Hannah prayed and said, ‘My heart exults in the Lord; my strength is exalted in my God. My mouth derides my enemies, because I rejoice in my victory.
Luke 1:46-48
Mary said, ‘My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour, for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed.
Words of Grace For Today
It would be more comfortable for us, if Hannah’s prayer ended before she says her mouth derides her enemies. Not that we do not understand her prayer. We just wish it would not be ours, or recorded as prayed often by the saints in light.
But that is sin, and we cannot deny it.
For exactly this moment Jesus came to command us to love our enemies, so that we would recognize the sin in Hannah’s prayer, and in our prayers. It is sinful to wish that we ‘win’ at the cost of others, enemies or not.
It is a sad fact of human existence that too often in order to survive we must be victorious over our enemies. Even then Jesus’ example is that our victory is no victory if we are not gracious with our enemies, as God is gracious with us. We need must remember our place. We are desperate sinful wretches, no better than slave traders and mass murderers, for our thoughts would have disastrous results for so many people, were they to become reality just in the wishing.
In the middle of a prayer/wish like Hannah’s we recall Mary’s Magnificat: My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour, for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant.
We pause in our sinful prayer/wish we remember our own lowly position, and with humble gratitude we recall how much favour God has poured over us!
God helps us remember Mary, the saint, who for generations we have called blessed, for though being Jesus’ mother put her life often in danger more often in pain … and she watched him unjustly suffer crucifixion at the hands of the priests and the soldiers.
Enemies. They are our collective misunderstanding of God’s Grace and purpose for us all.
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.
Mark 14:3-6
While he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head. But some were there who said to one another in anger, ‘Why was the ointment wasted in this way? For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii, and the money given to the poor.’ And they scolded her. But Jesus said, ‘Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me.
Words of Grace For Today
Waste.
When one has too much, wasting things is easy, and commonplace. Oil companies flowed with money as oil sold for over $90 a barrel, and office chairs with one broken, easily replaced, caster were thrown out and a new $450 chair replaced the not-broken-but-needing-simple-repair chair.
God blesses us with God’s abundance. God has plenty. We sit with our enemies at God’s table prepared for us where God’s oil marks us as holy and God’s Grace flows over us. Our elegant or plain glass, or any vessel or receptacle we could bring cannot contain God’s generosity. God ‘wastes’ Grace on us, on all of us, even on our enemies! There is so much, so much that one need not worry about what spills over. What we still hold in our vessels Jesus shows us by example is not to be hoarded or held tight. We can empty everything we have and are; and God will always fill us back up full and overflowing with Grace.
An the unnamed woman comes to anoint Jesus with her expensive ointment, though the disciples would have the money instead of the wondrous aroma giving Jesus the honour of being cleansed with such gloriously expensive suave. So they scold the woman and try to shame her for her generosity.
Jesus knows all about God’s unending generosity, and our ability to live without limit to our generosity. Jesus calls his disciples to stop their derision of the woman and to accept that he is so honoured.
How often we claim God’s generous Grace all for ourselves and use it as a club against others! Still God comes and remains faithful and generous and gracious with us.
God hopes we just might catch on. Life is not a zero sum game. It is, when we sacrifice for one another, unlimited in it’s blessings for all.
What a life God calls us to recognize is ours, all of ours!
From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.
Words of Grace For Today
Breathe.
Drink.
Eat.
Work.
Love.
God has blessed us immensely, if we can do this.
God has blessed you immensely, if you can do these.
A person does not have to think they have committed any terrible sin to know they need God’s Grace just to make it through the day.
Everyone, in many ways, turns from God each day.
To breathe the Holy Spirit, to drink the living water, to eat the bread of life, to work in the Kingdom of God, and to be able to love unconditionally, first one needs be forgiven and redeemed, ransomed and rescued, blessed and kept safe from all Evil.
It is truth that many people live, constantly fighting their way free from God’s Grace, to insist, though their sins are many and destructive, that they need no Grace. These people are to be pitied, prayed for, and kept at a great distance as much as one can. When one needs must deal with them, then Grace upon Grace is required, for destruction follows in their wake, yet God’s Grace overflows from ours. To keep their destruction from overwhelming us, we needs must be the conduit of God’s Grace spilling over them.
It’s immensely difficult to face the corrupt destructive intent of an evil possessed person and not want that God would eradicate them from all existence. Yet ours is to be the conduit of God’s Grace. God brings God’s wrath in God’s own time.
Since from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace we pray for one another, the Lord bless you and keep you, safe from all Evil.
Now if I have found favour in your sight, show me your ways, so that I may know you and find favour in your sight. Consider too that this nation is your people.
2 Thessalonians 2:14
For this purpose he called you through our proclamation of the good news, so that you may obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Words of Grace For Today
It is easy to have silly hopes … and it is foolish to live one’s life built on those silly hopes.
