Happy is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people whom he has chosen as his heritage.
Galatians 4:6-7
Because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.
Words of Grace For Today
Promises.
Promises provide for a future.
Promises from God provide for a blessed future … and happiness.
God chooses us and we become children, heirs of a kingdom like no other. We are chosen, made holy and sent out into the world with the inheritance that all envy and few would if they understood it fully.
The inheritance we receive is to be servants. To serve God. To serve God’s creation and all of God’s creatures, all people.
No great glory in that. It is ascending to … well ascending to the lowest among the lowest on earth.
That is the heritage that the children of God inherit.
Welcome to the children of God, promised great blessings, and sent out to share the Good News that transforms lives and all creation … but
it does not give us power, wealth, renown, comfort, security, or … well almost anything else that we humans would list as what we desire to have in life … except we are guaranteed God’s unconditional love and the huge challenge of sharing it with everyone, even those who least deserve it (especially them.)
Promises.
Promises provide for a future.
Promises from God provide for a blessed future … and happiness.
You shall rise before the aged, and defer to the old; and you shall fear your God: I am the Lord.
Romans 12:10
Love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honour.
Words of Grace For Today
The other day on CBC radio I heard a voice describing how the Indigenous People have elders. I’ve known some of this for decades (a nice refresher – I’ve bracketed those particulars that may not have been provided by the voice on the radio) and some was new. [No one can themselves work to become or claim to be an elder. There is no age requirement, only that it takes decades to become wise. Time does not guarantee wisdom, though. There are many foolish old people. It is a recognition given by the community, one person at a time, until it is consented by most that this or that person is an elder.] An Elder does not hold all the wisdom that there is. Each elder is respected and sought out for the kind of wisdom that that elder is recognized for. One may be a spiritual elder, another a story-teller elder, another a healer elder, and so it is for each gift for which an elder is recognized and sought for guidance by others.
The old admonition to ‘defer to the old’ found in various ways in the Bible is not always wise advice to follow in all situations. As above, some old people are still very unwise and some outright foolish. The same goes for respecting one’s parents. Most deserve better than they get from their children. It’s a matter of children rebelling in order to find their own voice and way in life. Some children would be far better off if they had learned some respect for their parents and elders, and learned how to exercise that even while they found their own path in life. Outright disrespect which seems to expand with each generation and becomes so obvious in classrooms, where students do things to teachers that were unheard of just 10 years earlier! On the other hand, some parents, parents that neglect their children, abusive parents, parents that have sex with their teenage children, parents that would as easily kill their own children if they do not do everything to ‘make their parent proud’ … simple said these parents should not be left to be parents … and yet the communities, churches, and courts continue to do exactly that, evil and corrupt as they themselves are.
As in all things in life there are no simple equations or admonitions to provide to anyone about how they should live, from whom they should respect and take guidance, or where their loyalties should lie.
Paul, as many others before and since, provides the guide that applies ALWAYS and in ALL WAYS: we should love and honour each other, all of us loving and honouring all others.
Sometimes love and honour means telling the hard truths even when people do not want to hear them, especially when people do not want to hear the hard truths.
To lie in order to avoid a hard truth is not to honour or respect the listener, nor the abusive person spoken about. To lie in order to destroy someone who tells the hard truths is to dishonour everyone, starting with oneself, continuing on to the person lied about and the [abusive, mentally ill, corrupt, or addicted] person about whom hard truths have been told, to all those involved (for lies seem to spread like wildfire as if we humans lust for rumours about others’ sins), and most of all to the children who hear and live with the rumours, who know they are false and learn they cannot speak the truth for fear of reprisal. Yes, with these wide-spread, destructive lies we teach our children to accept lies as the normal manner of life, especially if one wants to ‘get ahead’, which starts out more basically: if they do not want to suffer at the abusive hands of their parents and/or others.
The story Jesus came to live, preach, die and be resurrected in order to give us is a simple and full story: God loves us all unconditionally and gives us renewed (forgiven and equipped) lives so that we can exercise that same unconditional love for all other people.
So we love and honour each other … starting with the truth, even the hard truths we would rather not face or speak out about.
Love and Honour, even our elders, and even the foolish people, no matter their age, and even those that are corrupt, evil and abusive.
Save us, O God of our salvation, and gather and rescue us from among the nations, that we may give thanks to your holy name, and glory in your praise.
John 17:11
And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.
Words of Grace For Today
We pray in many and various ways: God, come and save us and protect us. Give us a place in your glory so that we may, as a strong and feared people among the nations and among our enemies, sing your praises and give glory to your name.
