The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him, and delivers them.
Luke 11:10
For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.
Words of Grace For Today
There are enough challenges to everyday,
even ordinary everyday days.
Through in upheaval like a pandemic, or injustice focused at oneself, or … [fill in the extraordinary upheaval that meets every life] the challenges can seem to be a bit overwhelming.
Then it is good to know that God’s Angels ‘encamp’ around we who fear and love God.
Then it is good to know that when we ask, God provides (what we need, not necessarily what we ask for). When we search, God guides us to find (what we need, not necessarily what we thought we sought). When we knock, God opens (the door that God knows we need to have opened, not necessarily the door we were banging away on).
To fear and love God.
To fear and love God is the beginning of everything good.
To fear and love God is the beginning of every good day, every good hour, every good minute.
To fear and love God is the beginning of every good relationship, project, or yearning.
Help us, we pray, to fear and love God before all else, (more than all the things that threaten to and do upend our lives.)
Help us, we pray, to trust God’s Angels are with us, (no matter what threatens to and does upend our lives.)
Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.
Luke 11:2
He said to them, ‘When you pray, say: Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come.
Words of Grace For Today
The Lord’s Prayer is known by countless people, said countless times, and desperately counted on more than a few times:
Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come.
For when God’s kingdom comes, then those that have done [fill in the injustice, the lies, the gaslighting, the horrendous abominations] to us and all other people will be brought to stop. Perhaps they will be brought to an end, though God’s preference is that they will be converted to serve God alone.
When God’s kingdom comes, then Nations shall come to God’s light, and kings to the brightness of Christ’s dawn,
and all people will give God thanks for the breath they have, for the water they have, for the food they eat, for the shelter (maybe even homes) they have, for the meaningful labour they have, and for the opportunity they have to love and be loved.
For now … the injustice continues, the lies live on, the gaslighting has not stopped, the horrendous abominations are repeated …
For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.
Colossians 1:19-20
For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.
Words of Grace For Today
Calm
Breathe and Relax
Be Calm
A year ago as Covid 19 spreading across the globe started to invade our lives we were afraid, unsure, perturbed and disturbed though without any focus of at what except an invisible thing that was coming for us! In Lent suddenly we could no longer gather for worship. We stopped and thought we’d start again in a month, right? It was just a temporary restriction, a temporary closure!
A year later, again in Lent, we think we have seen it all, and with vaccines being distributed slowly we hope that it will soon come to an end, though we are dreading what may come first, or almost never voiced, we dread most of all that it might never end. We dread now what we know is not just a very painful death, but even with mild symptoms the effects of the virus’ invasion into our body can leave long term ‘scars’ or scares, as strokes, organ failure and even heart and brain failure, strike without warning. Long-haulers refers to those who get sick, quite sick, but recover only sort of as they remain incapable of working, functioning, or thinking straight for fatigue and pain and …. The cost to all humans is more devastating than we could have imagined. Now the variants spread more quickly, perhaps more deadly, perhaps more devastating in the long-term disruption to our bodies’ functioning.
This is our life, suddenly foisted upon us, whether we were settled and bored or at least boring in our privileged lives, or whether we struggled to survive each day as our very lives were under threat of war’s violence, starvation or dying of thirst for lack of water … or whether our lives were already lost to an existential thirst for living water. No matter where or how or what we were before, now Covid 19 is upon us and has been for quite some time now, still an unknown quantity despite all we have collectively learned about it.
God remains.
God remains as always with us.
God remains as always with us and for us.
God has plans for our welfare and not for harm, to give us a future with hope.
To demonstrate God’s intentions and plans for us, Jesus lived as one of us, and as we (not God as some would claim) demand payment for sins God sacrificed Jesus’ life to our jealous, sinful, greedy, corrupt injustice.
Through him God was pleased to reconcile to God’s self all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of Jesus’ cross.
What lengths God goes to. What lengths we need God to go to, in order that we may be convinced that God’s attitude toward us is reconciliation, forgiveness, redemption, sanctification, and renewed life!
