Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has looked favourably on his people and redeemed them.
Words of Grace For Today
As we begin this evening to celebrate Christ’s birth, not the first time at all, not at all, the temperatures are set to drop deep below -30⁰. That cold will not hinder the blessed warmth that God’s story of Jesus’ love for all people provides for all the faithful.
Candles are lit on the wreath, one for each Sunday of Advent, reminding us that Christ comes and brings light to all the darkness of our lives and of this world, all the darkness that robs us of life.
Yet, this year, again, for all those intelligent to act wisely, there will be no worship service with great crowds, music, and candles lit while we sing Silent Night.
How God moves us through the challenges of life!
In the cold, in the wilderness, in the dark, in great solitude, the blessed quiet of the woods next to the lake, there is always great reason to celebrate all that God provides us.
Breathe.
Pray.
Give Thanks.
Hope.
…
It will all be well, very well, all manner of well … for all us God-made saints.
I made the earth, and created humankind upon it; it was my hands that stretched out the heavens, and I commanded all their host.
John 1:11
He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.
Words of Grace For Today
The world is a wonderful place for us to live life, from the beginning to the end.
That’s what God does when God creates:
God creates the earth … and it is good and we can make enough evil to ruin it completely, or we can enjoy life fully.
God creates us … and creates us good, and free to love, so we are also capable to make enough evil to ruin everything completely, or we can enjoy life fully.
God creates the heavens and their host … and God creates everything good and we can make enough evil to ruin the universe completely, so completely, for ourselves and all future generations, or we can enjoy life fully.
Because we can be so evil, when Jesus comes, when the Holy Spirit comes (even though we are God’s own people) in our sin we reject Jesus’ way, we reject the inspiration of the Holy Spirit that makes us holy, that makes us saints. Instead of living well, we live … lost.
And lost we are lonely, and lonely we are desperate, and desperate we do so many unthinkable things to others, and at the same time to ourselves.
Thankfully that is not the end of the story.
Jesus comes as a vulnerable infant born in a barn, which starts a life that continues to a death and a resurrection … by which God creates a story of God’s unconditional love for us all, and God’s response to relentless hard hearts that make enough evil to ruin the universe completely, so completely, for ourselves and all future generations. In response to our Evil God forgives us and gives us renewed life, capable of loving again …
Even if we seem lost to ourselves, or even to others.
Psalm 105:3
Glory in his holy name; let the hearts of those who seek the Lord rejoice.
2 Corinthians 13:11
Finally, brothers and sisters, farewell. Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you.
Words of Grace For Today
Last words.
What would be your last words to your best friend?
To your child?
To your spouse?
To your spouse who gaslit you and lied to send you to jail?
To the contentious congregation that never could stop fighting among themselves?
To the saints who gave you faith, nurtured it in you, and inspired you to sacrifice everything to do the good and right things in every situation that you could, even for your mentally ill, abusive, and pedophile spouse?
Paul wrote to that contentious congregation in Corinth his last words, pointing them once again to Christ: Finally, brothers and sisters, farewell. Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you.
What else could he write after so many years of writing and hoping that they would realize the treasure they were for each other, gifts to each other from God?
Life of faith in Jesus the Christ is often referred to as a life seeking the Lord. This only somewhat apt description recognizes that we never can grasp hold of and possess the Lord, or even be guaranteed that we have ‘arrived’ at knowing that we are God’s alone. Since we continue to sin all our lives, having embraced our faith, or rejected the gifts of God, we cannot point to a perfected way of living. We always continue on, ‘seeking the Lord.’ This is only partial correct in that it puts the onus of ‘finding the Lord’ on us. In truth our journey is a gift from God. Our effort at ‘seeking’ has little to do with the outcome of our journey. Hubris ruled as we are we like to claim that our own efforts determine our faith journey and all of our lives. It is simply not so.
All we are that is good, is a gift from God, including our faith.
Knowing and trusting this we can indeed rejoice in the journey that God gives to us, no matter how obstacle ridden, or unfruitful, or hopeless it may seem to us along the way.
Rejoice!
This we can do because God acts for us, first. Then we get to respond with all our hearts of faith that God has given to us. This is God’s way in God’s creation for God’s people.
Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them ‘Humankind’ when they were created.
Jude 1:2
May mercy, peace, and love be yours in abundance.