The church has prayed this and sought this and achieved this in many and various ways. As a strong institution among it’s enemies, and among the nations, it has played the part of a element of life to be feared … by individuals who the church could ruin by exorcising them (making killing them legal!) or today simply by ostracizing them without due process (so that they are denounced by many based on false rumours and false charges, usually that the person is ‘mentally unstable.’ Sounds like what was done to the prophets of old!) … and by organizations and nations who the church has stripped of all power simply by denouncing them though today it takes a bit more than that so the denouncing is done by political leaders who serve the will of the church.
What we, as individuals and as a church, have failed to do is to remain humble, vulnerable, meek, servants of God, living out God’s unconditional love for all people, and loving all people with a sacrificial love that may cost us everything as it opens the possibility of life abundant to all people.
It is not surprising that the church has become less and less attractive to people struggling in a more and more secular world. That is: the church is less and less capable of engendering fear or deserving respect across huge swaths of society, and even faithful followers of Christ in ever greater numbers are disillusioned with the corruption and blatant hypocrisy of leaders and followers alike that is rampant inside the church.
In many and various efforts to regain it’s fast dwindling numbers the church has tried and still tries to reach the expressed needs of the people, serving as a secular social club (with no real Word of God permeating anything about the club) or serving up ‘fear of others’ as a basis for a made-up faith/religion or passing off a fervent self-serving piety as the basis of faith … all which garner great responses … sometimes.
Still the numbers of members and churches plummets as it has for decades.
So the books written and the ‘new’ ideas of how to make the church a success … at least number-wise.
All of it is empty of course, because it tries to gain God’s glory by plan and scheme and effort. There is no human effort that can gain God’s favour, or gifts, or blessings.
That’s God’s choice and doing.
We have so long ignored it that we simply do not understand: Our purpose is not to succeed, but to fail, and in failing God makes plain the Grace that sustains us and all the world.
Yet we pray, as a church and as individuals: God, save and protect us. Help us to be the greatest of your disciples so that we can sing your praise and give you the glory in all things. But what we mean is God save us and protect us from failure so that we can exercise our own power in this world over others, live comfortable lives, and plan for a good future (of power and influence) for our children and grandchildren and many generations to come.
What God answers is: No.
God is our salvation, but not so that we can ‘Lord it over others.’
God makes us one with the destitute, the starving, the outcasts, the ostracized, the imprisoned, the persecuted, and the failures of human history … so that we will finally better understand: it’s not at all about us and our successes or failures. It is all about sharing all that God has given us as free gifts.
So as the church declines into irrelevancy God’s Word lives as the most relevant word in a world inundated with words: God Loves us all unconditionally, and renews life for all people, and sends us (who hear the call and give thanks for the renewed life we have) to share God’s unconditional love and full life abundant with all people, especially the poor and our enemies.
My soul makes its boast in the Lord; let the humble hear and be glad.
1 Thessalonians 5:16-18
Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.
Words of Grace For Today
We all seem to have something that we want to be proud of, that we want to be recognized and respected for. Some of us even have skills, accomplishments, and events in our pasts that we could be very proud of and that other people could recognize as good contributions to God’s good creation …
except.
Except our skills, accomplishments, and events in our pasts … in fact our everything about us … are gifts given to us by God.
Each day, even when the temperatures drop below -44⁰, we always have great cause to give God thanks, to rejoice in all that life is for us, and to pray …
to pray for what seems to be missing or lacking or challenging us beyond our imagination and our perceived abilities.
Often we might pray the wonderful quote from Mother Teresa: I know God will not give me anything I can’t handle. I just wish that He didn’t trust me so much. … But
But it was never Mother Teresa who said it. It’s a false attribution. So
So are we going to pray it. Probably not.
God gives us the abilities to handle as much as we can, and the truth that all humble and honest people know is that life can quite often throw up in one’s path more for us to handle than be can deal with.
Exactly then we learn our limits and …
we learn that giving God thanks, rejoicing, and praying constantly ARE things we can always do.
Well, that rejoicing part maybe not, or at least not with any exuberance when we lose those we love or we lose more of life than we thought we ever could and still stay alive. There’s grief. It’s real. It excludes the ability to rejoice. Most grief has a half life, but it can just as easily rejuvenate itself into our lives with no warning. That’s grief.
Grief and all kinds of suffering keep us humble, and teach us to pray also in our most desperate times.
What humble people can do and do perhaps better than the proud, is listen … listen to God’s Word and promises, and trust them. As God frees us to hear we live renewed and we can be glad … no matter what life puts in our way forward in time.
