

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The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the ‘rat race’ — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
~ David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008, American author and professor

The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.
~ Elie Wiesel, 1928-2016, Romanian-American Writer and Professor

Justice is for those who deserve it; mercy is for those who don’t.
~ Woodrow Kroll, 1944- , Preacher/Radio Host

Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.
~ Terry Pratchett, 1948-2016, I Shall Wear Midnight

Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1821-1881, Russian Novelist

This Sunday’s readings: James 1:27-2:7

Reflections

Just as our love for God begins with listening to God’s Word, the beginning of love for other Christians is learning to listen to them.
~ Dietrich Bonhöffer

You will never glory in God till first of all God has killed your glorying in yourself.
~ Charles H. Spurgeon, 19th Century Baptist Preacher

We sometimes find God’s forgiveness to be offensive: It reveals us to be distressingly like everyone else! (And we are so special.)
~ Thomas W. Currie III, 1946-, Professor of Theology, Author

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The Gospel takes away our right, forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving…
~ Dorothy Day, 1897-1980, Journalist and Social Activist

We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously – no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be real and costly love, with deep feelings for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner – no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment.
~ C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

But the one who is not afraid to admit everything that he sees to be wrong with himself, and yet recognizes that he may be the object of God’s love precisely because of his shortcomings, can begin to be sincere. His sincerity is based on confidence, not in his own illusions about himself, but in the endless, unfailing mercy of God.
~ Thomas Merton, 1915-1968, Writer/Theologian/Am. Trappist Monk

There is no such thing as an innocent reading, we must ask what reading we are guilty of.
~ Louis Althusser, 1918-1990, French Philosopher

True repentance always terminates on Jesus. It does not wallow in self-loathing or delight in self-flagellation. Rather, it allows an honest sense of our sinfulness to drive us toward the depth of Christ’s mercy in the gospel.
~ Kendal Haug & Will Walker, pastors, wrote Journey to the Cross