There are countless reasons to panic, to be in dread, to be overwhelmed with angst.
There is one ultimate reason to be calm.
God is with us and for us, and spares nothing to convince us that our future is good; we have every reason to hope.
For all will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well.
Relax.
Breathe.
Be Calm.
Be God-made saints (though we remain simultaneously sinners.)
So Israel said to Joseph, ‘Go now, see if it is well with your brothers and with the flock; and bring word back to me.’ So he sent him from the valley of Hebron.
Philippians 2:4
Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.
Words of Grace For Today
Israel sends Joseph.
That begins Joseph’s story of betrayal, slavery, advancement, a woman’s false charges, jail, interpreting dreams, and rising to Pharaoh’s most senior man … able then to rescue his family (including the brothers who betrayed him) from famine, which then results in Joseph’s descendants being enslaved by the Egyptians and God’s delivering the people, bringing them into the Promised Land. This story of deliverance will be retold generation after generation as the basis of God’s relationship with God’s chosen people.
When we think that our enemies have done us in, God uses all circumstances (especially our great disaster) to bring about witness and long-lived stories of God’s Graceful Deliverance of so many people.
God’s guide for us comes in many various words and ways. Paul relates a few of them to the Philippians: Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.
Let us live wondrously filled with trust in God’s deliverance, for God walks with us through all circumstances. We need not look after our own interests. We receive life and breath that we may look after others’ interests.
Streams Like This Have Flowed Since Earliest Times
Just as God’s Blessings and Wisdom Have Flowed
Even in Difficult Times.
They Flow to Us in Our Traditions.
1 Samuel 1:11
Hannah made this vow: ‘O Lord of hosts, if only you will look on the misery of your servant, and remember me, and not forget your servant, but will give to your servant a male child, then I will set him before you as a Nazirite until the day of his death. He shall drink neither wine nor intoxicants, and no razor shall touch his head.’
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
Hannah is barren, unable to have children. Her husband shows her great favour, loves her deeply. But her husband’s second wife (who has borne him many children) persecutes Hannah because she is barren. Like faithful people of every age, Hannah turns to God and prays for a son, and vows in exchange for a son she will offer him to serve God, raised in the temple by a priest.
Out of Hannah’s suffering, her vow bartering with God, and God’s Grace, God gave us Samuel, a faithful servant of God who anointed and guided kings and rulers of Israel through his lifetime, including a king no less than David.
Out of our suffering God works wonders to bring about great things, greater than we could have imagined possible.
Mary, mother of Jesus, recognizes the blessings God bestows on her, as she is chosen to bear God’s own Son, giving him life in this world as one of us. Mary is remembered as blessed, all these many generations later. She will be as long as Jesus is remembered, which we trust will be for as long as humans live. That is a great honour, an honour that God bestows on a young woman, really barely a woman. A young woman caught in the poverty of a backwater eddy of life’s flow through Israel’s history and geography, Nazareth.
The blessings come at a huge cost to Mary. She will be shunned as a pregnant girl not yet married. Joseph in marrying her will take on her shame as well. Together they will struggle in poverty, and when Herod catches wind that there is a king born among the children around Bethlehem, they will have to run for their lives to Egypt. Herod will slaughter all the children of Jesus’ age in the area. That is just the beginning of Mary’s sufferings which continue until Mary will see her own son accused, condemned and tortuously crucified for crimes he did not commit.
There is no end of heartache for Mary, and we remember her for that, and for God blessing her.
When God blesses us, there is hardly any guarantee or example in our faith stories that this will mean we will live a ‘normal’ life, a comfortable life, a life of anything less than one filled with huge challenges.
We think we suffer greatly in this time of Covid 19. There have been many, much worse pandemics before. The church, and individual Christians in it, have been persecuted much worst many times over in our history. Now as then we are forced to be creative. Life is not as comfortable as before. We have to learn to be practical in entirely new ways. We have to learn to worship in new ways.
