The Sundays of Pre-Lent and Lent have a distinct logic to assist us in our life in Christ. Last week, Septuagesima, Our Lord calls us to become laborers in His vineyard. This is, in effect, the call to become pilgrims on our way to the Kingdom of God. This week, Sexagesima, in the Parable of the Sower, He speaks of the importance of bringing forth good seed. Next week, Quinquagesima, He will speak to us of “going up to Jerusalem.” Here, we will reflect on what it means to walk with Our Blessed Lord as He heads towards the Holy City for the last confrontation with His adversaries.
The Sundays of Lent will speak to the hazards of our journey: the temptations we will face and conflicts with demons and the powers of evil. But on Refreshment Sunday, we are reminded that Our Lord will provide “food for the journey,” in the feeding of the multitude. Then on Passion Sunday, Our Lord reminds us why the religious establishment was so opposed to Him: “Before Abraham was, I am.” His claim to be God was considered blasphemous and worthy of the death penalty. This brings us to Palm Sunday and the reading of S. Matthew’s Passion account and our journey’s end, as Our Lord opens to us the heavenly Jerusalem through His death and resurrection.
In the Epistle for this Sunday, S. Paul speaks of the things that distract us and impede our spiritual progress. There are external contingencies: weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness. Although we will most likely not suffer in the same way as S. Paul, Satan does use the things that come at us externally to discourage us and deflect us from our goal. It may be the derogatory way in which people speak of us because of our faith. Or it may even be outright rejection because we are so far outside the cultural norm.
This can be exacerbated by the daily concerns and duties we face as well as our own inner weaknesses. Who is weak, and I am not weak? who is offended, and I burn not?
Entering upon this pilgrimage is not easy for any one of us. The trials and limitations we face are meant to be embraced as the very essence of our glorification: If I must needs glory, I will glory of the things which concern mine infirmities. This seeming paradox is at the very heart of our faith. Only when we acknowledge our inabilities, are we able to realize that it is God working in our lives to draw us to Himself.
At the end of the day, all we can do is to will what God desires to do within us. This is the moment of conversion – this is the moment of learning to live our lives as we are meant.
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Today is the Super Bowl, that great American attraction that somehow diminishes the game of football, more often than not. It is the 60th playing of the game since the merger of the National and American Football Leagues.
Seattle and New England will play the game in Santa Clara, California, in the stadium that hosts the San Francisco 49ers. Personally, I am cheering for Seattle, largely because I dislike the Patriots.
I do not care for the highly touted commercials, which are usually insipid. And I will not be watching Bad Bunny and Green Day at the halftime show. I get enough politics during the week.
English is making game snacks. They are always delicious, even though they do not always settle well in my stomach. Tomorrow could be a long day.
Below is an article by Everett Piper, who columns I find thoughtful and thought provoking. I hope you have time to digest Mr. Piper’s work between the morning and the Super Bowl.
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‘Progressive’ Christians, not evangelicals, are the moral sellouts
They’re blind to their own rampant compromised values
BY: Everett Piper, The Washington Times (February 1, 2026).
Last week, a friend sent me an article and asked for my opinion. The author of the essay in question is a “progressive Christian” named Tripp Fuller. His long, verbose column is titled “Bonhoeffer’s Warning, Unheeded: The Moral Collapse of White Evangelicalism.”
Painful though it was, I read all 7,300 words of Mr. Fuller’s musings, and here is what he said in a nutshell: Today’s “White evangelicals” are like the German Christians of the 1930s, and, like them, we are “sequentially complicit” in the evils of a Nazi regime.
In other words, America’s White evangelicals are “frogs in the kettle” whose consciences have been slowly “boiled” by our moral compromise with the Republican Party.
That’s it. Mr. Fuller could have saved himself a lot of words and barrels of ink and just said, “If you want to know what’s wrong with America, look no further than ‘White evangelicals.’ Their sellout to the Republican Party is the cause of all that ails us.”
Am I the only one who gets weary of the hypocritical duplicity of oxymoronic “Christians” such as Mr. Fuller? I mean, seriously, how could such a self-declared “scholar” be so clueless?
Has it never crossed his mind that millions of “White evangelicals” vote for Republicans for a variety of reasons other than superficial political alignment? Never mind that the party Mr. Fuller and his liberal sycophants favor supports government collectivism over individual responsibility, drag queens over the dignity of women and the sexual indoctrination of children over the innocence of little boys and girls.
Never mind that they align with those who champion illegal immigrants over the blue-collar citizens in Springfield, Ohio, who are being overrun by the crime and vagrancy of these imported masses.
Never mind that Mr. Fuller’s politics favor illegal gangs over the working-class Hispanic Americans in Aurora, Colorado, who are afraid to leave their apartments because another country’s murderous thugs have taken over their neighborhoods and streets.
Never mind that Democrats seem to care more about the “rights” of those who have entered our country illegally than they do about young women who are afraid to go for a jog in the local park for fear of being raped and murdered.
Never mind that this is a party that seems to think running over a federal officer with your car in Minneapolis is justified, while singing hymns outside a Planned Parenthood clinic in Tennessee is not.
Never mind that Democrats at the highest level of government have specifically labeled anyone who champions traditional sexual morality, school choice, parental rights, secure borders and/or religious freedom a “national security threat” while they laud the “peaceful protests” of Black Lives Matter and antifa. Never mind all this.
How is it possible that the smart folks such as Mr. Fuller are so deluded? How can they be so blind?
How can they not see that “White evangelicals” (as well as those who are Black, Hispanic, Native and Asian) vote Republican because we believe women are biological facts, that antisemitism is wrong and that Marxism is evil? How can they not see that we vote Republican because we can read and have thereby concluded that the Green New Deal is not only anti-science but also anti-human, Orwellian and insane?
How can they not see that we vote Republican because we understand what a fascist is and what a Nazi isn’t and they apparently don’t?
How can they not see that we vote Republican because we are appalled by the racism of critical race theory and the divisive agenda of diversity, equity and inclusion?
I could go on and on, but the point is clear.
What Tripp Fuller’s long-winded, condescending essay tells us more than anything else is that he and his acolytes (i.e., his tribe of “progressive Christians”) are the ones being slowly cooked in the proverbial pot, much more so than the conservative “White evangelicals” they bemoan.
The fact that this guy can’t see that he is the poster child for the “sequential complicity” that he pedantically criticizes is nothing short of stunning. My land, he just spent 7,300 words blathering on about the moral compromise of “White evangelicals” while apparently blind to his own rampant moral compromise.
These liberals could save themselves a lot of words by simply quoting Pogo: “We have met the enemy, and it is us.”
A good dose of self-awareness never hurt anybody. These proudly deconstructed “Christians” (and I use that term loosely) would all do well to go back and reread Matthew 7:5. “You hypocrites, first take the log out of your own eye.”
Talk about a frog in a kettle.
GFK
GFK
Observations From The Fifth Estate 