By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
2 Timothy 1:8b-10
Join with me in suffering for the gospel, relying on the power of God, who saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works but according to his own purpose and grace. This grace was given to us in Christ Jesus before the ages began, but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Saviour Christ Jesus, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.
Words of Grace For Today
There is always work to do, to survive, or to prepare to survive … unless of course one has gained privilege and comforts known previously only by kings, pharaohs, and rulers, that is the privilege of having survival needs long since met and one can luxuriate in life. As the dust we are from and to which we will return, when such comforts and privileges are ours, we inevitably consume our hearts and minds with un-graceful things, schemes to gain more at others’ cost, and concerns that have next to nothing to do with being God’s people.
In such positions of privilege we look on the work of the Gospel, the work of being the unconditional love for all others, as if it were such a great sacrifice for us to take on. Reality is that this is nothing more nor less than what we were created to be and do.
Our obsessions with survival, and all it’s replacement-substitutional (ersatz) concerns, is not at all the life we were created to live.
We always find our way into some perversion of the life God intends for us, as we struggle to escape death. We cannot escape it.
That is not our death toll, though. For Jesus has come to defeat death, and offer us life eternal.
The story is simple: provide care for all people, heal all people, love all people unconditionally, and allow (without fear of losing anything) those who would attack and maim you, who ruin your reputation with lies and schemes and scapegoating, and who would kill you to do as they must.
God is with us, always, all ways, and there is not enemy that can take God’s love from us. More we need not expect of life. For our God has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works but according to his own purpose and grace.
Before I was humbled I went astray, but now I keep your word.
2 Corinthians 7:10
For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation and brings no regret, but worldly grief produces death.
Words of Grace For Today
To be humbled.
To be humbled is to be taken from a place one has unrightly claimed as one’s own (a place of honour, power, wealth, privilege and comfort) and to be brought down to earth.
To be humbled is to be returned from the lofty reaches of the Devil’s Deceptions to God’s Kingdom where all are equal, equally ‘nothing’s except for the value God gives us by undeserved love and grace.
To be humbled is to be as God created us, fully dependent upon God for our breath and lives.
It is an irreverently proud person who claims, though, to have been humbled and then claims to keep God’s Word. Such an accomplishment is only possible for the Holy Spirit to bring us to participate in. It is never us alone who can do such a great thing.
To repent is not a one time event for Christ’s disciples. It is a daily, even hourly, manner of living. Humbly accepting our own inability to be righteous, and relying totally on God to make of us saints who can carry God’s Word in our thoughts, spread God’s Word with our words and actions, and embody God’s Word with our love for others and our hope for our shared future.
To repent is to acknowledge one’s sins, one’s bondage to sin, and God’s promise to free us from this bondage.
It is like fishing, knowing that one will not likely catch a fish at all, but that it is a day well spent, basking in God’s creation. Should one catch a fish then it will not likely be large enough to keep. So one will return it to the lake to live and grow and reproduce. When the most unlikely occurs and one catches a fish that is large enough to keep, then it is kept, cleaned, filleted, fried, and eaten with wondrous gratitude for such a rare privilege (one to partake in seldom lest one poison’s oneself as the fish are from the fracking used to make oil possible to bring up out of the ground.)
So it is that we live each day, holding God’s Word in our hearts and minds, as the motivator of all our actions, knowing that it will be seldom that we actually become the saints who share God’s unconditional and self-sacrificial love with others. Yet we find ourselves grateful for the readiness we can participate in, and for those rare events when God uses us. We may lose much of our lives in those moments of being God’s saints, but we know that this is exactly what God created us to be and do with our lives.
When we think we stand above others in righteousness
It is only because we’ve lost a sound perspective
on God’s reality.
Proverbs 10:28
The hope of the righteous ends in gladness, but the expectation of the wicked comes to nothing.
Hebrews 6:12
May you not become sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.
Words of Grace For Today
We would like to think and trust that if we are righteous, all will be well and we will live happily ever after.
It is hardly so.