Along the way we see how little some leaders have valued the long-and-hard-won traditions we have inherited. Instead, feeling this is the first time anyone has faced any challenges as God’s faithful people, leaders are making up new words. Were those words profound and as meaningful as the words our ancestors of faith had written, edited, and refined through so many ‘difficult times’ that would be one thing. Unfortunately many of these words end up merely as trite and pithy as mass marketed greeting cards.
Our traditions are not weak, nor wrong, nor set in stone. They exist for us to tap, to adapt, and from which to create new and continuing traditions from.
That requires a deep and broad knowledge of our history and traditions, a profound wisdom about faith and the world, and a great humility that allows an ongoing confession of one’s own and our collective sins, from which God saves us again and again.
We pray (with no first born to offer to God in barter) that God will give us all we need, so that we will not set to ruin the church that we have inherited, the faith that we live in, and the awareness of God’s presence among us … especially in difficult times such as these with which Covid 19 presents us.
We pray, God save us. God guide us. God help us mourn what is lost. God help us rejoice at what is left. God help us celebrate what is new to us again, as it was to many who have gone before us.
He said, ‘My lord, if I find favour with you, do not pass by your servant.’
Luke 19:5
When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, ‘Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today.’
Words of Grace For Today
When a king comes to town for a visit, unannounced (because there is no internet, or post, or telephone – either our past or our future) then we may want the king to stay with us, maybe.
First it would be life-death important to know how the king is disposed to us! If the king has come to find traitors and suspects us, will see what is not a betrayal, but something that the king will use as an excuse to vent his anger at being betrayed … well then obviously we might not want the king to come stay with us.
If the king, despite our ‘indiscretions’, is forgiving, and is favourably disposed to us, then it would be a great honour to have the kind stay with us.
Thus Abraham’s invitation seems understandable, “Come stay with us, if we have found favour with you.”
It’s a bit more complicated, since Abraham is sitting in a nomad’s tent, where the law of the desert, seldom ignored, is that out in the barren, isolated hard lands anyone seeking refuge from the heat and sands will be welcomed in, and welcomed in will be protected from all danger, even from one’s own desire for revenge if this is one’s enemy. As enemies go the desert is a greater enemy. Thus when three strangers stand in front of Abraham, who has made untold enemies in his journey up and down the golden tradeways from Ur to Egypt, Abraham may not know if they are enemies or not. He may be letting an enemy in three parts enter his tents, trusting the rule of hospitality will keep him safe, and will not put him in the middle of a fight these men have with others, others who may or may not honour the law of hospitality.
Perhaps Abraham hedges his bets, so to speak, and offers hospitality, if he has found favour with these three men.
Another piece of the complications is that this is not a known king, or just any passer-by either. This is three men. Not just men. Whether Abraham knows it or not the narrator tells us that this is the Lord, this is God. Three men are God. So not so simple, whether Abraham is in the know or not.
Perhaps Abraham really hedges all his bets, so to speak, and offers God hospitality, but only if he has found favour with God. What a way to find out where one sits with God! What a risk! What a wager Abraham makes, for if he has found favour with God and these three demonstrate to him he has, and others hear of it, Abraham’s reputation will increase immensely!
Pause a bit to notice in all these considerations I have led us to pass up one obvious thing: if these three strangers need hospitality, then they ought to be the one’s asking Abraham, ‘If we have found favour with you, sir, may we stop and rest within your hospitality.’
Stories about God’s interactions with us are always something different than we should expect.
Jesus’ story is one such unexpected development after another, always with a twist or seventy, to keep us on our toes about what we think Jesus is about and what God is trying to demonstrate to us with Jesus’ life, ministry, death, resurrection and ascension.
Good people, travelling about as Jesus did, teaching in the synagogues and to the people (if the traveller teachers were honourable people) did not mix with dishonourable people. They avoided ‘unclean’ people because it made them unclean and therefore unable to enter the synagogue until they had completed the purification ritual that lasted days.