One can, for example, hope that (contrary to all experience past and reasonable expectation for the future) that one will have a [fill in your desired, unreachable thing, like a ‘private lake’]. It is all silliness, hoping to possess things. It is foolish then to build one’s life so that one can finally buy a boat, and then store it away for the day that you can make it’s maiden voyage on your ‘private lake.’
To have hope that inspires the best of life into one and drives one to live the best and that draws from one better than one can imagine … to have that kind of hope one cannot foolishly build one’s life based on silly hopes. One needs to understand profoundly what is before one in the present, what is behind us in the past, and what lies ahead for us in the future.
Moses, wise as he was, is not always written about as if he were so wise. He asks of God, who has just told him that God favours Moses, that Moses will be able to live knowing God’s ways (in Hebrew this knowing is also to be intricately wound up in, to be active in the doing of God’s ways). And to what end does Moses make this request? To find God’s favour.
Yet, God’s favour is already pronounced by God! Moses is making a circular request.
This is us, all too often. God saves, loves us, favours us, and tells us so. We respond by asking that if God loves us and favours us we may know how to earn God’s love and favour!
We all too often want not to be in God’s debt, but we want to know ourselves, and be seen by others, to have earned all that God has gifted us! So Moses is written about as if Moses did not accept God’s favour, but wanted to earn it. Indeed, Moses wanted others to see without a doubt that God favoured Moses. It was required for his and his people’s survival.
There is so much more going on than a silly wish, to earn God’s favour. We can learn if we see.
The second passage also contains something to see. Paul writes to the Thessalonians that his proclamation of Jesus the Christ to them is to bring them Jesus Christ’ Glory.
Christ’s Glory is not something that many people would seek: it involves betrayal by one’s friend, a false conviction, a torturous cross, and death. Only then does it come to anything like what we might expect as Glory.
But Glory, God’s kind of Glory it is. It is that God brings us to life abundant through our being betrayed, being falsely convicted and our bearing our own crosses, which indeed kill us. Then we can start to understand the sacrifice for others lives that Jesus accepted, that Jesus calls us to accept.
On this cross, on this glory, we can hope that God will show us how to live the abundant life … not so that we can earn God’s favour. Rather we ask that God will show us how to live the abundant life that does not require things at all. Rather we ask that God will show us how to live the abundant life as our response to trusting that God saves us, loves us (unconditionally), and favours us.
Knowing this love, trusting this love, we are able to answer Christ’ call to sacrifice our selves, even our lives, so that others may have life, and have it abundantly.
That’s Glory. That’s Grace. That is us as Jesus’ humble followers.
It is he who remembered us in our low estate, for his steadfast love endures for ever.
Hebrews 13:3
Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured.
Words of Grace For Today
It is so easy to forget our past, when we were so much less than we are now. Become wealthy and soon one easily forgets what it is like to struggle to survive without enough money. With God and God’s people it is different, though.
Become educated and it is easy to forget how it is to be ignorant and vulnerable. With God and God’s people it is different, though.
Yet as one becomes more educated one learns that one really did and still does know so little. This is closer to how it is in our relationship with God, if we care at all for the Truth of Jesus’ love and life for us.
When God forgives us our sins, it may seem easy to forget our sins, now that Grace has saved us. We can easily pretend or delude ourselves that we somehow no longer need forgiveness, though as we grow, if we learn to be honest with ourselves then we recognize that we still sin, and more profoundly and profusely then we care ever to admit. We desperately need to be forgiven, more it seems each passing day.
When we learn this anew each day, then it makes sense to give thanks to God for all that we are, for we have and are nothing on our own. Only by God’s hand do we have anything given to us as stewards of it, nor are we anything other than the chemicals our body is made of, except that the Holy Spirit breathes life into us each day.
As we remember how much we daily depend on God’s good Graces, then it is not difficult to remember each day to pray for and work to support those in prison.
Yes, there are some real criminals in prison. They are people capable of great destruction to property and person without much thought of the damage they do. There are also many minorities, especially men, who have been taken advantage of and invited into a world where crime is the only way of life. There also are a great number of people, men and women, who are falsely convicted and never did anything to deserve to be put in prison.
Someone decided they would be their target. They would be lied about, false witnesses would be found against the person, and false reports and charges are brought against them … and judges easily lie about the evidence before them and convict people, on the basis of easily identifiable lies. The measure of correct judgments is that a fully informed, reasonable person would agree with the judge’s decision. But one has to be willing to lie, and reasonable has to be not that the person is actually guilty, but someone with enough money or power wants this person convicted, and the fully informed part of that has to be understood as meaning one had to understand that someone with wealth or power or a sadistic habit has to be satisfied … and yet another innocent person goes to jail.
