1. If the season of Lent is a journey, Holy Week is the destination.
  2. What we discover in O’Connor’s stories and Martin Luther’s theology is that God’s grace is elusive because the human heart is resistant to it.
  3. This is the message of Lent. We are not called to sacrifice for Jesus in order to earn our salvation. Rather, we are called to remember the sacrifice that Jesus made for us.
  4. Fullness, truth, reality – all this God gives us as his gift in Christ.
  5. It is terribly easy to set up our theology as a buffer against the real coming of the Lord and its consequences.
  6. While the world is full of horizons and endpoints, for Christians, there is always tomorrow, and there are people in that tomorrow waiting for us as we wait for them.
  7. Through water, blood, and word, the Spirit never stops pointing us to Christ, and even more, giving us Christ.
  8. Even though All Saints is a day for remembering the dead, it is not a day of mourning.
  9. The reason that God’s commandments are not burdensome is that Jesus has fulfilled them.
  10. The love mentioned in 1 John 4:15-21 fourteen times (!) is a love that needs no apology but is determined at all times to sacrifice for the other.
  11. To say that whoever loves has been born of God is also to say that those who are born of God are recipients of love. They do not have God because they love but because they are loved.