We would like to think and trust that those other people who are wicked, since they do evil things they will suffer greatly and never find happiness.
It is hardly so.
Job says it succinctly and correctly after losing all his property and his children, and after being inflicted with sores over his entire body: Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?
Matthew 5:45 puts it: God makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.
What benefit do we receive from striving to be righteous then? Why not simply succumb to all wickedness and be happy?
The complete passage from Matthew 5 reads: ‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax-collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
To that many theologians (Paul, Augustine, Luther among them) have added: it is impossible for any human to be perfect!
Where does that leave us?
It leaves us where we’ve always been: entirely at the mercy of God: God’s Grace, Mercy, and steadfast love. Fully dependent upon, and grateful recipients of God’s unconditional love, then we live, not trying to earn our way into or towards righteousness, doch we live imitating Jesus by being God’s unconditional love for others. We strive to love even our enemies, not for our own reward, but as thanks for God’s love first given to us.
Our hope then ends in happiness each day, only because by God’s grace we are promised it to be so. Thus, by God’s grace alone, we breathe and live each day … and pray that wickedness may be far from our hearts and our lives.
I shall not die, but I shall live, and recount the deeds of the Lord.
Galatians 2:20
It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Words of Grace For Today
Audrey had always had to fight to get anything. At home it was her two older brothers who made sure she had as little as they could arrange, including by stealing things from her and plain taking from her what they wanted, which was anything she showed that she treasured. She looked out for number one, and only number one. By the time high school came around she’d perfected her methods of manipulating, lying, and cheating for whatever she wanted. She had excellent grades, some of them she had even sort of earned. Most of them where given to her by teachers who were afraid of what she would report them for. She’d already laid waste to one teacher’s career and personal life with rumours of sexually abusing her.
When it came to dating she made sure she dated the boys she wanted to, and most of them were hardly aware of the trouble she’d gone to. University was a fools game for her, passing with grades she hardly earned, ruining any instructor who gave her anything less than a B+. Then she met Jacques, and for a few minutes one might have thought her ways would change. She even went to seminary to fit in with his family of pastors, a powerhouse in the church for generations. Jacques finished his degrees a year before she was done, and she could not be bothered to stay in seminary another year. Every one was too kind, naive to how the world worked. The most she got from any of them was fear or out right condemnation for her way of making it through at everyone else’s cost.
Through all her middle age adulthood she continued, as a respected (and feared) member of Jacques’s powerful family. Jacques’s kindness helped to cover up her rather crude and cruel ways of getting what she wanted. Anyone who knew her well, knew she would readily say she was ‘going to hell’ for this or that latest caper she’d pulled off at someone else’s expense. No one disagreed with her; that would be to put oneself in her sights and she never missed. The thing she never seemed to understand was that people were also sure that God had no room for Audrey, at least there was no evidence of it in her life.
In her late adult years she came down with cancer. She fought hard to survive. Most people thought she’d finally gotten what she deserved and could not cheat her way out of. When she lived a few wise, kind and gracious people said that God had given her another chance at life. They meant that God had given her a chance to see how to life life with grace, kindness and unconditional love. Most people who did not know of Audrey’s dark side sympathized with her; here was a cancer survivor after all. Audrey had, it seemed a new lease on life. The kind, gracious and faithful people saw she really did have a chance of learning something new for her: how to be honest and kind.
When a posting came vacant and the congregation could not get a pastor (since they ran through them like horsemen with swords), she volunteered. The bishop, having no other options to offer the troubled and destructive congregation, appointed her as lay pastor. People marvelled at the mysterious ways that God works, Audrey serving as a pastor in a congregation. There could hardly be someone with a life time more antithetical to Christ’s work. Still it was impossible to say anything about Audrey’s past; sympathy ran too wide for her. The congregation fell in love with Audrey, she knew exactly how to win their loyalty. It was the dirty work of destroying men that she jumped into with gusto, and soon the matriarch had what she’d thought she’d wanted for decades: a congregation run by women.