We are to remember all the people in jails, not from our place of comfort and privilege, but as if the prison director had us in custody and was using the guards, some violent, some friendly, to sadistically ‘play’ with us, to torment us. And that some health care people working in prisons go out of their way to provide inappropriate, even deadly health care to prisoners/us; because if we are in jail then surely we deserve no good health care.
For people tortured, well it helps to have been tortured at some point, so that we can not only empathize with those who are tortured, but that we can also remember what it was like to be tortured.
If you have made it thus far in life without being tortured, then watch perhaps 12 Years a Slave, for an insightful presentation of what being enslaved is like, and to be tortured, having one’s life taken from one, piece by piece.
Then we can wake to each morning, give God thanks for all we have, and fervently pray for others’ in real need. One does not need much to be thankful. One needs only eyesight to see the world’s beauty. Or eyes to see the people in the neighbourhood. Or ears to hear the loons’ cry echoing across the water. Then one can be thankful, that one has something, has eyes, has ears.
stripping the bark to kill a living tree for no good purpose is evil.
Isaiah 53:5
But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.
John 11:51-52
He did not say this on his own, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus was about to die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but to gather into one the dispersed children of God.
Words of Grace For Today
We humans understand how innocent people or animals are sacrificed to ‘pay a debt’ and free us. There are two kinds of sacrifice, one destructive evil, one gracious goodness.
Rene Girard developed a few ideas that many have applied and adapted. At the core is his mimetic theory that we ‘remember’ we desire something by seeing others having it, which causes senseless competition between even friends. Competition leads to conflict and conflict cannot be between friends, so the friends use a scapegoat (an innocent, vulnerable bystander) on whom they pile fictitious blame. This cathartic release of blame onto a third party relieves the conflict between the two friends and they continue on, the desire that caused the conflict resolves into the senselessness it was at the beginning. The friendship is saved, the friends continue on.
The vulnerable, innocent scapegoat is destroyed.
This is the destructive evil sacrifice.
Girard interprets the story of Jesus’ sacrifice for us as God’s clear statement that scapegoating innocent, vulnerable people is not acceptable or needed, just as God’s clear statement by calling Abraham to the mountain to sacrifice his only son Isaac, and then stopping Abraham, was that God did not want any child sacrificed to himself.
God clearly does not want destructive evil sacrifice by any humans.
God does send his son, Jesus, to live, preach, teach, heal and sacrifice himself to the corrupt power of his time, the Roman empire and the Chief Priest. This is the sacrifice of gracious goodness. It is chosen by the one surrendering to sacrifice. The sacrifice does not destroy innocent and vulnerable people. Exactly the opposite, it gives life to all.
Jesus calls us to wisely sacrifice, sometimes little, sometimes everything, in order that other people will be able to live. We do not send someone else to be the sacrifice. We go ourselves, knowing that all we are and have is a gift from God, and if God can use us to give life, then as followers of Jesus we can give of ourselves, and even give everything of ourselves, in order that others may live, and live in the abundance of Grace, Love and Hope that God created us all to enjoy.
So much in life tries to get us to strive to achieve and receive at others’ cost (the destructive evil sacrifice). This is not the way of life for the followers of Jesus, and for all the children of God.
Let your eyes be open to the plea of your servant, and to the plea of your people Israel, listening to them whenever they call to you.
John 14:14
If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.
Words of Grace For Today
Praying to be heard, and a promise to be heard carte blanch.
Being Gaslit taught me much, much that I would hope no one else would have to learn: what it is like to have one’s children and one’s beloved turn on you, telling lies that are beyond abominations; what it is like to be condemned in the church, community and courts for things you’ve never done; what it is like to be silenced so that no one will listen to you, no matter what you do there is no one, and talking to one’s self goes nowhere. It is to be ghosted by everyone.
And then I was made to sit and listen to the unending lies about me with no way to interrupt and prove they were lies. And when I was given opportunity to speak I was bullied, harangued and Gaslit even more.
So much to say. So many lies told that others use to define me.
My prayer was desperate: to be heard. God listen as you know the truth. Let me speak and make these people listen. Give me your ear, Your heart, and at least a sliver of hope that this nightmare, this twilight zone will end.
But it never ends.
At least now I can speak, though no one listens. People still ghost me. I know the lies do not define me. The lies define those who told them, and those who, knowing truth still used the lies as if they were true, and those who do not stop to think that the lies are not truth.
How terrible it is to be defined by the lies one has told, lies that destroyed other people, and hurt oneself as well. How ghastly it must be to be such a person, where no direction is down or up, or right or wrong. Everything is winning and surviving and having more money … no matter who you destroy in the process.
When I speak the truth, people run and then ghost me.
God when will it end!!
Then Jesus’ words give this hope: If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.
