Third Sunday after Pentecost

‘…[T]he distinction between Christians and other men, is neither in country nor language nor customs. … Yet while living in Greek and barbarian cities… they show forth the wonderful and confessedly strange character of the constitution of their own citizenship. They dwell in their own fatherlands, but as if sojourners in them; they share all things as citizens, and suffer all things as strangers. Every foreign country is their fatherland, and every fatherland is a foreign country.’


- The Epistle to Diognetus




‘It is time for Christians… to live again like strangers in a strange land. This does not require our withdrawal from the world or disengagement from politics and culture. It means that we learn to act and think, to read and to interpret… out of a new light springing from the gospel. It means bearing witness to the authenticity of our faith and building hope in the practices we keep: showing hospitality to strangers and outcasts; affirming the unity of the created order; reclaiming the ideals of beauty, love, honesty, and truth; and embracing the preferential option for nonviolence. It means learning to live in the world in a way that is participatory rather than manipulative, living in expectation of a time when we may speak of God once more as one who comes to us from a country far from our own.’


- Charles Marsh