See Reality, Choose, and Do
Open water is nice.
Canoe come ply the deep and shallow alike.
Drat that buzzing buggy mosquito, and that and millions more
sent to feed the birds, and eat my blood, leaving a terrible reaction
that sends my eyes, nose, and throat into conniptions.
Oh give me ice, that would be nice!
Touched with scrambled ice left overs
Our World – Our Tracks – Beautiful
God’s Light on God’s World – Wonderful
God’s Light on Our Tracks – Awesome
Psalms 107:2 & 8
Let the redeemed of the Lord, … those he redeemed from trouble … thank the Lord for his steadfast love, for his wonderful works to humankind.
Luke 14:22-23
The slave said, “Sir, what you ordered has been done, and there is still room.” Then the master said to the slave, “Go out into the roads and lanes, and compel people to come in, so that my house may be filled.
Words of Grace For Today
How wonderful, awesome (the real meaning of awesome is: profound awe at the ‘out of this world’, divine presence encountered in the mundane),
How awesome it is to have these two verses side by side.
First we, the redeemed from trouble …
And OH how the trouble is that we’ve been in! Our enemies (if we’ve lived a life worth something we’ve made plenty of enemies) have done us in … or if they have not we’ve done them in. Either way, how we’ve treated our enemies, and/or how they have treated us is nothing to be proud of in the presence of God! No hiding, no lies, no messing the truth with spin. We’ve been in great trouble, most everyday a little bit. And in lives where we’ve stood for something honourable, then we’ve been in a lot of trouble at different times. The evil in humanity cannot stand someone being honourable. It puts a spotlight on the evil, the spotlight of Christ’s light of truth.
And when we’ve been in trouble, done in by our enemies, or worse that we’ve treated our enemies with anything less than the grace of God, God has paid a terrible price to redeem us!
So …
First we, the redeemed from trouble, thank the Lord …
Now that’s a wonderful response to God’s awesome intervention in the messes of trouble that we get into! We turn into vessels overflowing with gratitude, spilling it across our paths as we proceed through the day.
We leave a trail of awesome gratitude and witness to God’s great mercy and grace! That’s what we spill out into the world – even if we also spew out sin, evil and a deadly virus.
We overflow with thanks for all God has done, out of love. This is thanks not just for God’s acting for us, but God acting for all humanity! No one is left out of God’s Grace and Love!
Then in the second verse, we read how when Jesus puts on a feast of celebration, and there are empty seats …
Don’t we know empty seats in our churches today as we put on feasts of Christ’s Body and Blood!
When there are empty seats, Jesus, our redeemer and saviour, sends us faithful servants out into the world around us to invite in everyone found in the lanes and alleys … the street people, the disadvantaged, the outcasts, … in other words all the people who need a good hot meal, all the people the world has turned against, all the people who’ve been left on the way side to suffer while others have trampled on to riches undeserved, on the backs of so many.
These are the people we, the redeemed, turn to in order to fulfill our Lord and Master’s command: Compel them to come!
Well, we are not to kidnap or force, but we have the words of Grace and Love of God to share with all those who are outcast, disadvantaged, suffering and could use a good, honourable, glorious feast! The words of Grace that we have … especially as Lutherans (though we’ve no copyright on them, they are for all Christians to embrace), that Jesus came into the world not to condemn but to save all people! … The words of Grace we have reach deep in the heart and soul of each person who will listen. We’ve experienced it ourselves and seen it in countless people. …
So we, who God has redeemed and saved from the trouble we are in, as we give undying thanks to God, turn as Jesus commands us, to invite the outcast, those whom Jesus also redeems, into a feast of celebrating.
The feast is Jesus last meal, the Eucharist, to sustain the soul. The feast is more. It’s a hot meal to sustain the body. It’s a gathering of redeemed people, overflowing with thanks, which sustains the heart and mind.
Except we cannot gather with more than 15 people, and not with anyone outside our core family, or maybe our ‘cohort’ family. Thanks Covid 19! [emoji of disgust.]
But we’ve been redeemed! We overflow with gratitude!