But the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him, and his righteousness to children’s children, to those who keep his covenant and remember to do his commandments.
Hebrews 13:8
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever.
Words of Grace For Today
The drive in here, into the meadow in the woods by the lake, from the gravel road that is maintained by the MD is nearly a kilometre long.
Most years the snow and rain make it challenging though not impossible to make the trek when needed to get supplies, food, and water.
Today that seems to have changed and to find out whether that has changed is to risk getting stuck in hard, cold, soft and freezing and hard frozen ice and snow smothered with rain over the last few hours.
Whether I can make transit that fist kilometre or not is entirely up to what I do in preparation. It is at least a two week task to try to shovel the worst parts free and clear down to the hard packed snow-ice that has developed over the last months from November on. There is no need to wish I had shovelled it regularly as the snows fell. First I had lots of other work to do to survive the winter so far, with it’s plentiful snow and it’s deep hard cold for days below -35⁰ and weeks below -25⁰. Second, the task of shovelling that kilometre once would take about a week of constant work, pushing my old body to it’s limits each day. By then the next snow would have fallen and I’d have had to start all over again … meaning I would have been shovelling snow constantly for months now and doing little else … when there is lots that has to be done to survive without a home in the woods next to a lake, even if that is all a huge blessing from God. So no regrets that I drove that kilometre as I could, dragged two logs behind to bounce a bit of the snow to the side and pack the remaining in a hardened roadway that I could drive over.
With the warming to above zero and the accompanying thaw, with the rain that has drenched the snow and with the freeze coming again that will turn it all into slippery ice, that kilometre will not be ‘miraculously’ ‘fahrbar’ (drive-able). The drive-ability of that kilometre depends now almost entirely on how much I shovel, where I shovel, how far down I shovel and if I survive (no heart attack or stroke or back spasms laying me flat in the snow for days while I freeze to death, or any other of a host of ways that shovelling could put me down.)
That’s a reality that is conditional, conditional on what I do.
God’s grace, forgiveness, claim on us, and mission that we are sent back into the world to work at is not conditional at all. God’s blessings and favour are not conditional on anything we do. That God blesses us and favours us is entirely unconditional! It depends only on God’s steadfast, never changing, never failing love and grace.
We humans do not like to be so dependent on any one or thing other than ourselves. So we, along with great words of God’s grace and steadfast love, have repeatedly perverted God’s promises into being conditional on our responses to God’s grace and steadfast love. Thus Psalm that teaches (wrongly) that God’s blessings and favour for us and our children and their children and all people is conditional on us keeping his covenant and remembering to do his commandments.
That condition sets us up to strive to be and do what we cannot be or do: perfect. And it gives control of our lives over to others who interpret our being and doing as sufficiently good enough or not.
God’s grace and steadfast love are not conditional.
God sends us out to be and do that same unconditional grace and love for all people.
Are we up to the mission? It does take every bit of life we have in us, and often more.
Correct me, O Lord, but in just measure; not in your anger, or you will bring me to nothing.
1 Thessalonians 5:9
For God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Words of Grace For Today
There are many people, on earth, and who have lived on earth (and there will be plenty more in times to come), who know that they need no correction from God or anyone else for that matter. They are wrong, but there is little to be done for them. They sit in positions of power, like judges and bishops, archbishops can cardinals, who are pretty hard, if not impossible, to provide any correction to. They get away with bullying, abuses beyond imagination, and making light dark, sweet bitter, and life death. They have no fear … of anyone, especially not God.
There are many people, on earth, and who have lived on earth (and there will be plenty more in times to come), who know that they need every correction available from God or anyone else for that matter. They live humble lives, fearing and loving God, and loving other people, praying that God will have saved them (like that pastor about to retire who expressed his greatest concern to his colleagues over a game of cards and scotch – I was so young and did not understand then – ) ‘from having hurt anyone!’
God’s wrath directed at any part of creation, at any person or any people rips that part of creation with unimaginable agony out of creation. God’s wrath completely unmakes it/them, uncreates it/them, separates it/them from every having existed.
We pray we will never know God’s wrath!
God’s wrath is perhaps well directed towards those who will take no correction.
God promises are that God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.
In this promise we live, in fear of God, overwhelmed with love for God and all God’s creation and all God’s people.
It’s a good life, though we know we always need correction, and pray that God’s correction will come in ways that will not destroy us, for we breathe, and work, and pray, and struggle, and love, and hope … as God-made saints and simultaneously as sinner still.
And we pray each day that we will, above all, not hurt anyone, and, knowing that we have and cannot help but still hurt others, we pray for forgiveness each morning, noon and night.
