Saturday, March 6, 2021
![ash-wednesday-usa[1]](https://thenoontimes.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/ash-wednesday-usa1.jpg?w=350&h=250)
Receptive
Today we stand on the threshold of a great opportunity, an opportunity to shed all that we dislike about ourselves, an opportunity to return fully to the promise God sends to the world through us. We have taken up the prophecy of Amos as our first Lenten lesson plan and today we re-visit an old theme: we ask for the courage to open our hearts and minds and souls to the possibility of newness, we ask for the strength to be receptive to God’s announced gift of regeneration.
God calls to us through Amos just as he called to the faithful millennia ago. nd what is the message we hear today? Where are we to go to do the work of self-conversion and kingdom building? Amos tells us simply: We are to look to our own homes, communities, work, worship and play places . . . we are to begin . . . and then we are to take this newness in which we find ourselves into all we do, think and say. Social injustice and religious arrogance: these are the two devils we are to combat. We must invert these two ideas (as Jesus always does when he stands us on our heads – calling us to the margins rather than to the comfortable middle) to social justice and to religious humility. They are the standard bearers we are to carry each day as we step out of our homes and into the world. hey are the same standards we carry into our evenings as we return home to rest and rebuild.
To learn more about the places named in Amos 1, click on the following words and consider . . . Do we live in these places? If so, what do we do to change ourselves . . . so that the world might also change? Aram, Philistia, Tyre, Edom and Ammon.
mage from: http://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/us/ash-wednesday
The Noontimes 
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