Certainly we can figure out how to share this feast of Christ’s Eucharist and Hot and Cold food, and of sharing each other’s presence, so that we can follow Jesus’ command to compel people from the roads and lanes to come. It may take a football stadium size area. Maybe an 80 acre farm so that no street person or family is closer than 8 metres to any other person or family.
That might take a bit of government approval, a careful plan for serving, and a few extra dollars … but in this time surely someone could put all that together!
Or on a smaller scale, any of us could invite an online meeting of families and street people to join together for the Eucharist and a real home cooked meal! Why not?
Do we or do we not overflow with gratitude?!
Or on an individual scale, we can always call others on the phone! And when needed deliver a home-cooked meal. Why not?
Balance is not easy to find.
Beauty and Peace are as difficult.
God guides us to both, as gift and blessing unearned.
2 Samuel 2:26
Then Abner called to Joab, ‘Is the sword to keep devouring for ever? Do you not know that the end will be bitter? How long will it be before you order your people to turn from the pursuit of their kinsmen?’
1 Corinthians 7:15
But if the unbelieving partner separates, let it be so; in such a case the brother or sister is not bound. It is to peace that God has called you.
Words of Grace For Today
God calls us to peace.
Peace between nations, between people, between spouses, and peace within ourselves.
Peace is much more than the absence of conflict.
Given merely the absence of conflict we humans always find our way into open conflict quite easily. It is because everyone is wrong about something, and they still think they are right. [Except of course me. I’m always right. Right?]
Girard provides that it is more complex than that, involving mimetic desires that lead to competition, which is ‘resolved’ through scapegoating. We compete with each other for what we see as limited resources/things. Aware we cannot afford open conflict with our closest friends we project our conflict on to some innocent, vulnerable bystander. Seeing that innocent as the source of our problem we destroy that person. Our urge to compete and destroy is ‘satisfied’, the thing we competed for becomes insignificant, and we are able to return to a ‘peaceful’ co-existence.
Except for the innocent person we’ve gaslit, attacked, destroyed and most often exiled or killed.
And except that, since we are not entirely oblivious to reality, we know we are now guilty of ruining an innocent person, of not working out our conflict with each other, and the root cause of that conflict is not addressed. It just goes underground in both of us, in our relationship, only to re-emerge at a later date. Then it will be an even less comprehensible conflict, which we will ‘resolve’ by destroying yet another innocent bystander.
Peace must be diligently sought anew each hour of each day, or it is lost. And it is lost long before anyone notices any conflict arising.
Peace is lost when we no longer see the souls of other people, for whom Jesus died, as the most important part of our own lives, when we no longer give everything we are to provide care for those in our daily lives, or when we no longer work to meet the needs and satisfy the yearnings of those with whom our lives are intertwined.
Peace is a marvellous way of being. It is fragile and can disappear in an instant with a [wrong] word or deed. It is threatened most by an errant thought.
God gives us peace. We can treasure it, with our hearts, minds, and strength.
Monday, April 27, 2020
God’s Light Reflects
Into Every nook and cranny of creation (and our lives.)
Genesis 3:8
They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.
Romans 8:15
For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’
Words of Grace For Today
Fear and anxiety are our greatest enemies, the factors in our lives that most thoroughly bring us to our destruction, to do inane things, and to fight for the worst causes.
Anxiety not only destroys the person it controls, devouring our souls from the inside out, it’s effects destroy people around the anxious one. Anxiety breeds anxiety. It is more contagious than the fastest spreading virus.
Anxiety does not require anything in reality to be compromised or threatened, but it’s effects compromise and threaten all reality.
Adam and Eve walk in the Garden of Eden. God created Paradise for them, and gave them freedom to choose to obey, to not touch the tree in the centre of the garden and live full of joy from base to peak, or to disobey and be exiled out of the garden to face death in the dark valleys of despair.
Ah, arch-typically, Adam and Eve succumb to curiosity and the desire to know more than God and to be ‘gods’ themselves. As we all would, and do, again and again in our lives.
After we have turned from God, then fear sets in. That’s real and appropriate. The huge problem arises when they/we try to deny we’ve done against God. That’s when anxiety sets in and controls us. We begin to believe that if we lie even more and more, somehow God will not notice. If we can fool ourselves into believing we have not turned away from obeying God, and somehow if we believe it then it becomes true and God will be fooled as well. Not at all.
