First Sunday in Lent

It might supprise you, but Sundays are not part of Lent. (Go ahead, grab a calendar and count out the 40 days of Lent starting with Ash Wednesday -- you'll find you have to skip Sundays to make it work out.) There are "Sundays in Lent" not "Sundays of Lent". The reason for this is that EVERY Sunday is a joyful celebration of the resurrection of Jesus the Christ. As my pastor when I was growing up used to say "We are an Easter people!" -- meaning that Christians are rooted in the resurrection and never completely blot it from view. Sundays during Lent should seem even more special and celebratory because Sundays are "Feast Days" when fasts are to be broken. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lent#Fasting_and_abstinence (right above the "Holy Days" heading) or http://www.lexorandi.org/lent.html. For some people, this makes fasting from something during Lent MORE difficult because they still experience it on Sundays.

How you choose to observe the Sundays in Lent is up to you, but if you are observing a spiritual practice during Lent, remember today that the purpose of all things things is to help us grow closer God, who loves us so much that Jesus suffered and died and was raised again for our sake to reconcile the world to God. Every Sunday, we celebrate the fact that we know the tomb is empty!

Anyway, my Lenten devotions won't appear in the same way on the Sundays in Lent. Instead, I'll just offer a few quotes or links to things I read recently that were interesting.

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If you want a relationship with the biblical God, you have to let Him determine the scope and nature of your relationship. You have to give Him his freedom. This is one of the differences between true spirituality and a mechanistic imitation, one of the differences between rationalized and relational. God is a Person and He is free, and He is Lord of the living Body. - From http://nextreformation.com/?p=1970

In Monk Habits For Everyday People, author Dennis Okholm rightly observes that, "We hear what we are trained to hear. And if we have been trained well to be possessive consumers, then we may not be well trained to hear the needs of others or the voice of God." If we take Shelly Lazarus' challenge seriously and observe our country's consumer credit crisis, then we can agree that we have been trained to be "possessive consumers."
- From http://www.churchmarketingsucks.com/archives/2008/01/a_readers_resol.html

But as people of faith, we know that the change must go deeper than politics. In fact, unless change goes deeper, politics won't really change. And no matter which candidate finally wins this presidential election, he or she will not be able to really change the big things in the U.S. and the world that must be changed, unless and until there is a real movement pushing for those changes from outside of politics. Because when politics fails to resolve or even address the most significant moral issues, what often occurs is that social movements rise up to change politics; and the best social movements always have spiritual foundations.
- From http://blog.beliefnet.com/godspolitics/2008/01/the-power-of-change-by-jim-wal.html