Category: God-Talk

Giving Thanks to God ….. not to godlets.

Saturday, July 10, 2021

Life is A Maze

an Amazing Maze of Wonders,

Gifts from God.

God is All Amazing.

No need to make small godlets.

Psalm 106:1

Praise the Lord! O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures for ever.

Colossians 3:17

Whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

Words of Grace For Today

Giving God thanks surely involves using our voices and God’s name, though when we use God’s name constantly in our communication with other people it is a grand misuse of God’s name, grace, and steadfast love.

Truly, in word and deed, doing everything in the name of our Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God is so much more than mere words of thanks, or constant mention of God’s name.

Giving God thanks is an attitude towards life that brings us to reflect God’s grace towards others.

It is to give of one’s self so that others will live, whether they accept and practice faith in Jesus Christ, or not, for all people are God’s creatures, God’s precious people, people God forgives.

Giving God thanks is to extend to all others the same grace that God first has given (and continually gives) to us.

More often than not it is to do it anonymously, so our names are not known or remembered, so that our God’s name is not known or remembered … rather that God’s grace towards us is experienced as God’s grace towards other people. We certainly are not to bring people to worship or adore us for our good deeds and gracious words. We certainly are not sent out into the world to bring people to worship a ‘small god’, a godlet of any kind even one they name Jesus.

There are enough people worshipping a godlet of some kind or another, and too often they call that godlet ‘Jesus’. It certainly is not.

The past president of Tanzania is one very visible example: Covid 19 hit and shut down country after country in Africa with restrictions and precautions. What did this ‘Lutheran Christian’ do? He prayed. Certainly good. Then he announced to the country that his ‘godlet’ ‘Jesus’ had cured all Tanzanians of Covid 19. There was to be no mention of any respiratory illness as Covid 19, though there were thousands of cases everywhere. His godlet Jesus caused the avoidable death and long term disability through Covid 19 (and long Covid 19) of thousands of Tanzanians. That kind of godlet, no matter what it is called, is certainly not the Jesus of Nazareth, Son of God, healer of our every ill, the creator, redeemer and sanctifier of the universe and all people in it.

Small gods, godlets, are made up every day by so many people looking for a way through life’s challenges.

God walks with us, seeing all we do, and still God’s steadfast love endures for ever for us and all people.

Because God is gracious to us, therefore we can be gracious with all the deadly covidiots out there, and all the abusers, and all those with power who abuse it, and all those who thought (and those that still think) residential schools were acceptable, … and all the enemies of life abundant for all.

Treating the enemies of life abundant for all is how we give thanks to God, for God’s grace worked first for us.

…

Happy 90th Birthday Celebration Dort!

Very sorry we cannot cross the border to be there to celebrate with you.

Summer Cool, Always Salt

Tuesday, July 6, 2021

After the unbearable heat

the cool summer mornings

give life to our hearts, minds and spirits.

We are not out of the woods yet though,

more heat is on it’s way!

Jeremiah 29:7

Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

Matthew 5:13

You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.

Words of Grace For Today

Jesus sends the disciples out into the world to share the Good News, that God has sent Jesus to demonstrate God’s love, forgiveness, grace, and favour bestowed on all peoples.

We are out in the world, now in a world that ‘does not need God’, has no room for God, and pretends that everything is fine (without God.) The Good News is needed more than ever before.

How is this sending by Jesus different than God ‘exiling’ the people of Israel to foreign cities, cut off from their homes? It is done by force, first of all, against the people’s will and established by the sword of a alien ruler, not of faith in God. When Jesus sends the disciples, they choose to follow Jesus and they choose to obey him as he sends them. The exiles are not able to travel ‘back home’. The are captives in the foreign city. The disciples go out and they return ‘home’ to follow Jesus as he goes about the Galilean countryside.

How is Jesus sending the disciples the same as God ‘exiling’ the people of Israel to foreign cities? The passage for today from Jeremiah provides the link: in both sendings God’s people are to seek the welfare of the places and cities where they go. The exiles are more permanent, perhaps life long, and even many generations long. Their well being is intricately tied to the well being of the cities to which they are exiled. The disciples bring nothing with them, so their welfare is tied to the welfare of the places they go as well. The difference for the disciples is that at some point they get to leave the welfare of the places the visit and reclaim the welfare of home as their own, perhaps … if the welfare at home is controlled by people who will welcome them home.