Words of Grace For Today
It’s c c c cold outside.
God created this?!
God created us to share one another’s company so that we could warm each other against the cold?
Would that even help in this cold of below -30⁰ C?
…
Maybe a little, but certainly not enough, unless …
…
unless one of us is able to plan and prepare and build a shelter that can be warmed by heating fuel to the burning point … safely.
So the wood stove gobbles up wood and produces heat, mostly safely (if one is particularly alert to the immediate dangers of burning the whole thing down or gassing the occupants with carbon monoxide or … well there is a whole host of dangers to be avoided while heating a stove to 400⁰C and a chimney to 2000⁰ C
and there are benefits, like sitting in a sauna after jumping through the ice into the lake.
Not that I have a sauna or a hole in the ice, nor the foolishness in these temperatures to jump in such a hole! But walking outside is bracing and then biting and then dangerous, so it’s nice to know the ‘wood eating monster’ has done it’s thing well and 40⁰C awaits me to warm up by. Of course the floor temperatures are anywhere from 20⁰ to 60⁰ cooler than at head level. At Advent we remember that God comes to level … well, this variation could use some levelling!
Still, we breathe and live, and marvel at systems that work in such cold were metal looses half its strength and oil congeals and skin freezes in minutes or seconds.
So we give thanks that God’s mercy, peace, and love are ours in abundance!
No Matter the Weeds Or Ice In Our Way, Christ’s Light Guides Us.
No Matter What Our Enemies Do
Or Take From Us,
No Matter the Wilderness They Abandon Us To
God Walks With Us
Lamentations 3:24
‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I will hope in him.’
1 Peter 1:8-9
Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.
Words of Grace For Today
So many things challenge us each day, sometime making our day’s progress the usual grind, sometimes throwing up road blocks that could put us in reverse to find a way around them, and sometimes they stop us in our tracks, dead halt.
Whether it’s our enemies trying to undo us, or someone using us as a stepping stone to get ahead, or questions about our own worth brought on by lies about us or our own real limitations or others’ unreal expectations, or it is our health that fails us … no matter what it is that challenges us we all experience them every day.
The only way to live life abundantly is to be able to know that the Lord is our portion and only in God we can hope.
When we fear and love God, when we believe and trust God’s promises to carry us, when we know that glorious joy from knowing God walks with us … then we can know as well that God is at work in us, having given us faith and sent us out to share all God’s gifts with all God’s people.
God is at work in us showing us that our portion is the Lord, and that we can trust and hope in God alone.
My holy name I will make known among my people Israel; and I will not let my holy name be profaned any more; and the nations shall know that I am the Lord, the Holy One in Israel.
John 17:26
I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.
Words of Grace For Today
To know God’s name and to keep it holy is a gift given to us all, though we often, more often than we care to admit, we turn our back on the gifts from God and use God’s name in vain, and more as our own avenue for our own selfish wishes. All in vain.
God in God’s name is what brings us to live with grace and hope.
God in God’s name is what brings us to know the love that holds the universe together.
This is the gift that gives us life.
This is the gift that we turn away from when we follow our own ways, deceits, and greed.
This is the gift that God extends to us again and again, each time we turn away from God.
This day, which will it be for us, to turn from God, or to accept God’s grace bring us to return to God?
It will be both and neither, as God wishes.
So we live in God’s favour, blessed and living as we breathe.
Foreigners shall build up your walls, and their kings shall minister to you; for in my wrath I struck you down, but in my favour I have had mercy on you.
Colossians 2:13-14
When you were dead in trespasses … God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross.
Words of Grace For Today
God has a beef with us, and (in the terms of today’s many times corrupt courts) issues a warrant for our arrest and incarceration in hell forever.
God finds us, and leaves us at the mercies of our evil enemies, who control us and take our lives as opportunities for their perverse desires. This is indeed hell.
…
Thank God that is not the last God has to do with us, for God is clear in judgment against all who sin, who turn away from him, not just our evil enemies but us as well. Even more so God is loving and merciful to all people. God takes that writ and the consequences of our suffering in hell for eternity and nails it to the cross of Jesus, God’s only Son.
And there it stays …
and
when we again turn away from God another writ is issued, we suffer, and then God relents and forgives us and nails that writ on the cross.
So it continues through all time
as the cross
is weighed down with writs so countless not even the stars nor all the particles of the universe are so many.