Reminds us of obligatory self-quarantine requirements of travellers and those with close contacts with people diagnosed with Covid-19!
Zacchaeus was anything but honourable. He collected taxes for Rome, able to exact from whomever whatever he wished in order to collect his allotment. He got to keep any extra he collected. Tax collectors were wealthy and hated; the preyed upon those from whom they could take the most with the least ability to protect themselves. They hardly collected from the influential and really wealthy people who could exact their own revenge against any tax collector taking anything but a token tax from them. Tax collectors were hated, really hated and really feared. One did not want to end up on the wrong side of a tax collector who could ruin you financially, or if you resisted, could have you jailed for debts.
Jesus interaction with Zacchaeus is exemplary of what Jesus demonstrates to us. Jesus does not stand at all on norms or expectations. Jesus stomps all over them, not to stomp on them but to point to something that norms and expectations violate: God’s unconditional love for everyone.
Again the invite is backwards, given by the one who ought to be the invitee. It would be Zacchaeus’ honour to host Jesus. Zacchaeus is more than curious about Jesus. He works to overcome his own shortcomings and short stature (real and figuratively) to get a view of Jesus. Zacchaeus should be inviting Jesus to stay with him, begging for the honour of Jesus’ presence in his ill-gotten and supplied home. – If you have not caught this in reading the Zacchaeus story, we are all equated to Zacchaeus; we should all be desperate to invite Jesus into our lives, and all we do is try to overcome our shortcomings and lack of standing in the Kingdom of God in order to get at least a glance of God’s own Son, Jesus. As if that is enough, or as if we actually could every overcome our shortcomings, our sins.
Instead Jesus is the one who sees Zacchaeus (us), and Jesus invites himself to Zacchaeus’ home (our lives). When Jesus arrives Zacchaeus is converted from a lost soul to one of Jesus’ followers. Zacchaeus moves from Jesus’ presence back into his own life … in order to make things right that he has made so wrong.
Jesus arrives in our lives (well we notice Jesus’ presence as an arrival even though he’s been there since before we were conceived – God is always with us!) and our first steps are to put things as right as we can in our lives, for those we have done harm to. Like Zacchaeus our putting things right for others is a good step toward doing ourselves something good too, not in order to gain something, but in response to being given everything, namely we have been given God’s favour.
Jesus will seem to arrive again and again in our lives. Today what are we going to put right in response to God’s greatest blessing, namely that God walks with us through everything, that Jesus has made his home in our lives, forgiving us our sins in order that we might forgiven all other people and make things as right as we can.
Lord, if we … no, that’s not how it goes for us that trust God walks with us. We say instead: ‘Lord, since we have found favour with you, and you abide with us, what can we do for you this day?!’
… – – – … Cold Hard Reality … – – – … Our Own Sin … – – – … The Start of God’s Work for Us …. ..
Friday, February 12, 2021
The Sun Rises And Spreads Cold Cold Cold Light
God using the sun to draw smoke shadows on curves of snow
Proverbs 3:7
Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord, and turn away from evil.
Galatians 6:4
All must test their own work; then that work, rather than their neighbour’s work, will become a cause for pride.
Words of Grace For Today
We become accustomed to life, unjustly lived, civilization’s thin veneer holding back barbarism, barely while so many wealthy, privileged, and powerful people utilize outrageous barbarism to hold on to what they value, i.e. their positions, corrupt as they are.
We become accustomed to life and are widely disturbed, our individual and collective mental health plummets, because a pandemic disrupts our customary living …
and we are left to face what truly lies beneath, behind, and beyond our ‘civilized’ habits. It is not pretty. It scares us. It drives us mad.
This is a small piece of the cost of living as if we could rise above fear of God. This is a small piece of the cost of pretending that we need not resist evil at every turn, lest we be dragged into the sea of it’s chaos, into it’s power to uncreate creation, dissolve all time, and possess life itself even as it all crumbles into non-existence.