The passage from Matthew ties it together nicely: the quality of one’s life as a disciple of Jesus, as a person of God’s people is not determined by the prosperity of one’s surroundings. Rather one’s life is determined to be of the greatest quality because God has adopted us as children. No matter what comes our way we remain God’s children.

Like salt we do not change as the surroundings around us change. We remain salt.

The danger to our lives is not prosperity or poverty. Each we can deal with easily enough, poverty perhaps more easily than prosperity because in prosperity it is too easy to forget from where the goodness of life comes. We too easily attach goodness to the things of luxury and comfort, rather than to the essentials of life provided always by God’s goodness and grace. Soon we start to assume that we can make it well through life without God’s blessings, grace, forgiveness and guidance. In poverty we do struggle to remain alive, though there are few reasons to doubt that the goodness of life comes not from things, but from God, because so often without any goods or things to divert our attention from God’s blessings we immerse ourselves (in order for life to continue) in giving God thanks for all the goodness that pours over us each day.

We are God’s children. Simple and easy. Like salt it’s not complicated. Like salt too much stops life, but the right amount preserves sustenance through the sparsest of times.

When we lose our saltiness, our simple dependence on God for everything, and our ever present gratitude for everything, then we become useless. We lose grace and have no Good News to share. There is nothing left but to make up nonsense about life. We see so much of that, so much more than we could imagine civilization can endure and still survive.

To this saltiness-lost-world Jesus sends us with Good News.

To this saltiness-lost-world God exiles us to live out the Good News.

Wherever we are or go God walks with us, and guides us to share and hear anew the old, old story of Jesus and his love, for us and the whole of creation.

One step at a time today, again; not towards our goals, but towards God’s will for us.

Hallowed Love

Monday, July 5, 2021

There is no way we are perfect!

Forgiven we can do wonders

for each other.

Exodus 20:7

You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.

Luke 11:2

He said to them, ‘When you pray, say: Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come.’

Words of Grace For Today

How can we live a perfectly righteous life, enjoying everything in creation as we and it was intended to be enjoyed?

The ten commandments are a basic framework of how to live well in community in God’s creation.

The first thing is to get things right about God: to know God, to speak well of God, to speak well to God. God is not just another thing in creation. Nor is God just another being in creation. Nor is God just another special entity beyond creation. God is Creator of us and all that is! God is the only entity beyond creation.

God is not disengaged from us or from creation. God is far more than creation and yet God is always with us in creation. God is intimately involved with every little detail of our lives and every thread of creation’s time.

God is also for us.

God is interested in us getting the best out of life that life has to offer.

In a word more powerful than we will ever be able to know: God love us.

God wants us to know God, and respect God.

God wants us to be for all of creation.

God wants us to respect creation and other people.

In a word more powerful than we will ever be able to know: God wants us to love God, and all of God’s creation, and all of God’s people.

That would make for a perfectly righteous life for us and everyone.

How far we fall from that ideal!

In fact, God does not acquit us on any charge as we live so much of our lives against God, against creation and against each other!

God judges us guilty, deserving of death!

And then God forgives us! Again, and again, and again, and on and on and on all our lives!

How can we respond?

Well we could try not to misuse God’s name, for starters, and thereby teaching ourselves to respect God, which is the beginning of love.

There is so much more that we can do, with marginal success, except one thing we can do nearly perfect all the time. We can pray.

We can pray as Jesus taught us, including that we can pray that God’s name be hallowed and that God’s Rule will come – though it is come near and will come completely one day whether we pray or not. Praying for it to come helps us to remember that we are able to act towards others with love since God’s Rule is already here.

As an aside since it is a huge issue today (again as many times in history): God does not have gender and God has all genders. It is our referring to God solely as having only one gender that skews our ability to see each other with love. It is our refusal to refer to God with any one gender (to say God does not have that gender) that skews our ability to see each other with love.

Historically Christians have referred to God as male, a reflection of a mistaken idea worked out against us all that males are more human, more like God, more powerful than females. Huge mistake.

The efforts to correct this are often as hate-fuelled and therefore so skewed as to make love impossible.

It’s time we prayed that God’s Rule would come now for us on these issues, so that we are freed to address God as mother, as parent, as Abba, and with all other labels of gender, so that we see that all genders are a reflection of God’s goodness and love for us all in creation!

Wonders and What God Does With and For Us … All

Friday, July 2, 2021

Extraordinary Wonder

in Every Ordinary

Is God’s Creation

Every Expanse,

Every Detail

Isaiah 40:15

Even the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as dust on the scales; see, he takes up the isles like fine dust.