Those that looked on from the outside marvelled at how successful Audrey was as a pastor. Those who knew how she operated, those who knew her before and people that just met her, saw that her ways had a new face, but her heart was all about destroying other people in order to get her way.
Then Jacques came down if a terrible, painful, and incurable disease. Kind, gracious, faithful people saw that God offered Audrey great hardship, and also yet another chance to rest in God’s grace.
This surrender, of one’s own enjoyment of life, in order to give other’s life (the opposite of how Audrey had lived) is what Paul describes in today’s verse: It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
There is no other more poignant manner to describe this than to realize one faces death, head on. And one survives, but one’s life is not one’s own anymore. One’s own life, in large strokes and in the finest details, has become God’s life given to one to live as Christ calls us to live:
filled with truth, kindness, grace and unconditional, self-sacrificing love.
This life then is not our story, it is not that we live to be our own story. Instead we live to tell (with everything in our lives – thoughts, words, and deeds) of God’s great deeds, to tell Jesus’ story, and to tell the stories of the saints who have gone before us … so that the next generations will learn the stories, and learn to live them, and live them well.
There is in this new life lived as not one’s own, the greatest freedom and peace … as God intended us to live.
Bless the Lord, all his works, in all places of his dominion. Bless the Lord, O my soul.
Luke 13:29
Then people will come from east and west, from north and south, and will eat in the kingdom of God.
Words of Grace For Today
Cold autumn rains fell, ferocious through the night, and then steady with only a light wind pushing them across the horizon. Still the winds, with wet furry, had torn apart Tina’s camp.
It took the morning to patch up most of the damage, and set her mind busy with plans, imagined and then reworked and reworked, to brunt the blast of damaging winds. Ideal would be a solid wall, though that was not possible. Perhaps some kind of wall made of the available recycled items collected in the past summer from garbage which she was allowed to pick and choose from.
There was no protection possible from the ferocious winds of false rumours that people used as excuses to ignore, deprive, and outright attack her. There was no wall to be built. Only God’s grace kept her safe, protected, alive, and filled with awe and hope.
There are works of humans that are impressive in their majesty, though where humans excel is in their ability to destroy each other. Arnold had tapped into this method of getting ahead when he was still young, informing on his family to the secret police. It had brought him apparent success even as he watched his family disintegrate before his teenage eyes. He’d gone on to become a multimillionaire on the backs of many people. Tina was only one of many left in his wake of destruction. The police had used this corrupt power to bring false charges against Tina. The courts had used this power of destruction to falsely convicting her. It seemed as if there would be no end. But their destructive power, if not already, soon will come full circle to rest in their lives again and again, leaving them each and all desperate for relief, for rescue, and for salvation. Only God knows if they will be brought to an end by their own destruction, or whether God will redeem them and claim them as saints. So it is will all who use the destructive power at which humans excel so well to construct their lives of deceit and greed.
God’s kingdom is constructed differently, without the need for walls to protect oneself from the ugly blasts of destructive deceptions and schemes to gain advantage at other’s cost. God’s kingdom is built on God’s works of mercy, steadfast love, and wonder. There are no words, actions, or direct assaults which can diminish God’s works. God’s mercy is forever, God’s steadfast love is unfailing, and God’s wonders are unassailable and omnipresent.
Here people from all lands, east, west, north, and south gather together to feast under God’s protection that cannot be compromised. Together they give testimonies, true and wondrous, of God’s great works through which God has blessed all people.
Cold autumn rains fell, ferocious through the night, and then steady with only a light wind pushing them across the horizon. Nothing in God’s kingdom was changed one iota, and Tina feasted in solitude with the hermit saints of all times, with the people of the earth from all places and all times. As God blessed Tina, and all the saints of all time, together with Tina they all blessed God with thanks.
For all that is, comes from God, and all is well, all is well, all manner of things are well.
How precious is your steadfast love, O God! All people may take refuge in the shadow of your wings.
Matthew 6:26
Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?
