excerpts from Celtic Daily Prayer during Lent . . .

I couldn't think of an appropriate title for this entry, maybe "re-emergent church" would have been good as a friendly dig on my friends in the "Emergent Church Movement"?!  I just continue to sense God is returning His Son's Church back to Him, His Body manifest in the world, and it's going to have to come out of the "boxes" sooner or later for that happen!  Organic and simple; no buildings, no programs, no budgets, no exclusive paid clergy . . . just Jesus and the Holy Spirit doing the Father's bidding!

"March 9
PSALM 85:13    ISAIAH 61:1-4    LUKE 14:15-24

What is both Good and New about the Good News is the wild claim that Jesus did not simply tell us that God loves us even in our wickedness and folly and wants us to love each other the same way and to love Him too, but that if we let Him, God will actually bring about this unprecedented transformation of our hearts Himself.
What is both Good and New about the Good News is that mad insistence that Jesus lives on among us not just as another haunting memory but as the outlandish, holy, and invisible power of God working not just through the sacraments but in countless hidden ways to make even slobs like us loving and whole beyond anything we could conceivably pull off by ourselves.
Thus the Gospel is not only Good and New but, if you take it seriously, a Holy Terror. Jesus never claimed that the process of being changed from a slob into a human being was going to be a Sunday-School picnic. On the contrary, child-birth may occasionally be painless, but rebirth never. Part of what it means to be a slob is to hang on for dear life to our slobbery.
Frederick Buechner

March 10            
PSALM 34:18    ISAIAH 30:17    LUKE 14:7-11

True discretion is impossible without true humility. Self-deception is unlikely when a person is humble enough to submit to the judgment of another.
John Cassian

March 11
PSALM 142:1-7    SONG OF SONGS 8:8-9    MATTHEW 7:24-27

The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, his own law, and judges the brethren and himself accordingly. He acts as if he is the creator of community, as if it is his dream which holds the community together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes first an accuser of his brethren, then God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer



March 12 
PSALM 144:1-8    Isaiah 28:10    MATTHEW 13:52
The renewal of the church will come from a new type of monasticism, which has only in common with the old an uncompromising allegiance to the Sermon on the Mount. It is high time men and women banded together to do this.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

March 13
PSALM 144:9-15 ' EZEKIEL 17:22-24    MATTHEW 13:31-32

Dynamic and erratic, spontaneous and radical, audacious and immature, committed if not altogether coherent, ecumenically open and often experimental, visible here and there, now and then, but unsettled institutionally.   Almost monastic in nature but most of all... enacting a fearful hope for human life in society.
William Stringfellow

March 14
PSALM 85:1-7    I KINGS 18:44-45    MATTHEW 25:1-I3

Looking down I saw Scotland, England, Wales and to the Northwest, Ireland. The treetops upon the hills and the clustered clouds hid the people. Suddenly small, flickering lights appeared. They were scattered all over the isles. I came closer to the land. The light was firelight. There were fires burning from the top of Scotland to Land's End on the tip of Cornwall. Lightning streaked downward from the sky above me. I saw it touch down with flashing swiftness, exploding each of the fires into streams of light. Like lava, they burned their fiery path downward from the top of Scotland to Land's End. The waters did not stop them, but the fire spread across the seas to Ireland and to Europe.
Then the Lord said: I will penetrate the darkness with a visitation of My power. With lightning swiftness I will release the power of my Spirit through a renewed people who have learned how to be led by the Spirit. They will explode with a witness that will touch every part of society in Britain. I'm strategically placing them to touch the farms, villages, towns and cities. No one will be without a witness whether they be children in the schools, farmers in the fields, workers in the factories and docks, students in the universities and colleges, the media, the press, the arts or government.
I seemed to see an army of all types of people moving into the continent with a compassionate ministry - participating, caring communities involved with each other at a grass-roots level, sharing the love of God everywhere. I saw the empty cradles of Europe, her churches, holding a new generation of Christian leaders.
Jean Darnall, Heaven, Here I Come"