Revelation 21:3

I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them.’

Words of Grace For Today

Wonders upon wonders stare us in the face each morning, noon, and night:

The universe is a great and expansive place. It is a great thing to wonder about: How did it come to exist? Where does it extend to? What is beyond? What holds it together? What is ‘next door’ to us?

Life around is continually renewing itself. It is a great thing to wonder about this process: What holds it all together? How is it that the ‘birds and the bees’ came to be able to renew life, to procreate and have life continue despite so many challenges to life? How much of it have we already destroyed or put in danger with our huge population and luxury demands for energy?

The atomic make up of this universe is a curious expanse. What regulates the sub-atomic pieces of the universe and life so that what we encounter has a semblance of order, an order that we ‘discover’ and passionately pursue understanding, so that we can ‘progress into the future’?

Human life and consciousness bring us to wonder about all around us, with curiosity and purpose to ‘make life better’. No more wonder is possible than to wonder how it is that we can wonder at all. What are we made up of? Certainly it is more than chemicals and happenstance!

The greatest wonder of all is that God deigns to live with us, as Jesus, and always as God who sojourns with us each day of this miracle of life.

God is the One who created all this, the universe of galaxies and black holes, life on earth of so many varieties and interconnections, human spirit of body-mind-soul, and all that is – even if we cannot know of it or even imagine it!

God sees the nations so grandly constituted for good and evil as entities smaller than grains of sand. God could scoop up the isles out of the oceans all in a moment and toss them into a black hole on the other side of the universe. God knows the inner workings of every life form and every interconnection between forms of life and even between each life form and the cosmic events of which we may or may not be aware. God knows everything about humans, the good, the bad, the ugly, and the miraculous.

God has all knowledge of all things. God has all power over all things in all time and beyond time. God has all everything above every thing and moment.

This God chooses to walk with us, each day. To love us. To protect us. To guide us. To accompany us in the best of times and the worst of times.

If God is for us, who can be of consequence standing against us?

No one. Not even the Evil One and those who do the Evil One’s bidding, trying to lie about reality, to create a false reality supposedly more favourable to themselves while destroying so many around them.

No, not even our worst enemies, nor the Evil that drives them … nothing can separate us from God’s love and grace. With God’s love and grace working for us, we are able to help God makes wonders happen for all God’s people, all God’s creatures, and even all of God’s creation.

Heat, Spirit, and Cooler Days!

Thursday, July 1, 2021

No Matter the Heat,

No Matter the Evil We Face ,

Or the Doubt We Know,

God’s Promises Are As Sure

As The Coming of Winter

and the Return of Cooler Days.

Hosea 13:4

Yet I have been the Lord your God ever since the land of Egypt; you know no God but me, and besides me there is no saviour.

1 John 4:13-14

By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Saviour of the world.

Words of Grace For Today

If only all in the world would only know our God as generously gracious, loving and merciful, and always walking with us, all of us.

If only we could know our God so, and remember that … every day, no matter what.

We can know that God is with us, for even in our darkest hour, the story of Jesus saving the world and us in it can always convince us anew that God is with us and for us, just as God worked to save God’s people from slavery in Egypt, from the wilderness, and from all the temptations of the Evil One.

Spirit and spirit, God meets us as we are and as God is: always fully spirited, always able to follow in Jesus’ way, giving good words and God’s good promises to all.

All the Reasons to Be Filled With Wonder …

Thursday, June 24, 2021

New life

Common and Spectacular

Exodus 34:9

He said, ‘If now I have found favour in your sight, O Lord, I pray, let the Lord go with us. Although this is a stiff-necked people, pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for your inheritance.’

Luke 1:76-77

You, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of their sins.

Words of Grace For Today

If …

If …

If we do the right thing …

Then God will do the right thing for us.

If … Then.

‘If we … Then God …’ is not the way that God works with us and all the universe.

God does and because God does therefore it is good for us!

God does Grace, at great expense, giving endlessly generously to us.

Therefore we live abundantly, grace pouring over us; God forgiving us our sins, life renewed for us and in us each day, each hour. God’s grace is more than sufficient for us, and as it pours over us it pours over all around us, with all those blessed with the blessing that is everything for life.

No ‘if … then’ when it comes to God.

Only ‘because … therefore’.

Therefore we live and as

Christ calls us to go out, sent to share the good news that God forgives all our sins.