God has mercy.
God’s mercy is ours to claim, imbibe, and live out of. OR we can choose to ignore all God does for us, redeeming us, claiming us as God’s own children. We can continue in our anxiousness to choose to fool ourselves. Doch God is not fooled and
God still has mercy.
God redeems us at a great cost, to frees us from slavery to sin.
Yet we can still anxiously choose to live in that slavery, to try to fool ourselves and hope to fool God, though we know there is no fooling God, not ever.
So we cry Abba, save us. This cry is ours constantly to cry out with all desperation. For we need God’s mercy and protection, or we end up living anxiously as if we were separated from God.
God is merciful, God is trustworthy. God claims us and never lets go. God is with us
even now, in our anxiety wrapped in Covid 19.
Buried Beneath the Ice
Not Nice.
Jonah 2:3
You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me; all your waves and your billows passed over me.
Mark 5:22-24
Then one of the leaders of the synagogue named Jairus came and, when he saw him, fell at his feet and begged him repeatedly, ‘My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live.’ So he went with him. And a large crowd followed him and pressed in on him.
Words of Grace For Today
God rarely delivers us from our trials. Most often God delivers us in our trials.
Jonah tried to hide from God, to no avail. Neither can we hide from God. Jonah was tested severely, as we are, too. In the deep, the heart of the seas, the flood over our heads, God’s waves pass over us.
When we face our own demise we see life more clearly for what it is. When we face the demise of our children, we ought to see life more clearly for what it is. Sometimes though anxiety makes us act as if we were just plain stupid. Anxiety explains a lot of inexplicable behaviour, even during normal times.
Jairus, a leader at the synagogue, faces the death of his daughter. He comes and pleads for Jesus to have mercy and come and heal his daughter, so that she may live.
That should be an account that tears at every parent’s heart. My child is being ripped from life here with me … and what can I do? Jairus has heard of Jesus and goes to beg, to humble himself before Jesus, to beg for his daughter’s life from a man he knows can save her.
That’s faith.
That’s faith that can only be given by God!
That’s faith that brings life to those who have it and those near them.
Jairus’ faith brings Jesus to save his daughter’s life, and she does live.
Beneath the waves of Covid isolation, loneliness, shortages, fear of illness and death (our own and our loved ones’ … and even our enemies’) we gasp for breath,
We gasp … and humbly pray that God will deliver us and our loved ones, heal us all, and bring us all, even our enemies, back to live full lives, filled with gratitude and complete joy!
Still we gasp for air. Where are we caught so dark and deep, that we find little air?
Anxiety.
So we pray, free us from all fear, and make us into the people that can heal others with a word.
God’s Great Creation Teaches Us to Prosper and Know
Complete Joy
Deuteronomy 30:9
The Lord your God will make you abundantly prosperous in all your undertakings, in the fruit of your body, in the fruit of your livestock, and in the fruit of your soil. For the Lord will again take delight in prospering you, just as he delighted in prospering your ancestors.
John 15:10-11
If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.
Words of Grace For Today
To prosper. That is what is not happening for so many people the world over. The economies of most nations is at a near standstill, as essentials only are made, distributed, for sale and purchased.
So much that the world thrived on was not necessities, but the benefits of a very advanced global economy. Yet I have not met nor heard of a person who has truly prospered, who did so without doing on the backs of many other people who could not prosper.
To prosper seems to be equivalent to being able to get away with terrible crimes and sins against other humans, all in order to get ahead.
This is not at all what God would have us do or be in this marvellous creation.
Jesus comes to show us an exactly mutually exclusive way of being in creation; self sacrifice so that others may live well. Prospering at others expense is out of the question. The only kind of prospering is when one moves forward through ones days choosing goals and actions so that others may live and live well.
This is a quite foreign concept for many caught in the ‘logic’ of global capitalism, built as it is solidly on greed and making gains at others expense, accumulating power in wealth and using it to continually succeed in getting more money from others getting less money, endlessly.