This is how powerful and enduring God’s love is, God’s mercy is, God’s Grace is.
Thus (despite the chippiness of so many people around us because Covid continues with all it’s variants of concern to threaten and thus governments and wise people -no more so than us ourselves continue to restrict our lives) we wake to each new day thankful for all that God provides that contributes to our survival one more day, so blessed are we by God. In this our enemies’ and their destructive deceit withers up like crab apples left to be pecked at by birds and to rot on the trees until they freeze and drop as fertilizer for another summer’s growth.
God’s justice, mercy, and love have reigned, do reign, and will always reign supreme.
Moses returned to the Lord and said, ‘Alas, this people has sinned a great sin; they have made for themselves gods of gold. But now, if you will only forgive their sin—but if not, blot me out of the book that you have written.’
Hebrews 3:12-13
Take care, brothers and sisters, that none of you may have an evil, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today’, so that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.
Words of Grace For Today
Moses was more than disappointed in the people. He’d been up the mountain, talking with God, receiving the ten commandments. They had waited, grown impatient and decided to take things into their own hands. Progress. They gather all their gold, give it to Aaron and insist he make them an idol of a god that they can worship, just like the ‘good old days.’
This is quite a step away from God, the God who brought them out of harsh racist slavery (the thanks they receive for their forebearer Joseph’s saving the Egyptians all from drought and widespread death) into the hardships of freedom – in the wilderness – as they learn to live faithful and trusting God so that they are prepared to enter the Promised Land.
This step proves that this generation is not ready to enter the Promised Land and will not. Still God forgives them and goes with them, in the ark of the covenant, as they wander the wilderness, raising another generation who will be prepared to follow God into the Promised Land. Well that generation is as much an unprepared, unfaithful generation as the last, as are all the successive.
Fast forward to after Jesus’ birth, ministry, crucifixion, and resurrection and the leaders of the early church and honest ones in every generation up to today (and all people into the future) know that the temptations to take things into our own hands is overwhelming. People have constantly turned away from God to worship idols of their own making from their own treasures (whatever it is their hearts treasure that is not God’s steadfast love).
The writer of Hebrews does as well as most leaders: he admonishes all the people to exhort each other so that they will not ‘take things into their own hands’ and turn from God. This admonition is futile. Worse it sets the people up to play judge against each other, thus taking God’s Grace and turning it into everything but Grace.
This is God’s Word: fear and love God with all you heart, mind, and strength, yourself, your neighbour and especially your neighbour.
This is God’s Promise: God will forgive us our ‘taking things into our own hands’.
We need not fear God’s judgment. On every day that ends with ‘y’ (including each today) we get to bask in God’s favour, God’s Grace, and in God’s steadfast love. We get to forgive each other and offer each other the gifts of the ‘Promised Land’ that God has showered down on us.
Then he said, ‘Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.’
Hebrews 12:28
Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks, by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe.
Words of Grace For Today
It was 2 am, and every sensible person was asleep or working the graveyard shift. Not Porgy. An alcoholic for decades with more than enough DUI’s to prove it, was drinking with his friends and when they all left at midnight he kept up by himself on the way home. At home he grabbed the left over beer and shifted from his pickup truck to his jeep. He set out to ‘run the muck around’ on crown land, except it was a foot and a half deep with snow. The better the challenge and the more fun.
He had toured all through the regular routes and left the run out to the hermit’s place for last. At 2 am his headlights off he winds onto the high road, now no longer on crown land for a ways, and follows the tracks that wind around an old basement filled with garbage and 20 year old trees, past the blocked off road above the illegal campsite sitting just 10 feet from the water of the lake, a road that can still be walked and from which the best views of sunset and fishers are enjoyed and captured by the hermit photographer. As he rounds the old deserted and abandoned camper and add-a-shack for a wood stove he guns the engine to ensure he wakes up the sleeping hermit and 50 yards later drives right through a wire that the hermit setup to slow down quads stealing wood from him. Up in the hermit’s wood yard Porgy’s jeep suddenly dies. It just stops. There Porgy sits, tries to turn the key to start the jeep but everything is black, dead, quiet.
The hermitage is holy ground. (Porgy has forgotten everything about ‘removing his sandals’ or giving God God’s due. God reminds Porgy by disabling his old jeep.)
