My foot stands on level ground; in the great congregation I will bless the Lord.
1 Corinthians 14:26
What should be done then, my friends? When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. Let all things be done for building up.
Words of Grace For Today
Standing on level ground: building up the gathering of followers.
Out hiking in the mountains, more so as the years accumulate on one’s frame, one needs to take breaks from the steady walking forward, upward in order to catch one’s breath, to regroup one’s commitment and to let one’s body catch up on the energy output so slight for each step, yet so great for hours and hours of steps forward and upward.
A cool drink of water, or juice, and a handful of trailmix or cheese or pemmican helps the body and the spirit rejuvenate.
While one rests it is the first obvious thing, one seeks out a level spot, perhaps with a log or rock on which one may sit to rest. Experience will teach one that sitting is best kept brief, and that standing or walking easily about, catching any great view available, is the best way to rejuvenate one’s spirit for the arduous labour of one step times thousands per hour.
So also it is best to find one’s place in the congregation standing on level ground, orienting oneself to the view, toward God in our midst, and toward the people gathered, and toward all the people who are not present but are out there. So oriented one can assess the circumstances and discern God’s work, and with all that one brings to the congregation one can ensure it will build up the congregation, each person and all of us together.
What does not build up has no place in the congregation.
Paul had an earful of what the people in the congregation at Corinth were capable of, which did not build up, but rather divided the congregation.
Paul did not give up on the congregation, nor anyone person in it. He writes with clarity about the divisions and actions of the congregation that tear the congregation apart, that tear it down. And he points to ways the congregation can work to build each other up, to provide for each person, and not to continue hubris practices that divide and destroy the congregation.
For generations now those words, and unfortunately those circumstances, resonate as people stand against each other, against faith with integrity, and for their own limited vision of what the church is. We still pray: God save us from division. God grant us unity.
and then we whisper: my kind of unity, thank you God.
We really need to take a break, on level ground, give God thanks, and celebrate what the Holy Spirit has made of each person.
Together we can pray: God save us from temptation and deliver us from Evil.
For I know their works and their thoughts, and I am coming to gather all nations and tongues; and they shall come and shall see my glory.
Romans 10:12
For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him.
Words of Grace For Today
God knows everyone’s works and thoughts. No one slips under the radar of all knowing God. Everyone, no matter their nation or tongue, will come to know God’s glory, power, and God’s knowledge of their everything.
God’s full knowledge of Jesus’ followers also applies to everyone, no matter Jew or Greek (or in today’s word – white or coloured, rich or poor, powerful and connected or isolated and expendable). God knows everything about everyone, and Jesus’ followers come in all types, no bias.
All that can be terrible news for those who are guilty. … Well that is everyone.
That can be terrible news; that is the 2nd side to the sharp sword of the Gospel, the sword that cuts us free from our sins; and it cuts to the heart of the matter to show up our desperate need to God’s Grace.
Thankfully God is gracious with everyone, and generous with grace for everyone who calls on the Lord. Jesus answers everyone who calls.
Sometimes the answer is that Jesus will be with us as we continue to suffer what we want to be free of, the lies about us, the weight on our shoulders.
Other times the answer that Jesus gives us saves us from the evil that threatens our very lives.
No matter the answer Jesus gives us, whether we continue through the suffering or are freed, life abundant is nevertheless ours. We can Breathe.
We can give thanks.
Jesus is generous.
We can share the blessedness Christ’ gives us with all people (no matter the person or nation) and we can share generously.
Inevitable Grace; Like the Setting Sun, Always (even if we do not see it.)
100%
– Human Fatality Rate
– God’s Grace Coverage
– Percent of People to whom God Offers Grace
Proverbs 11:19
Whoever is steadfast in righteousness will live, but whoever pursues evil will die.
Matthew 5:6
‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Words of Grace For Today
Both these verses taken literally cannot be true.
For the first verse from Proverbs:
The mortality rate for all humans is 100%, also for people who live in righteousness.
Further, no one can live in righteousness, of their own doing. We all sin and cannot help but sin.
For the second from Matthew:
Any reasonable and sane appropriation of the history of humans will recognize that the people who hunger and thirst for righteousness continue, all through history, up to and including every today that comes our way, to hunger and thirst for righteousness.
Righteousness from themselves is not possible, for we all sin, inevitably, and righteousness is not marked on a curve, it is an absolute. One sin and righteousness disappears from us.
Righteousness from others for those who thirst for righteousness is the same. Everyone else sins as well and righteousness disappears quicker than the rise of the sun at the summer solstice.
Righteousness as in justice based on truth is the same. Someone has to act with righteousness in order for justice based on truth to be possible, yet no one does 100% of the time, nor can anyone.