Being wise in one’s own eyes is like the fool Trump, declaring himself to be so intelligent, even as he spouts idiocies that are easily proven to be false. Remember when he recommended that people drink bleach to eradicate Covid 19 from their systems. Bleach of course is a caustic poison easily eradicating life from anyone who drinks it!
Our own, your own, idiocies may not be so obvious to us, to you, though they probably are to others!
Daily we immerse ourselves in the old, old story of Jesus and his love; which starts with our past and continuing sins confessed and graciously forgiven by God.
We immerse ourselves in this story, not forgetting the beginning (our wretched inevitable sin) so that we do not forget how much we need to be saved from our sins, how much God does to save us, and how terrible our deserved damnation would be if God were not so undeservedly gracious with us. We do not forget our ongoing inevitable sins so that we do not rise to false pride.
Instead we readily accept the reality and confess our sins, knowing in that confession we also accept God’s forgiveness, which forgiveness enables us to also be God-made saints, simultaneously as we remain sinners. God has God’s way with us, and we love it!
We know our own works are pitiful. Our neighbours may look to be so as well. On our own nothing we do amounts to anything (valued by God’s criteria and measure). Aided, guided, and inspired by the Holy Spirit, God accomplishes great things through us. God saves others by giving them abundant life through our work.
Our pride in our work, and in our neighbours’ work, amounts only to pride in what God does through us. Though we last no longer than smoke we remain courageously, creatively humble as God uses us to paint Grace on this world. Meeting the new demands of Covid 19 pandemic and it’s dangers and restrictions is a mere trifle, measured by God’s criteria. It is another opportunity to see, receive, and share God’s unending blessings.
I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.
Acts 9:3-5
Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’ He asked, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ The reply came, ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.’
Words of Grace For Today
My father served as the first civilian doctor to winter over at McMurdo when it ceased to be a military base. He tells of being asked if he’d like to hop a ride with one of the specialists out on a snowmobile. The wonders of light against the ice and snow, the distant mountains in one direction, the ocean in the other, and the shear size all came through in the email to us ‘kids’. And it was cold, real cold.
Living then on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia the winters were cold and impossible for travel if it dipped below freezing and snowed. There were few if any snow tires on the vehicles there, and lots of balding summer tires, so the cars slipped and slid, jamming up the hillside roads, and even the gentle slopes along the coastal water. I could only remember cold from my previous ‘lives’ in Minnesota and Alberta.
Before he hopped on the back of the snowmobile, my father suited up covering every stitch of skin with protective gear. He did not say they travelled fast. It would be hard enough on the machinery at a reasonable pace. It was just that at -75⁰ C everything is a huge bit different…. He missed one small piece between a glove layer and a jacket (if I remember that location correctly). He felt nothing besides the regular cold and returned with a severe frostbit patch of skin. He was fortunate not to loose a piece of flesh to the cold-burn.
Cold, so cold that it burns skin dead with freezing very quickly. We can hear of it, but until one feels the cold it is hard to imagine how powerful the cold really is.
A hard deep cold has hit the prairies extending across the central US as well. It was down to -34⁰ here last night and will get colder yet through the next two nights if forecasts are to be believed. Still a short walk outside is easy, a longer work session possible, even a long walk is doable with the warmest clothing. Cold so cold it freezes skin without any pain is a whole other level of cold.
Like the jogger who went out in shorts for his morning 3 mile run in a deep freeze and returned to have both legs amputated they were so damaged from the freezing.
Saul is enthusiastic and powerful with letters to pursue, detain and punish heretics, followers of the crucified Jesus of Nazareth. Then Jesus shows himself first hand to Saul. That transforms Saul’s life of persecuting followers of The Way, to one of Jesus’ most dedicated disciples, spreading the Good News around the east and north of the Mediterranean Sea, which proves to be the birthing of the Christian Church beyond Jerusalem, which sets the ground work for the Gospel of Jesus Christ to reach us even in this millennium.