I will sing to the Lord as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God while I have being.
James 5:13
Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise.
Words of Grace For Today
Life is full of surprises.
Surprises that are good, and surprises that are bad.
Whatever life brings to us this day, we know that God claims us, forgives us, renews us, and sends us back into all that life is to be God-made saints, though we always remain sinners.
So we sing, and sing, and sing and dance giving God praise and thanks for all of life.
While we suffer, for there is no shortage of that in our lives as well, we pray, and pray, and pray to God, asking for deliverance, for forbearance, for endurance, and for hope … so that we can continue through the dark days as blessed God-made saints, to emerge into the light of life and joy and contentment … for all is from God,
so we sing and pray as long as we have being in this life,
and in the end we will return to God, still blessed as always, to live eternally with all the saints in light.
…
As for today … bring what may we are ready with our songs and our prayers … and the gifts God gives us to bring God’s Grace to bear on so many people’s lives.
There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.
John 15:16
You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name.
Words of Grace For Today
All this reaching for …
… for viral posts,
… for glory,
… for fame,
… for wealth,
… for power,
… for … well for anything that will fill the emptiness in our being, an emptiness of being separated from God,
All of it is futile, and most of it fills us – not with what we want, but deceptive as it is instead we get filled right up with shtako, and it sucks the life right out of us as we reach ever more desperately.
Most futile of all are all the human efforts spent (wasted) reaching for God.
The games we create to try to convince ourselves that we have reached God: all the piety, all the restrictions on our lives, all the condemnations of others to make ourselves look good (in God’s eyes, as if!), all the hate for ourselves and others that builds and comes out as self-righteousness and bullying. All these games are so life-sucking that we are soon left as mere shells of the life that God created us to enjoy. And even then we reach and reach and reach for something, anything, to fill our overwhelming emptiness. All sorts of addictions follow: to alcohol (God’s gift so abused), to drugs (ingenuity of humans so perverted), to gambling (the gift of the necessities of life severely abused), sex (the gift of intimacy perverted by and into base self-indulgence and licentious promiscuity), work (the gift of labour perverted into an obsession that denies everything good in life), and on and on and on the addictions are numbered, not least of all the addiction to religiosity and piety (perverted from worshipping God, to worshipping one’s own efforts).
God’s gift to us of faith is exactly like the gift of life: only God can give it, we cannot reproduce it, nor even can we meet God part way to receive it. But oh, have we figured out ways to pervert, subvert, and deny it as God’s gift to us!
If God chooses to hide God’s presence from us then our prayers should well begin with Isaiah’s words, “There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.” To which we should add: “SAVE US!”
So God is not.
As baptized saints we trust that Jesus came to demonstrate that we may often think God has abandoned us, Doch, God never does. God walks with us. God’s presence is not our choosing or in response to our doing or not doing, believing or not believing. God chooses us, to create us, to sustain us, to forgive us, to renew us, to make us saints able to be God’s Grace on earth.
As Jesus says, “You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last.”
This day, what fruit, what Grace, has Jesus led us to harvest from God’s great abundance, so that we have much to share with all around, especially the poor?
Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge.
Revelation 14:7
He said in a loud voice, ‘Fear God and give him glory, for the hour of his judgment has come; and worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water.’
Words of Grace For Today
Day to day, and
Night to night …
There is a lot that comes at us day after day and night after night …
There are so many things by which we can orient ourselves as we face what comes!
Some promise a reward sometime in the distant future, some in the near future, some even in the just about to be present – almost instant rewards, but none live up to their promises and give us life, abundant life, except …
…
except when we orient ourselves first and foremost by a proper fear of God. It’s the kind of fear that gives God all the glory for everything good. God deserves our worship. We deserve to be people who give God glory and worship, along with all of creation.
…
except if we orient ourselves completely out of fear for God, we become pretty useless, reduced to fear responses for everything we do, which leaves us decaying into puddles of reptilian responses to everything: freeze, flight, or fight.
And these response do not involve our whole brain, our whole hearts, our whole being, all given to us by a God that loves us.
Martin Luther taught us well that ‘we are to fear and love God ….’
That love part gives us something by which to orient ourselves day and night, which bring our whole mind, heart and being in to play as we live, and by God’s Grace can choose to:
listen,
learn,
forgive,
love,
and
hope,
so that many, many other people can see how great life is when we live it oriented by our fear and love of God.
God’s judgment will come, day by day, night by night and
…
by God’s promise made to us in our baptisms we know that all our sins will be set aside and Jesus’ pure and righteous record will replace ours …
