My dear brothers and sisters in Christ.

I like to look upon each and everyday as a new opportunity, a new day to strive forth in the pursuit of Our Lord's buisness.

            I am grateful to Him, to be able to stand here in your midst today.  As you all know, the history of Christianity in our midst is a very recent one.  We had our own beliefs, rife with superstition.  Surely there was a supreme God of sorts namely, Chukwu; but then there were other deities.  And of course each man had his very own Chi.

Even then our society was well organized.  An order existed in the society; our social norms were carefully guarded by taboos and customs.  Elders enforced these and sucessfully passed them down from generation to generation.  In and of themselves they spoke of man as a moral being guided by natural law and with his plac ein the spiritual realm.

The reason I bring all this up is because I want to say that not all that was old was necessarily bad, and the converse likewise holds true, that not all that is new is good.

Our acceptance of christianity implies a willingness on our part to accept this new order, and to simultaneously reject disorder which is the foundation of all sin.Accepting this order means placing man in his rightful place under God, with full obedience to God's law and the law of the church.  Yet we must give to Ceasar what belongs to Ceasar, and this means obedience to the laws of the state.

How far does my obedience to the state go? Does this obedience absolve citizens of their individual and collective resposibility for their actions?  Were the german citizens innocent or complicit with the nazi regime of Adolf Hitler?

The fate of all individuals whose fate is known to God alone.

No, I challenge each and everyone of you.  Contrary to the words of the good samaritan who stated that "I am not my brothers keeper", the very essence of Christianity is " I am my brothers keeper', for in so far as " you did this to the least of my brethren" in the words of Christ "you did this to me."

I have a social resposibility to speak up for the disenfranchised, the poor, the widows, the rejects of society.  infact, if the state orders me to commit sin, to murder the innocent, or to otherwise tamper with justice , my conscience compels me to disobey.

Likewise, if I stir up my fellow man to dissent against the state, and my fellow man looses his life in cosequence to this, I am just as responsible for the mans murder as the state that executed him.  This does not mean that we must not voice our opposition to the glaring injustices of these tyrannical regimes which have "stolen" so to speak the vote of the common man.  But while voicing this opposition we must mot endanger our own people.

With these words said he stopped and made the sign of the cross, and immediately averted his gaz downwards toward the ground.  His outward mark of a deep inner humility.

He heaved a sigh of relief, he had said what he was supposed to say, or at least what he thought that God wanted Him to say.  Life in the Spirit could be tricky; behind shadows lurked other shadows, truths could be hiding half truths and the true intentions of man were sometimes hidden from the very men themselves.  That was where, father Michael had said that an examination of conscience came in.

"Am I doing this for earthly acclaim?  is it pride the root of all sin that motivates me?  His conscience could infact go on and on, so much so that Fr Michael had at one point called him scrupulous.  in consequence of which he was summarily ordered desist on pondering on a certain venal sin.  After successfully fleeing from all grievous sin his whole life only now surreptiousl to find himself at the very heart of a secessionist movement.  By no means was he the perpetrator, but in truth, he was the spiritual leader of the movement.  At times he would fan the flames of dissent, but never too much, because he had to simultaneously hold the youths back from a suicidal youthful exuberance.  From time to time his duties became to provide for their material welfare as best he could from his own meager income.  He was little more than the leader of a rag tag group of unemployed educated youths.  Completing your education was taken as a part of duty, which in and of itself had little or no intrinsic value to the society at large, as there were no hopes of lawful employment.  The options open to these young men were severely restricted, or to put it bluntly they were non existent.  So by default, they could pick up arms as armed robbers, they could pick up arms as freedom fighters, or become traders.  Infact, some of them were freedom fighters by day and by night they became armed robbers.

As father walked home after the semon he thought of all these things and of how sometimes it seemed as if the line between right and wrong became fuzzy. If a man and his family were starving to death, does this give him the right to steal from the surplus of another who refuses to share with his less privileged neighbour?

And if a thief steals money from a thief who stole money from the sate, am I somewhat justified in repossessing what should have been mine in the first place?

These were difficult questions father pondered in his mind, surely father Michael knew the answers to all these things he thought.  But his mind now having turned into this line of thought would not give up; if someone had repeatedly cried out against a morally corrupt regime but the cries fell on deaf ears, what was a lawful recourse?  Here he asked himself if there was such a thing as a just war and he determined that this was aquestion he would have to ask father Michael, as he could not off the top of his head remeber the vatican position on wars in general.

All these issues swirled in his mind as the red dust swirled around his saandaled feet as he made his way on the path to the rectory from the motor park.  Not once did he look up. The edges of his cassock were quickly turning orange by this deluge of eager dust, and his feet likewise.  Everywhere was brown, the grass was brown, as if the very earth itself were shrouded in a sympathetic cover of dust echoing the despair of the people.  harmattan had arrived with its dust storms, overcast mornings of the past had now turned into days and weeks when the sun would never beseen.  Even the harmattan was getting worse he thought, everything was getting worse, at least for the common man.  The rest of the world had chosen to ignore the plight of the poor the plight of Africa.  so the children starved.  In the halls of power the leaders grew fat from the riches of the land, whilst the poor hardly knew where the next meal was coming from.  Such hardship that defied the the imagination and tempted the weak of faith to despair.

Chapter 2;

Dinner with the Bishop of Enugu.