The month, that is, not the morning runs, which have been squarely average in their rapidity. This morning, for instance: grey skies but clearing, 13°, humid, pollen, legs gradullay limbering up, but a humble pace, so that there was nothing notable about the run.
I got back, cleaned up, and leaned into finishing my sermon for the morning, which took its departure from Matthew’s binary parables of judgement and the contemporary atmosphere of hostile partisanship, took a turn through Romans 7 and 8 about just how ill equipped we are to put on judges’ robes and pronounce sentence before the appointed time, threw in some observations about the temptation to denounce, to anathematise those who upset applecarts that we thought just fine as they were, when it has been known to turn out (let the reader understand) that someone we shout down as a blasphemer in the heat of the moment may turn out to have been a tender-hearted prophet calling us to refocus on the needs of the vulnerable and abused. Then on to the wideness of God’s mercy (which is good for us, since none of us is holy enough to meet with divine approval apart from grace) and the conclusion that by backing away from being enforcers of our agenda (seem it never so holy) we may seem to be losers in the world’s eyes — but there are worse things than being thought a loser, among them being found wrongfully to have condemned the innocent; but that in our willingness to ‘lose’ we are more than enforcers, more than conquerors, but beacons of the grace that we most radiantly reflect when we most humbly cling to it.
Then this afternoon I went grocery shopping. We’ll hae a we bit more time with Käthe, and breakfast tomorrow morning, before we send her away to Colchester for further travels. It has been a glorious treat to visit with her, though, and to admire the wonderful adult who emerged from the childhood where I first met her.