Words of Grace For Today
Take refuge in the shadow of God’s wings, in the safety of God’s steadfast love. All other ‘security’ is an illusion, a deception, and a departure from God’s kingdom into the Devil’s realms. Under God’s wings, like that of a great bird of the sky soaring at will, God brings us to adventures we would not imagine, to places and understandings where life is abundant, and to challenges and work that fulfill all our yearning to participate in creation.
As autumn sets firmly in on the land, giving great respite from the bugs, the heat, and the huge influx of 2-legged animals in the wilderness (only some who are dangerous or greatly destructive to the land, scarring it with tire ruts, garbage strewn about, feces and toilet paper in the woods, and all sorts of materials half burned in the fire circles that sterilize the soil beneath and pollute the air above) …
As autumn sets firmly in on the land, we breathe easier.
As autumn sets firmly in on the land, great flocks of geese of 100s and 1000s, make a distant chorus, moving in V’s for days to traverse 1000s of miles from the waters of the north to the temperate winters in the south.
As autumn sets firmly in on the land, birds of prey, great hawks, owls, and bald eagles screech high as they circle for hours seeking their prey. Song birds like my neighbours the robins spend all hours out in the meadow hunting worms and bugs for food.
Whether autumn sets firmly in on the land or not, in all seasons and times, one has to wonder about these words of Jesus. For as God provides for the birds without their sowing or reaping into barns, first: their lives seem to be wholly directed toward finding food and avoiding being food; second: there are and were also in Jesus day so many people who neither sow nor reap and they worry most about what they will eat and what they will wear, for their choices are so many it is only as ignorant shame that they indulge such luxury as most of the world suffers without enough food, clothing, shelter … and now fresh water and clean air, yet alone meaningful work and people to love and be loved by.
The point is clear from Jesus’ words: our attention and concern should be less on all the required labour needed to survive (or luxuriate in over abundance.) Our attention and concern is better spent on understanding the mystery, freedom and peace that is available to us when we, our lives long, learn to seek refuge, meaning, and purpose in God’s steadfast love. For there, comforted, protected, and challenged, we can see life with clarity.
What we see with clarity is that our lives were designed by God and given to each of us by God in order that we can extend God’s steadfast love to others.
We simply cannot do that if our primary concern is providing for ourselves, for then we turn inward and bend reality from God’s great creation to our own insatiable appetites. We become instead of caretakers of creation, destroyers of creation. We become incapable of seeing others as Christ sees them: broken people in need of God’s love.
God help us when we make that turn away from God’s steadfast love as our only sure refuge.
Thank God, God always calls us, welcomes us, and renews us so that we can return to God (… home in God’s kingdom to be the ones who exercise God’s unconditional, steadfast love for all people) so that we can take refuge in the shadow of God’s wings, in the safety of God’s steadfast love. All other ‘security’ is an illusion, a deception, and a departure from God’s kingdom into the Devil’s realms. Under God’s wings, like that of a great bird of the sky soaring at will, God brings us to adventures we would not imagine, to places and understandings where life is abundant, and to challenges and work that fulfill all our yearning to participate in creation. … home in God’s kingdom we are the saints who exercise God’s unconditional, steadfast love for all people.
The Lord protects them and keeps them alive; they are called happy in the land. The Lord does not give them up to the will of their enemies.
Matthew 5:7
Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
Words of Grace For Today
Yesterday’s headline was “Trouble in the Prairies as surgeries postponed in Alberta, Saskatchewan due to COVID’s hospital burden.”
For weeks now the reports are that the large majority of those people burdening the hospitals with their Covid crises are those that have chosen not to be vaccinated. Meanwhile there are protests against vaccine passports required in order to gain access to events that are perhaps safe, but not if unvaccinated people attend. They put both themselves and others at great risk of being infected, the transmission rates go up (or rather wild) as vaccinated people also spread the virus, and the hospitals are overburdened. The results are catastrophic for so many people. Those with Covid in hospital suffer and die or more likely suffer for years from long Covid (further burdening the health care system). The overburdened hospitals push ‘elective’ surgeries off to an unknown future time, and those they do not result in immediate death, many postponements do contribute to more severe suffering and then earlier death.