Jesus had not yet seen global capitalism, but the previous generations had certainly seen themselves either among the conquering Romans or those the Romans conquered and ruled, to the Romans’ advantage. In spite of many wishes that Jesus conquer the Roman occupiers, Jesus instead offers to us that our joy be as his joy is in doing God’s will, and that our joy be complete.
To prosper, and to have our joy complete, all coming to us as we abide in Jesus’ love, so that God’s love will abide in us.
All this is gift; God chooses and acts. We receive and benefit. We live in God’s love. God is in love with us. And we in turn are in love with all creation and all God’s creatures.
Since time immemorial, God has called faithful people to retreat from the demands of normal life, and ask why and how one lives as one does.
This is now the time for us all.
Cancel that world tour vacation. Cancel that entertainment holiday. Cancel that weekend of expensive travel, motor sports, or casual sports. (OK, we’ve been required to do so anyway.)
God calls us to take this time and ask: how does God want us to abide in God’s love and have our joy complete? How does God want us to prosper … now during Covid 19, and after isolation is not needed for everyone’s health.
This is how we prosper: we love and give sacrificially of ourselves to others, as Christ did for us … on his cross.
Friday, April 24, 2020
Demonstrates Glory by Healing our Souls.
Jeremiah 14:21
Do not spurn us, for your name’s sake; do not dishonour your glorious throne; remember and do not break your covenant with us.
1 Corinthians 1:9
God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
Words of Grace For Today
Jeremiah pleads with God not to break the covenant God made with their ancestor, Abraham. God alone made the covenant. It was not a bi-lateral agreement. It was not tit-for-tat. It was not a contract with the members agreeing on the exchange of things of value.
God made the covenant, simply because God choose to make the covenant. Thereafter, God returns numerous times to restate the promises. In addition to Abraham and his family and descendants being made, by God’s act alone, into the people of God, God makes promises: God will give the wandering Arameans land flowing with milk and honey. God will give Abraham and Sarah descendants as numerous as the stars.
God makes good on God’s promises. God makes good on more than that.
God comes in the human life of Jesus of Nazareth, God’s own son on earth, to live, heal, teach, suffer, and die … to pay for what you and I and all our ancestors and their descendants (i.e. all people) have done against God and the goodness of creation.
The story continues. Death does not win out, because God raises Jesus back to life.
God does this not because we deserve it, but because God so chooses.
God also chooses you and me to join in the fellowship of Jesus, the body of Christ on earth.
We may turn from God.
We may suffer as a result of sins.
We may face challenges we may not know we can even survive, like Covid 19.
God remains trustworthy. God remains a Rock for us to rely on. God remains with us!
This is the ongoing story of God. God remains with us, even when we no longer deserve the great blessings God has given us.
All good is to God’s glory. God’s glory is not our brokenness, doch God’s will to heal us.
May we be healed of all the ills that we face because of isolation, because of loss of loved ones, because of the illness we face, which may indeed bring us to death’s door.
On this and the far side of that door, God stands with us. God is worthy of our trust.
Tuesday, April 21, 2020
Our lives are to mirror God’s, in our thought, words, and actions.
Daniel 6:24
The king gave a command, and those who had accused Daniel were brought and thrown into the den of lions—they, their children, and their wives. Before they reached the bottom of the den the lions overpowered them and broke all their bones in pieces.
1 Corinthians 16:13
Keep alert, stand firm in your faith, be courageous, be strong.
Words of Grace For Today
The king gives a command, which decimates Daniel’s enemies who were bent on killing him. They and all their families face the death they had set Daniel to suffer.
I saw this sign in a furniture store, among the kitsch hanging about:
Karma, I have a list of people you seem to have missed.
No matter our enemies, our faith given to us inspires us to love even our enemies. Revenge or Karma’s actions, or what goes around comes around are not what we wish for those who would destroy us, even when they do their best from or through seats of the highest powers, the richest businesses, the most influential families, and not even from or through the force of armed police. We forgive, except when these actions go unrestrained, unnamed, unnoticed (except by their innocent victims). Then, ordained as a select few of us are, we must name those sins as bound, and leave them to God’s judgment. We trust that the Light of Christ will shine on their evil deeds. We treat them as those outside God’s people, with empathy and care, even when they deserve none of it.