So what can these verses mean?
To begin we need remember the old, old story of Jesus and his love. We are reckoned to be righteous, not of our own doing, but because God replaces our pathetic sinful records with Jesus’ and God then reckons us to be righteous, again and again each day.
Proverbs:
To be righteous is to live reflecting that gift of righteousness as we can.
It is clear: righteousness is to be alive, as God created us to be. And to sin is to die, bit by bit (sometimes large bits) until, though we walk and talk, we are dead inside.
Matthew:
As we hunger and thirst for righteousness, we cannot earn righteousness or accomplish it on our own, yet as we humbly confess our sin and trust God’s forgiveness we receive our fill of blessings. Actually God pours so many blessings on us that our cups run over, spilling blessings in our wake as we make our way in the world.
There we go: hungry and thirsty, and simultaneously filled over the brim with blessings.
There we go: living as God forgives us and blesses us, yet simultaneously dying as we inevitably sin.
How to live? Blessed, we live at peace with ourselves before God, yet agitated and active in the world, working to bring justice to more and more people, and continually humbly confessing our sins and our total dependence on God’s Grace.
Therefore we recognize others’ sins as encompassed by God’s Grace and we deal with them with compassion and clarity and forgiveness … and hope.
How can a mortal be just before God? … He is wise in heart, and mighty in strength. Who has resisted him, and succeeded? He who removes mountains, and they do not know it, when he overturns them in his anger … who does great things beyond understanding, and marvellous things without number.
Mark 4:26-28
He also said, ‘The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.
Words of Grace For Today
God is marvellous, all powerful, and all-knowing. God is irresistible. Creator of the earth that produces of itself.
We can sow God’s Word (as best we can). We cannot know how the seeds germinate, grow, and produce their fruit even though science, a product of Christian faith, has helped us understand much about seeds and plant growth. Yet when we come to growth in the Kingdom of God we are completely out of our depth. We can submit to being the dirt in which the Word of God is planted. We can allow the Holy Spirit to work through us to plant the seeds of the Kingdom of God in others.
Understanding completely is not within our grasp.
Being just before God is not within our grasp.
Thanks be to God, Jesus is God’s story for us so that we can grasp all we need to understand about the Kingdom of God growing in us.
Thanks be to God, Jesus’ sacrifice provides for us a pure record before God, so though we cannot be just, we need no more than Jesus’ Cross.
Now we can get on with being good dirt for God’s Word … and imitating Jesus loving all the other ‘dirt.’
Yet, Lord, you have made [humans] a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honour.
Ephesians 2:10
We are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.
Words of Grace For Today
Yet … God created us a little lower than God, crowned with glory and honour.
Yet … what? What is the yet? Without looking at Psalm 8:4:
Is the yet about how sinful we are?
Is the yet about how unworthy we are?
Is the yet about how unappreciative we are?
Is the yet about how lowly other creatures/creation is created?
We really do not need to know.
We need to hear how God created us with glory and honour. Do we live that way still, today?
Can we?
Ahh, we are not left on our own. Jesus is in whom we were created, so that we could do good works … and that is how God planned for us, even before we were created!
This is our way of life (or the way of life that God created us for): that we imitate Jesus. We teach with wisdom that is not ours, it is Christ’s. We tell the old, old story with a tale that is not ours, it is Christ’s. We teach and reach out to the vulnerable with a love that is not ours, it is Christ’s. We strive for a justice with an energy and for a justice that is not ours, it is Christ’s.
We practice forgiveness with a Grace that is not ours, it is Christ’s.
We do this (we can do all this only) because Jesus has done it first for us.
The glory and honour we were created for is not our own. It is the gift of the Holy Spirit that we share in Christ’s glory and honour.
It is the same for each person we will meet each day. We are all only mirrors of Christ’ glory and honour.
You can spring your snowmobile from this point to the lake,
until God brings Spring
and then it’s a disaster to spring here.
Isaiah 43:13
I am God, and also henceforth I am He; there is no one who can deliver from my hand; I work and who can hinder it?
2 Corinthians 5:10
For all of us must appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each may receive recompense for what has been done in the body, whether good or evil.
Words of Grace For Today
How simple it seems: life here and now is a proving ground of who and whose we are. After death or maybe before, God judges us on the basis of what we have done, whether good or evil. No one can deliver themselves or others from God’s hand. God’s work (also of judging us) cannot be hindered by anyone … not even the Devil himself!