Porgy has heard the ground is holy and not given it much credence. Now, completely dark, shut down silent, Porgy reconsiders. A light flashes down out of the sky. Porgy jumps out of his skin and prays earnestly for the first time since the last time he was drunk, “God save me!”
God has found a way to ‘speak’ to Porgy, even in his drunken haze.
It’s actually a military helicopter on an exercise, testing electronic surveillance, that God has put to use. Knowing all about Porgy’s DUI’s and alcoholism, the helicopter crew has been following his truck and then jeep for the last half hour, and having heard that the hermitage is holy ground they decide to play a bit with Porgy. They’ve remotely, temporarily shut off the jeep when they’ve known it would be safe. It was a good test of their equipment, logged and certified as effective at 500 metres.
As if in response to Porgy’s desperate prayer, the jeep lights up again. He starts it, and drives out as quietly as he can. Within days everyone hears a version of the story, Porgy’s version, how he went to visit the hermit in the evening and how God shut down his jeep as soon as he got on to the hermitage. He told everyone it must be holy ground.
Within days the military few know a different story, and they hear the story from Porgy. Only a faithful few realize that they played a part in it all, but God was at work. They realize that the hermitage really is holy ground. Humans (from his ex, the girls, the lay-pastor and bishop, the wealthiest people in town, the cops, lawyers, and more than 2 dozen judges) have sought to destroy a good, kind, and honest man, and they have only created a holy martyr, a hermit more safe from Covid than anyone of them, more blessed every day than any of them. Their practice surveillance of the area has long since established the hermit’s hard work to survive, his ingenuity, and his kindness to anyone who treads on that holy ground … and his efforts to save anyone from intruding in unholy ways on the holy ground. Their investigations of records they ‘practice’ accessing for ‘national security’ have given them enough of the completely unjustifiable effort of many different people to financially ruin him, to drive him deep into debt and poverty, and to even kill him … and the hermit’s blessed response of forgiveness to his mentally ill ex and the children and the binding of everyone else’s sins – putting their deeds over to God for judgment and offering them forgiveness if they would only but confess.
No one is holding their breath for that, since all the guilty people think no one will ever know who has done what or how.
But God knows, and a few intelligence people know, and a few honest people who listen carefully, and a whole lot of guilty people know.
That morning at 2 am, the hermit did wake up to the jeep’s engine noise, look out the window, and saw the jeep, and the light. He heard the near by helicopter and then saw Porgy start the jeep and drive away. When daylight came he went out and repaired the wire. All along, as for so many other things, the hermit gave God thanks, knowing that since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, we can give thanks, by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe.
Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth; give me an undivided heart to revere your name.
John 14:6
Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’
Words of Grace For Today
No matter who we are, what history we have, how many sins we have piled up, and no matter how many times God has forgiven us and the Holy Spirit has inspired us to live as God’s saints spreading God’s unconditional and steadfast love to all people …
No matter what challenges we face in our past and in our present and in our future …
No matter anything, God’s Grace pours over us in abundance …
and we still know we need Jesus’ way, truth and life more and more for our hearts are divided between serving Christ and serving our own selfish needs, and so are our decisions each minute.
Decisions.
We make decisions every day, every minute.
We make decisions by engaging in various steps:
1. we asses what the situation is
2. we consider what choices we have
3. we discern what choice best serves our self interest
4. we make the decision by acting on it.
Recent modern thought is that step three is the most important. Thus the common assumption behind modern society brings us to serve our own, greedy, selfish interests, thinking that is the most important thing to do.
Philosophers and thinking people of all generations have long since realized that step one is actually the most important.
Who we are and what we think, how we view the world, is the most important step. Therein we determine what the ‘problem’ is, and that determines everything about what choices we come up with, choose and act on.
When we know that first and foremost when facing decisions our only hope to do something good for us and for other people is to consider everything from the perspetive that God gives us: that God created, we all are free to love (and therefore sin, that is to turn from who God created us to be), that God forgives us our sin and calls us back to ‘see the world’ (and our ‘problems’) as God’s gift to us including our own lives, and then …
then we have some hope of choosing what is in our best self interest, which is always then in the best interest of all people.
It all depends on us knowing God’s creation as God created it to be, and us in that creation as God saves us and inspires us to be: God’s saints.
So we pray: Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth; give me an undivided heart to revere your name! knowing that Jesus is the way, and the truth, and the life.