Job loses everything, wife, children, wealth, and even his health. His friends bring him encouragement to confess his sins. The widespread belief is that if someone suffers at all it is a result of that person’s own sins. There may be no relief from the suffering, so the only thing to do is to confess and beg God for forgiveness.
This belief is alive and well today under many guises. It is a handy way to blame those who suffer for their suffering, to avoid one’s own responsibility for others’ sufferings, and to convince oneself that one is above such misfortune (because one does not sin like ‘that’ person has!)
Job knows he has not sinned in such a way as to have deserved the horrific loses and suffering he has faced. Job has heard all about God, believes in God, and prays to God (and yells in defiance at God)!
Then God appears face to face with Job!
That changes everything!
Job responds: now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.
It’s deep freeze cold. We do not know cold though until we experience it in person.
It’s God’s creation. We can believe in God, and pretend we’ve earned our place before God. Then God appears in person to us and … we know how undeserving we are of God’s Grace and …
We know first hand how wondrous and life-changing God’s Grace is for us and …
We know God’s Grace is nothing if we do not share it with everyone, as freely and as graciously as God has shared it with us!
Then there is beauty in every piece of life, just as there is beauty in the cold of coldest deep freeze polar cold.
(including the miracles of such vaccines as never before possible?)
OR
Complaining and demanding yet more miracles
amid a pandemic?
Psalm 145:10
All your works shall give thanks to you, O Lord, and all your faithful shall bless you.
Hebrews 6:7
[We can be like] ground that drinks up the rain falling on it repeatedly, and that produces a crop useful to those for whom it is cultivated [for this is to receive] a blessing from God.
Words of Grace For Today
Is it gratitude that defines us?
Are we like ground, thirsting and tilled and producing nourishment for many?
Who is it that we are this day?
The Morning After, the morning of redemption:
So what does this morning offer to us, to you, to me?
The light shines bright in the mild air across the cold undisturbed curves of snow marking the goodness of winter this day, if even for too short a time.
Where does the light shine in you, in me, in us?
…
Coming out of the city yesterday, on that wretched 1 mile stretch of gravel that the city has never paved like the roads next to it and the MD roads out into the country (who is being disfavoured with this anomaly?) I was peddling nicely along, tired and warming up for the hours it would take to get ‘home’. The flashlight on the front provided a good beam, strobing to save power, and the snow had collected in strips or rather been run off in strips down the road. It was bumpy, washboard … a real pain in the butt and jolted my whole tired body. I kept seeking out a smoother path, finally even on the side just outside the last clear strip. I did not make it to the snow. Instead turning the wheel demonstrated that that ‘cleared’ strip was not just cleared, it was run over and over and over until it was a shiny slick ice way. The front wheel lost all grip on the ice as I turned to the right. It slid left, the bike handle bars, seat and packs on the back rack went right, gravity took hold and I was on my back and right buttocks before the goose could crap or squawk. My back did not like it a bit. Fortunately I’d just taken food with a Tordol to ensure my back did not give me problems and from experience it lessons the arthritis pain on the trip on the bike there and back.
I lay there a bit, lights red and brilliant white strobing in the dark near the ground, then rolled over to test if I were still functionally one piece if not at peace with the cursed universe. The left doubled mittens came off to dust off the snow, light and sticking everywhere.
I stood, more dusting off as a car whisked by without stopping to inquire about the strobes reflecting off the ice and snow.
Then, with miles to go, I pulled up the bike, turned each wheel and the pedals each a turn to ensure they were not damaged, and set off walking towards the west, smoke plumes far to the north and west, wheeling the bike back and forth between the snow and ice strips trying to find sure footing for myself and for the wheels. Most of a mile later, on the pavement I tested the grip. It seemed sure enough. So with the cabins ahead to the right I mounted the ‘old steed’ and powered by my tired legs set off on the all too familiar route of gradual rises that require walking and the grades where I can wheel free, forward and down just a bit. At the creek, steeper down I was more than wary, and stifled the gravity pull, more for the oncoming traffic that filled the lane ahead than for myself – for I was too tired to remember I ought not want to put cheek or anything else to the ground at great speed. Fortune was the first time I was barely moving, still in first gear, trying to find a path forward through the rough ground below.