It all sounds pretty simple, and devilishly difficult. Proving oneself is an ever failing project. We go from one compromise of good to the next compromise of our souls, just to make it through any 60 minutes of any day. All of what we think, say or do is catalogued permanently without error or omission under our name in God’s never ending knowing and memory.
Who could face God thus? For every single last one of us will fail that judgment. We cannot make it through one hour, yet alone a day, or a year, or a lifetime.
There is a vain hope, held by so many people, that though they have done terribly all through their life, they have somehow managed to say or do something really good, and they hope that good thing or two or even a series of things can somehow outweigh the terrible, unending bad things they have done. The scales are not so weighted in our favour. God is just, basing all judgments on truth and whole truth only. Everyone of us fail, and fail miserably as the scale rapidly hits bottom on the evil side overwhelmed by the weight of our sins.
Given this inevitable negative judgment, some people give up hope, and either more fully participate in evil to get ahead, at least in this short life on earth, or they despair and fail to give a day’s thanks for everything they have, hiding from life as much as they can, with consuming, praying, doing small ‘good deeds’, or – and this applies to the most people, nearly everyone somehow at sometime – they compare themselves to others and delude themselves into thinking that the judgment scale of God is somehow marked on a curve of averages and not absolutes.
Out of this delusion arises the nowadays all too common assertion that truth is never absolute, but it is all relative. We just see things differently.
Well … we do see things differently. God does not. And created in God’s likeness we too can see God’s absolutes more than we care to admit, even to ourselves.
Plato’s Ideals are not a mere figment of one’s imagination. They are real, as real as the water we drink and food we eat to stay alive.
The only way our judgment day[s] – it is likely we face God’s judgment each day and just do not know it – before God goes anything other than real ugly for us, is that God anticipated how we would be, and provided a loving, self-sacrificial manner in which we could understand both God’s firm judgment based on the truth of who we are and what we’ve done, and God’s endless mercy and love, which gives us re-newed life as many times a day it is possible.
It seems that God gives re-newed life more times a day than we are capable of imagining, for we still breathe … and pray in thanks … and share what God entrusts to us. The renewal of life is that Jesus’ record, unblemished and pure, is swapped in for our terrible sinful records, and God judges us as unblemished and pure, pure of heart and able to see God once again in the ordinarily mundane things of life. Those things become sacred. All things become sacred. All people become sacred, for God uses it all, us all, to make good happen, such good that we are wholly incapable of doing on our own. The Holy Spirit infuses renewed life into us, and pulls miraculously good thoughts, words, and deeds out of us.
We actually follow Jesus.
We don’t just practice some random and useless piety, like not smoking in beer country (but beer is great at church potlucks), not drinking in tobacco country (but smoking is great after the services), or as in Minnesota, smoking, drinking and dancing are all to be avoided; but us medical missionary kids knew it was all bunk. We didn’t smoke because it was unhealthy and stunk. We didn’t drink because it messed with our brains and our brains were fine, thank you. We did dance, and occasionally it led to sex, which was just part of life, because children are wonderful gifts from God, so is sex, and so is dancing – we just did not advertise it in front of other ‘pious’ weak-faithed Christians. We did not take sex or children lightly. They were great gifts from God, not to be messed with lightly, but to be celebrated greatly. Again, we did not go out to have sex with a great number of people because we knew that sex was powerful and if you messed about with it, it messed about with your brain, and our brains were fine, thank you.
Somehow growing up in all that lutheranism of minnesota (it is the state religion, or was, after all) many had not faced the challenges of world views that did not include God, and not as a small matter, but aggressively, determinedly denied God because that faith threatened their old, old religion of worshipping ‘things’ that medicine men and women could (supposedly) control. Our faith offered something beyond piety, or setting ‘old’ ways aside. Our parents as medical missionaries came with science and medicine (products of Christianity’s care for the world and the vulnerable and sick – Jesus was after all a healer), both of which set things in order in this world and offered, as Jesus had, healing.
Instead of latching on to some senseless piety that overshadowed faith, we knew out of necessity the essentials of faith, and it certainly was not some useless piety, or false faith. Our faith had to be genuine and authentic, fully dependent on the Spirit working through us, or we’d have been eaten alive by those who stood against this faith.
Back home, our faith had to be genuine and authentic, fully dependent on the Spirit working through us, or we’d have been eaten alive by those who stood against this faith, those that held some false piety as being the core of faith, as if we could behave our way into God’s favour!
No one can hinder God’s work, not God’s work in us or this wonder-filled world.
For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe,
Matthew 5:8
‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Words of Grace For Today
Bribes are the way of the world.
Some are blatant, demanded, extracted. Others are offered, subtly, as perks for understood unnamed favours.