This is no easy task.
It is also no easy task to forgive those who blatantly breach the health orders. Their foolishness puts themselves and so many of us, at terrible risk of coming down with Covid 19, which will lead to the death of those most vulnerable. The fools will likely live on to continue to threaten others again.
Still we pray: God helps us Keep alert, stand firm in our faith, be courageous, and be strong.
Help us to forgive the unforgivable.
This, too, shall pass.
Monday, April 20, 2020
God’s Eternal Word has Broken into This That We Know.
Genesis 18:19
For I have chosen him [Abraham], that he may charge his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice; so that the Lord may bring about for Abraham what the Lord has promised him.
Romans 6:22
Now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life.
Words of Grace For Today
Wikipedia provides that ‘Sanctification is the act or process of acquiring sanctity, of being made or becoming holy.’
We believe firmly that only God can make us holy. We cannot act to become, or enter a process of becoming holy. Sanctification is a gift given at Baptism. Thereafter one chooses in each minute/choice to act out of being holy, or not; and truth is we all act out of both all the time, simultaneously.
As generations rise and pass, we may well charge the successive generations to ‘keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice.’ This is Abraham acting then, but it is ever since God acting in the lives of the successive generations, one generation, one person at a time, to inspire them to act out righteousness and justice. God and any human who lives, eyes even a bit open, knows there are plenty of people with lots of power, influence and money who, in each generation (also ours), have no inkling for righteousness and true justice. It is all self interest, the rest of humanity be damned. Which really is the condemnation of themselves in eternity.
Given the gift of sanctification we are holy! We have the ability to be holy in every moment. In these choices, compromised as they may be by our still being sinners, we not only have an end in eternal life, we have the blessings of eternal life already today, every day!
As Covid 19 health concerns and orders foist so many new limits on our lives, new challenges, and new frustrations. Humour provides a view to this. My 88 year old Mother, living alone 10 miles from town provided these:
Who would have thought that when the time changed we would go from standard time to twilight zone time, where:
I need to practice social distancing from the refrigerator.
I am so excited! I am so excited. It’s time to take out the garbage. What should I wear?
This month’s biggest decision was where to go for Easter!
the living room or the bed room.
Simple Daylight Savings Time does not look that terrible anymore.
God’s holy people know God’s time is eternal and already it breaks in every day into our mundane lives, making each minute remarkable!
Take that Covid 19!
Do Not Be Afraid …
Deuteronomy 32:10
He sustained him in a desert land, in a howling wilderness waste; he shielded him, cared for him, guarded him as the apple of his eye.
Luke 12:32
‘Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.
Words of Grace For Today
Isolated as we are, not completely cut off from the living, though keeping our distance, not able to see our loved ones as before, we experience the real effects of living in a desert land, in a howling wilderness waste land.
Even isolated though, we are not alone, for God is with us. God gives us the Kingdom, and in that Kingdom all live, and live well!
Fear cuts us off from our wonderful abilities to reason and place ourselves in reality, and then to choose how to respond … to choose to respond with Grace and Love.
Fear is the enemy greater than all others.
Repeatedly angels and messengers of God’s Word repeat what Jesus said often: Do Not Be Afraid!
It is too easy to let ourselves take in the new reality of being isolated because of Covid 19, of being likely to contract this highly contagious and for some painful and even deadly disease and forget all God’s blessings.
It is too easy to let ourselves despair.
It is too easy to let ourselves spiral into fear
that becomes frantic,
that becomes panic,
that becomes rash and foolish thoughts, words and actions
that put us at great risk, not only from this virus, but at great risk to lose our sanity, our God-given calm and the gifts of the Holy Spirit that equip us to be God’s Grace to others.
God treasures each of us.
So we can treasure one another.
Reach out to others as we still safely can:
especially
if you feel the walls closing in on you,
if fear grows on you,
if you feel despair circling.
Allow God to use each of us to sustain one another through this desert wasteland where fear grows too easily. Connect yourself and each other each day to the Grace that gives us breath, to the Courage that gives us life, and to God’s promises that give us hope, no matter what assails us.