Sunday-Ps.99 -ends a series of psalms with God as king.the image doesn't work well in our time. It is a metaphor for god’s majesty, again an element of the divine that is difficult for us. How would you try to describe it in more contemporary language.
Monday-Everyone who struggles for justice, everyone who makes just claims in unjust surroundings, is working for God’s reign, even if not a Christian. The church does not comprise all of God’s reign; that goes beyond the church’s boundaries. The church values everything that is in tune with its struggle to set up God’s reign. A church that tries to keep itself pure and uncontaminated would not be a church of God’s service to people. Oscar Romero
Tuesday-"The Hebrew Scriptures are filled with prayers of crying out to God. Prayers of Lament give form and voice to our grief, a space to wail and name what is not right in the world in the context of prayer. The prayer of lament is first and foremost truth-telling, it begins by challenging the way things are. Lament names that something is not right in the world."--- Christine Valters Paintner, PhD
Wednesday-André Trocmé (He protected Jews in a small town during WWII)Politics per se are not the church’s business. The church is not to preoccupy itself with results. It has not even to practice “pacifism,” that is, reject arms with the object of stopping war. No, God expects only one thing of it: that it walk in obedience to the gospel, refusing violence in whatever form because of that obedience, without concerning itself with the consequences, good or bad, that such refusal may involve. Such faith puts into practice the justice that marks God’s kingdom. The church’s business is not to establish peace between the nations, but to bear witness to the love of God, to live in his peace and righteousness.
Thursday-It was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed.”~ Thomas Merton
Friday-Kallistos Ware-God does not condemn us to hell; God wishes all humans to be saved. He will love us to all eternity, but there will exist the possibility that we do not accept the love and do not respond to it. And the refusal to accept love, the refusal to respond to it, that precisely is the meaning of hell. Hell is not a place where God puts us; it is a place where we put ourselves. The doors of hell, insofar as they have locks, have locks on the inside.
Saturday-"The season calls me to let go of false assumptions, wrests my too-small images of God from me as I enter the Mystery of dying and rising. Autumn demands that I release what I think is important to do and returns me to the only thing which matters that I remember—to love and to allow love to sculpt me, even as it breaks my heart."--- Christine Valters Paintner, PhD
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