The Church is not exempt from this. The Courts are not exempt from this. No part of life seems to be exempt from this bartering of favours for favours. Ideals are set aside too easily as palms are greased and the recipients on both sides enjoy a bit more of life than they otherwise would have. As if life were a zero-sum game, where one needed to get what is there before someone else beat you to it.
Since the Church is not exempt, even the faithful, confessing a faith that is otherwise founded on the cross, behave as if salvation is one more thing to acquire for oneself, as if it were insurance for after death.
It is challenging not to fall in line, as permits to build are denied for no apparent reason, or provided to others even with faulty plans; as jobs come to others (not even qualified) who enjoy high standards of living, and others (more than fully qualified and capable) are left to seek labour outside their field of training; as invitations, social recognition, and being included are offered to the most asocial people, and others dedicated to the well being of all people are ignored, socially derided, and ghosted by nearly all.
God, though, is not a taker of bribes. Salvation is given to all as a free gift. Claiming to be able to earn it can revoke the gift from one’s life. There is no effort, or favour, that one can offer God that would be sufficient to bend God to do other than what is God’s will. Attempts to do so are sufficient to see God’s will exclude one from life.
God is not one among many gods. God is the One and only God, the God above all other gods we may try to create. God is powerful, and loving, gracious and generous with all people. We are to fear and love God …. This is the beginning of our response.
The Promise is made often in many ways. Those who do not trying to bribe or cheat or step on others to get ahead, in a word, those who remain pure, they will see God. Perhaps as Moses did, face to face, turning Moses ashen white from the encounter that few if any others have ever survived. More likely the pure of heart will see God in the everyday. For without a heart that is bent-in-on-itself, bribing, cheating, and trying in every way to ensure it’s survival before anything else – without this bent-in-on-itself, one’s heart remains open to see the wonders, the awesome wonders that God works each day for others … and for oneself.
Wonders of wonders, to see God each day many times over.
That generous gift from God cannot be matched by anything we might try to acquire for ourselves.
Our salvation assured (a gift from God) and seeing God each day, we pray: Give us today our daily bread. Then we work, sweat, and plan to ensure we and others have the basic requirements for life: clean air, clean water, nourishing food, adequate clothing, sufficient shelter, meaningful labour, and opportunity to love and be loved.
One day at a time, life is full of wonders, and God is awesome!
Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.
John 4:14
Those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.’
Words of Grace For Today
Water, water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink!
There is a story that comes to mind, of two young men shipwrecked and blown far away from their course and out of the frequently travelled shipping lanes. One trusts that God will save them. The other doubts God exists at all. While the doubter works to catch fish for food, the faithful one throws their desalinating water filter overboard. While the doubter sleeps having Gerry-rigged a rainwater collector, the faithful idiot dismantles it and throws it overboard.
With water everywhere, they thirst for the water that gives life: fresh water.
While the faithful believes he has water that will keep him from thirsting, the doubter does everything to use what water is available, mixing urine and scant rainwater to minimally re-hydrate himself. The faithful prays, trusting God will save him … and falls into a coma.
Idiot faith is not the faith Christ gives us. The faith Christ gives us is hope-filled and practical; wise and perceptive; overly generous and gracious; self sacrificing and self preserving.
The water Jesus gives us keeps us from thirsting, and common sense is not lacking. Life and all it requires of us is filled with Jesus’ water, gushing up like an artesian spring, not so that we can test God’s miraculous intentions towards us, but so that we can follow paths that give life, to ourselves and to all around us.
God does not exact a price for the living water. Jesus has bought and paid with his life for it, for us. Not only does God provide us water, living water, that gives us breathe, faith and hope; God also provides us all we can eat. We come, we buy with all that God has provided to us, Grace! And we are filled, never to be thirsty or hungry again; no matter the challenges life throws at us.
The two young men were rescued. Both were alive, barely, the faithful in a coma for hours already. He never recovered and died. – One has to wonder what St. Peter had to say to him! – the doubter after many difficult months recovered, and lived the rest of his life, never doubting God’s love for him and those around him.
You have made the Lord your refuge, the Most High your dwelling-place.
2 Corinthians 3:12
Since … we have such a hope, we act with great boldness.
Words of Grace For Today
Today a crowd of tents overflowed from the Web campsite and filled the Birches campsite with an accompanying number of vehicles so many there is not enough room to park them all, and at least 5 large dogs. Awake, there is hardly room for the correct Covid 19 physical spacing, and sleeping the tents are close enough that one is already within a few metres of at least a few people in other tents, not to mention others sharing the tent you are in.
As the clerk at the drug store said (as sick people come for medicines), she’d had it and she’s done, completely done with this Covid 19 thing.