The real tragedy is that children under 12 cannot be vaccinated, they are (because of those over 12 who choose not to be vaccinated) infected in greater numbers, and their suffering and death – and the fear of suffering and death – increase dramatically, a fear shared by their families and friends.
One has to ask why we do not gather those who choose to go un-vaccinated, line them up, and shoot them …
the first thought is with lead,
but mercy would dictate that we use needles and vaccinations,
and then many of us realize that we ought only shoot them
…
with a camera, post their photos on the internet, and let the chips fall as they may.
And
there ought to be a Canada-wide mandate that Covid vaccination passports must be established by all provinces and territories, and those without passports or exemptions due to health be barred from gatherings or services or business that they could not access during the height of Covid 19 lockdowns.
We probably will do nothing like that, for the political fallout would be great, where as the political fallout for doing nothing (and refusing to accept scientific guidance) seems to be less (and in some parties it seems to win political support – for fools are in no shortage.)
In these Covid times, we do not need a personal enemy to have our lives put at great risk. The Covidiots are doing that with great efficacy to us all.
So we trust that God protects us and keeps us alive. We know that God does not give us up to the will of our enemies, therefore we are called happy in the land.
No matter the Covid fools that endanger us all. No matter the personal enemies that attack us based on lies told about us to cover the liars’ own terrible sins. No matter the real likelihood that, even vaccinated we will be infected and suffer long Covid in some form or another. No matter how poor health care becomes because the system is overburdened by Covidiots’ and their victims, both intentional and unintentional. No matter the real fear we suffer that our children will contract Covid and suffer or die.
No matter what comes our way, we remain ‘happy in the land’ because we know that God walks with us.
No matter what comes our way, we remain ‘happy in the land’ because we know that God is always merciful with us, and God enables and motivates us to be merciful to all other people.
We have many challenging days ahead (only some of it is responding to Covidiots) never leaving us an excuse to be at all bored. Thanks be to God!
But you do see! Indeed you note trouble and grief, that you may take it into your hands; the helpless commit themselves to you; you have been the helper of the orphan.
Mark 9:22
It has often cast him into the fire and into the water, to destroy him; but if you are able to do anything, have pity on us and help us.
Words of Grace For Today
When I hear this ‘cast him into the fire and into the water [that place where uncreation bubbles up to border on and at times consume creation], to destroy him’ I think of the guy yesterday who jumped in front of me. The corner of No Frills where the milk coolers are was congested with at least 6 different people. So I stood a good 2 metres short of the pack, waiting patiently for them to move on. A few were visiting so it took a while. That’s when the guy came up from behind me and wedged his way less than a foot from me past me and another customer waiting to get at the cooler. The guy was an obese bear of a middle aged man. He quickly worked his way to the coolers, but then dwaddled getting his milk jug as if they had been moved since the last time, as if he could not find the right shelf of 2% which is always all the shelves behind door 2. Then he peered into the coolers dwiddling in the corner a few extra minutes before finally leaving.
I paused a bit, not too long, considering the other customers waiting politely behind me. When I stepped into the corner to door 1 to get skim milk it was clear the jerk had dwiddled to leave the air filled with flatus expelled through the anus, an aerosol that could be full of Covid virus.
The news is all full of Covid 19 fourth wave in Canada, fuelled by the Delta variant and 39 times more infecting the unvaccinated, though vulnerable (otherwise health compromised – read old or ill or young) vaccinated are still among those in hospital, ICU, and the morgue.
This jerk’s antics are a clear demonstration how aerosols hang in the air, filled with Covid virus, waiting to be breathed in, and how impossible it is to avoid doing so, except by staying in total seclusion … without milk.
The passage from Mark is not about this at all, of course. Covid 19 did not exist when Mark wrote his account of Jesus’ ministry. This passage is about the ‘demon’ who inhabits a young boy, which casts him into fire and water to destroy him.