God, I ask, as all people have since the beginning of time, hear me and give me meaning and love and hope …
hope that truth will prevail,
hope that the children will be safe from abuse and gaslighting and from being brought to sacrifice truth for money, and life for money, and love for money.
Sing to God, sing praises to his name; lift up a song to him who rides upon the clouds— his name is the Lord— be exultant before him.
Philippians 4:4
Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.
Words of Grace For Today
Our human survival instincts keep us much more alert for trouble, mindful of the troubles of the past, than basking in the good things of life.
It would have done our for-bearers little good (and we might not be here) to sit around the campfire regaling their escape from the mountain lion (who hunts humans for sport) earlier that day, letting the mountain lion pick them off in their relaxed stupor. Better to notice their success with a slight sigh of relief and continue building their defences, keeping a very alert watch for the silent hunter.
So also today we need to keep sharp, guarding ourselves against dangers of this life, much less from four legged animals, and much more from the Evil One working through two legged animals (ourselves included.)
Yet that war is already won, and the battles we are left to fight may even destroy us, but they cannot determine the outcome of the war: Jesus conquered death and all evil with his sacrifice on the cross and his resurrection to life.
While yet alert for danger, we also need to not turn everything into danger. We do need to celebrate all that God has done for us, meeting our daily needs for survival in this abundant life God provides for us. Celebrating God’s work for us, God’s protection, reminds us we cannot survive on our own, that the Evil One can snatch us away if we try to survive on our own.
Songs since the beginning of time have carried profound meaning, combining the rhythms of life, the melody of the spheres, and the words of God-given visions. Not all songs do this. Many cheapen the possibility reducing life to a crude and corrupt perversion of life as God gives it to us. Perhaps the worst version of those crude songs are ones that mention God’s name and carry little of God’s real blessing.
There are plenty of good and profound songs, the songs that carry God’s love and purpose for us give life. These we can sing to express our joy each day for all God has done for us. Some of these songs are simple chants, mantras really, like Dona nobis pacem. Others are complicated working through the darkness of life to a purpose of health and resilience, like Cohen’s Anthem. Some even bring hope and thanks to our hearts in spite of the composer’s intent, like Tikaram’s Cathedral Song. Many have no words, like Anthony’s Song of Hope.
There is no shortage of songs already composed and many more will be composed. They provide us a full song book from which we can sing God’s praise, rejoicing each day for all that was, all that is and all that will be – only by God’s Grace.
Gideon said to them, ‘I will not rule over you, and my son will not rule over you; the Lord will rule over you.’
2 Corinthians 10:18
For it is not those who commend themselves that are approved, but those whom the Lord commends.
Words of Grace For Today
Many strive to achieve for themselves great position of authority and power. For example one needs only look at all the bishops our church has had who seriously wanted to become bishops. They were disastrous for the church, each in their own special corrupt way.
The best bishops were those who did not want the work, nor the honour, nor the heartache of presiding over a church in decline.
The church remains in decline.
What does that say to us other than God has plans that are not those of the church which wants to grow … according to our measure of growth.
There is no shortage of people trying way too hard to make their plans into God’s plans for the church. All are dangerous and destructive.
What we need is leaders like Gideon, who though offered control and rule, chose instead that the people would be ruled by God.
To be ruled by God is something, not anything like being ruled by a code of what someone has determined is ‘for sure’ God’s will (though it looks like a terrible subset of faith, reduced so that that it is worthless.)
To be ruled by God is something, not anything like being ruled by a person who supposedly can speak God’s will. We’ve had no end of despots, also in the church.
To be ruled by God is something that will lead us in places we cannot anticipate, into adventures we cannot imagine, and to share life with people we had never known before as God’s people. It’s a wild ride.
Hang on tight
to the Holy Spirit’s fire and breath.
That’s all God gives us most of the time, everything else we see as solid is an illusion we create for our own sense of (false) security.
He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities.
Acts 15:11
On the contrary, we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will.’
Words of Grace For Today
If we are honest with ourselves and each other, we know our participation in original sin.
It is the opposite of what we wish well for ourselves and others, that we would consider the goodness of life, and what we understand God intends for us.
We know that we deserve all judgments of God made against us, and all punishments and consequences we may encounter.
So it is of the greatest consequence that we know God promises to deal with us NOT according to what we deserve, not according to our iniquities. How wonderful it is that we understand, on the contrary, that we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as all people will be saved by grace.
Now that our salvation is secured, what can we do about all those iniquities that keep piling up? Can we stop increasing them? Unfortunately not, but we ought try with grace and gratitude with all our mind, body and strength.
We can offer grace to all other living people. We can breathe and love and hope.
Life is messy, and we can live with confidence and courage in the face of all kinds of evil knowing God has already dealt with it all. So onward, with what this day has to offer; countering all evil and sin as we can, and bringing God’s grace to bear on all that we can.