Onward the night went, progressively faster and slower, approaching me and passing me by at varying speeds, with smells of leaking gas and oil, the plumes changing direction and the night sky moving against the ground lights, the airport strobe, and the reflections off the smoke plumes so far distant, the nearest just beyond my destination of warmth, shelter … All the while knowing the toughest mile is always the last pulling the bike through the snow after the road ends when I am left to more pedestrian advances through the snow toward … rest.
This morning …
After a late night of letting my overheated muscles cool to normal and my mind to find it’s rest, I woke twice to stoke in the dark, and then once again as the dawn barely started to push the dark west, each time not wanting to rise, but it needed be. Until finally I woke to bright light beyond the coverings, and slowly pulled the cobwebs back with more light and then a walk outside, and on to the late morning routine of Eucharistie und Frühstück, thankful for the fire that provides boiling water for coffee, and writing.
A morning of redemption from the monotony through yesterday’s exercise and today’s recovery.
So I ask again, mostly of you:
So what does this morning offer to us, to you, to me?
The light shines bright in the mild air across the cold undisturbed curves of snow marking the goodness of winter this day, if even for too short a time.
Where does the light shine in you, in me, in us?
Are we filled with praise and gratitude for all God’s generous gifts to us all?
Do we drink in those gifts, and give back to those most in need, the benefits of our being so blessed?
Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.
Romans 6:23
For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Words of Grace For Today
The world’s equations are simple and messed up. They speak of just rewards. The wealthy and ‘successful’ hold that they have earned their wealth and ‘success’, and the poor just have not worked hard enough!
Those in deep poverty don’t have time to waste on such equations: life demands everything of them just to survive another week, maybe even just one more day!
Those in between, afraid they may end up in deep poverty, buy into the work-reward equation as protection from sliding into desperate poverty (until they do, not a result of their own doing) and as a faint hope that some day, if they work hard enough they may climb up into better circumstances, even become one of the wealthy or ‘successful’.
God’s equation is not tied to our efforts, not efforts at good works, nor efforts at true belief, not efforts of right thoughts. God’s equation of ‘success’ requires only God’s acting on us, in us, and through us …. By grace alone we are saved.
So what do we do with these biblical texts and many like them that seem to throw us right back into the ‘our good efforts and good results net us eternal salvation or eternal damnation – so buck up pal and do good OR else!’ equation?
First of all: it is a life long challenge to remember and hold to God’s equation for our eternal salvation. Some hold (not us) that it’s all up to God, so what we do does not count at all! It’s just that our lives will reflect God’s choice of salvation or damnation for us: that is if we look like God has saved us it means we are and the other way around. In this way of living one falls right back into desperately trying to be or at least look good, so as to show in this life one is chosen by God to be saved! And that brings us right back into the futile equation of ‘it’s all up to us, so buck up pal Or else.’
Second of all: it is not up to us to get it right. We do not hold that we can save ourselves, but we certainly can ignore God’s good work in us and live like hell. Literally we can sin madly and never take claim of the gift of salvation that God has already given to us and constantly newly gives to us.
So our salvation is a result of God’s good work for us.
And our damnation is a result of our own evil work in creation.
A paradox, but what else is faith, than a tension beyond comprehension, requiring trust each day, each minute.
Before God we are all in deep poverty, needing God’s gift of redemption. We are all sinners.
Before God we are all given the greatest riches and real success, claimed as God’s own children. We are all saints.
So how to live each day: simple! Share God’s Grace with everyone.
As Jesus summed it up: love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and strength, and your neighbour as yourself, even your enemies!
That equation for each day is like the bright sun in the mild air on the cold snow returned after weeks of cloudy, snowy, deep-freeze weather: it’s filled with thanks for the light, love for creation, and hope for each new day!