Wishful thinking until it kills you or someone you love, or compromises your organs for the rest of your life. A personal declaration that your done certainly does not cover it all.
You become one of the most dangerous people on earth today.
Thankfully we have made the Lord our refuge. We dwell in the Most High, and we dwell in a place isolated from everyone, including that dangerous drugstore clerk, every other dangerous carrier of Covid 19, and the fools who walk right up to me at Canadian Tire while I’m quickly finding the one thing I’m there for, having waited a good ten minutes for the two fools to move away from me down the isle 25 feet. While I’m determining which of the five different spools of plastic string I need, they return, walk right up to me and stand over me, breathing heavily and grunting impatiently for me to be done, and then as I stand up they walk within a foot behind me, push my cart out of the way and say I should get out of the way. Later the same two guys nearly run me over as I back up one foot to change course since the isle ahead is blocked by an elderly man on his cell phone. This time I politely ask the two if they could keep their 2 metre distance. They huff that I backed up into them, as I stepped back a half step at most to turn my cart to the left down an isle.
There are hundreds and thousands of other shoppers I have no close encounters with when I’m shopping.
Brash stupid boldness, like declaring Covid 19 is over because you say it must be, or walking over people with no respect for physical distancing, is not the kind of boldness that Christ gives us, through the hope the Holy Spirit creates in us.
The boldness Christ’s hope gives us is to
– do the right thing when everyone else is not,
– say the right words to a bully, when everyone else is cowering and capitulating,
– risk everything we are in order to save children at risk of horrendous abuse by their parent,
– not work to protect oneself, but to protect others who are vulnerable,
– and many other inspired risky actions,
since we know we need not protect ourselves or make our own security.
Christ has done that already.
All that we are and have, is for Christ, so putting everything on the line to do the right thing is exactly why we live and have anything to work with.
Martin Luther was right, too. We are bold in all we do, unafraid that we will inevitably sin. That knowledge does not deter us from risking everything to do the right thing. We trust that we have been, are, and will always be forgiven by Jesus the Christ. This is not some reckless abandon to do idiotic things to no good end or imaginable benefit. This means that we do not allow the Devil, or the inevitability of our sinning, stop us from trusting that God will guide us to do the right thing, and to know it is right.
We sinners, of course, so often try to justify our own sins. Doch with the Holy Spirit’s help we resist that as well, easily confessing, and re-adjusting our path, our plans, our hopes and our dreams to reflect Christ’s self sacrificing way for everyone we encounter: we sacrifice ourselves, not others.
For those who cannot comprehend the true risk of a virus, compared to the true risk of life and limb in order to save others, compared to the true risk of losing one’s own soul, we must pray and bless them: Lord bless these utter fools and keep them and their deadly virus far, far from us, all of us, humans.
I will again do amazing things with this people, shocking and amazing. The wisdom of their wise shall perish, and the discernment of the discerning shall be hidden.
Mark 6:2
On the sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astounded. They said, ‘Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands!
Words of Grace For Today
A few nights ago a man came telling me that the surveyors would becoming, that he had made an offer on this land. (This is crown land, never will it be for sale.) He said that this land had been in his family many years ago. It was coming back into his family. The fences would go up, he would bring his truck in and plow the road. (The road is impassible and would need numerous culverts, lots and lots of clay roadbed compacted into place and layers of gravel over that to make is something that could be plowed.) He was going to develop the shoreline. (Twenty metres in from the edge of the lake is always Crown land and it cannot be developed without a special permit, which are few and far between.) He said he was going to divide up the land into 5 acre plots for various members of his family. (It would take millions of square miles of land divided into five acre plots to accommodate his whole family, the family of all Canadians.)
Jesus comes doing amazing things that shock people. They ask where he came from? Where did he get this wisdom that he teaches?
The surveyors cannot find the borders of the Kingdom of God. They cannot determine how to divide it up into little plots for each family. They do not have the instruments to determine how big anything is according to God’s measure.
Any wisdom we put together is no more than this man’s puffed up claims to be able to buy crown land for his own, when it is used already by so many for random camping. Watch carefully, and we may see God at work.
Who in your life makes false claims, haughty claims of ownership of things that cannot be owned? Are you the one? Does God’s wisdom show you up to be foolish in God’s Kingdom?
Only God’s Grace can show us a path forward wherein we can imitate Jesus’ way of the cross, bringing Grace to all people. Only by God’s Grace can we avoid making foolish claims of how we are buying up God’s Kingdom for ourselves.
Only by God’s Grace, today we allow the Holy Spirit to guide us forward into an abundant life. Thanks be to God.