Taken with the Psalm one could point to our work done to help alleviate the trouble and grief of the helpless and of the orphan. This is the work of the saints. Our courts commit themselves to taking the ‘best interests of the children’ as the first priority in family court … though they certainly do not! Quite the opposite. The courts commonly sacrifice children to be raised by the most dangerous of possible parents (most favoured are birth mothers, no matter the indications that the birth mother is a clear and present danger to the children!) Apparently the courts want more clients (criminals) in the next generations, which is the result of these dangerous parents’ parenting.
So with our prayers and our work as God’s voice, hands, and feet we say, “have pity on us and help us” You are the one who can take our trouble and grief into your hands. Do so now, for among the most vulnerable are the children (who cannot be vaccinated yet at all!)
Our future is at risk. There are so many idiots, jerks, antiscience idiots, anti-vac idiots and covidiots abundant enough to put us all at risk, to put the vulnerable at risk, to put our children and our future at risk.
You, Oh Lord, are the only one who can take our trouble and our grief into your hands, and heal us of these idiots and their destruction of life and future.
Both we and our ancestors have sinned; we have committed iniquity, have done wickedly.
Titus 2:14
He it is who gave himself for us that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good deeds.
Words of Grace For Today
There is no shame in admitting one’s own sins, and the sins of one’s ancestors.
To face reality, especially the dark reality of one’s own sins is not easy or common or even possible …
unless first one know that God has, even before time, known we and our ancestors would sin, and God has not ever abandoned us to our sin. God has planned even before time how God would respond to our sins by redeeming us with God’s own son’s life as the model of how to live: sacrificing in order to unconditionally love those least deserving of love, in order that they will know God’s generous and gracious forgiveness.
So we have the story of Jesus, living as one of us, giving his life to teach, heal and guide and in the end to offer himself to be crucified, so that we would see that we need not sacrifice people, we need not scapegoat people, we need not work (futilely and destructively) to free ourselves; God has done all that is required.
We have the story of Jesus’ love for all people, especially the outcasts, the ill and ‘ill-fated’, those forced into and captive to poverty, the corrupt, the arrogant, and even the unjust.
We receive renewed life so that we can be the instruments of Jesus love for those in our time and place.
Thanks be to God, for though we are wretched sinners all, we are God-made saints, called to bring God’s justice and grace to bear on the world we live in.
Who are they that fear the Lord? He will teach them the way that they should choose.
Philippians 1:9-10a
This is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best.
Words of Grace For Today
Each day we make choices of how to proceed through our day.
Sometimes our choices are simple: Do I kill the ant crawling on the window? Yes. Do I kill the wasp buzzing around my head? No. Do I share food with the young camper who, for some reason, camps for months and has no way to provide for himself, except an relative who shows up occasionally (or not) with supports of various kinds? Yes. Do I mow the grass to keep the mosquitoes down? Yes.
Sometimes our choices are more complicated: Do I help the yelling young parent with a screaming child running around the grocery store? Maybe yes. That can be a situation where a moment’s intervention can break the stress for both parent and child and allow them both to proceed in a better space. But maybe no. Intervening in a family situation may be taken the wrong way and all the pent up anger can be focused on the person who intervenes, either immediately or at some later date. Do I sign a mortgage to buy property even though I know my job is not secure for the length of the mortgage? Maybe yes, since my family needs a home. Maybe no, because we may have a home for only a year or so before we lose it and then we will have even less resources for a home. Given that pressure do I take the management job offered with another company that pays much better, but has a reputation for skirting the law and abusing it’s employees? I need the money, but do I want to become one who abuses employees?
Sometimes our choices appear to be simple but they turn out to have consequences that we did not see, either good or bad. What are we to do?
Paul, writing one of his most loving and affectionate letters (to the church in Philippi) prays for them: This is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best.
We would wish this for ourselves, and for other people.
This wisdom is a God given gift. It is not handed out in a day, but grows over a lifetime of living wisely, and that life begins with the fear of the Lord, As the psalmist wrote in many and various ways: Who are they that fear the Lord? He will teach them the way that they should choose.
Help us God, we pray each day, to fear and love you that we may be blessed with the wisdom which guides us to choose the best for all people in each of our choices we make.