There are no better words that we can ever hear, or share with others, … and more often than we can ever imagine these are the words that we so desperately need to hear again … and again … and yet again.

Because God forgives us, therefore we live and can be filled with gratitude and wonder.

Blessings in All Things!

Tuesday, June 22, 2021

The Blessing of Winter is there are no Mosquitoes

The Blessing of Summer is …

You can say what you will about summer.

I’d say, it is that

winter will come again

so there will be no heat (except in the furnace)

and no mosquitoes!

Psalm 103:15-16-17

As for mortals, their days are like grass; they flourish like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more. But the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him, and his righteousness to children’s children.

Romans 5:2

Our Lord Jesus Christ is through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.

Words of Grace For Today

We always like to think we are more than we are.

It’s almost built into our DNA.

We strive to achieve more, to become our own godlets, to no avail.

We are but like grass, here one day for a short season, and blown down, mowed to nothing, overtaken by weeds, eaten up by even vegetarians, and the gone, just gone with only a few people who perhaps remember us to live on after us.

Short and brutish … that’s how life is described by poets and philosophers and even wise theologians and priests … though the last along with other wise people do not stop there.

They also go on to give God thanks for the greatness of creation we are privileged to participate in, and especially God’s Grace which gives us more than meets the eye, or rather just as can meet the eye of a faithful mystic, one who looks and sees God at work in the most common things of every day life.

Jesus brings us the story that tells us this Grace is ours to live in, to enjoy, to trust … and to share.

It is this steadfast love of God that gives us breath even when we should not be still alive at all. It is God’s steadfast love that promises that everyday common and usual events and things are much, much more … and we can see them as works of God’s steadfast love.

As we fear and love God, God is able to show us that we live in, work from, and can prodigiously share God’s steadfast love with all people.

Hot long daylight days, short ferocious loud and destructive storms, and cool calm after the heat of the day … all are blessings from God.

I’m not sure about the mosquitoes that just devoured me while I was outside for a few minutes … okay even they are blessings from God. I was driven back in to write and give God thanks.

This is God’s blessing – that we know how, can, and do give God thanks for all things … so much so that we pray for our enemies unceasing, that they may be a part of a double victory for Christ.

Let the storms come, let the heat come … even let the mosquitoes come in droves. There is calm after the storm, there is cool after the heat … and there is ammonia based glass cleaner to dry out the itchy poison the mosquitoes inject to get blood to flow to their bite. Itch, itch, itch. Itch to distraction, endless itch .. until the ammonia works it wonder and the bites settle finally to a comparatively marvellous calm. Thankfully there is no malaria here!

And the night settles in, the day is done. The only thing to do is give thanks, wash up, and sleep deeply in God’s embrace. Tomorrow promises to be another marvellous day, all in all.

Seek or See?

Sunday, June 20, 2021

God’s Light

Brightens Even an Old Stump

As It Falls Apart

Isaiah 55:6

Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near.

Colossians 2:9

For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.

Words of Grace For Today

God is never too far.

Too often we know that God is near, nearer than we are comfortable acknowledging since we would like to think we are getting off scott-free for the sins we commit, the evil we perpetrate on others, and for all the lack of kindness and absence of goodness we share with others.

God is here. More than near, God walks with us, always.

There is something to ‘seeking’ God, for if we do not open our eyes to notice, like so much of God’s goodness and Grace that is all around us each day, we will miss the best in life.

Sometimes it is easier to think of God as some far off, great and powerful, disinterested deity. God is no such thing. God comes a Jesus, lives as one of us, eats and cries like one of us, laughs and prays like one of us, and dies like one of us … well, hopefully dies like no one need ever again die, innocent yet falsely convicted by those ‘righteous ones’ in power, who fear for their own survival if the truth is told far and wide. God could not be nearer.

God is fully embodied in the same life we live.

God desires that we live as well as Jesus did, that we not scapegoat anyone (Jesus was the scapegoat to demonstrate that God does not need more scapegoats, or any other false, sacrificial sacrifices), and that we learn to serve others (all others) just as Jesus did.

That’s a tough road to navigate when the expectation is that we must prove ourselves, either so pure and good that God will accept us, or so evilly successful in this life that we need not care about God’s blessings. God accepts neither option for us, and instead forgives us once again each day, and sets us off in a renewed life, able to serve others … so that more and more people will enjoy an abundant life.

It’s a challenge, more than seeking God, it’s a challenge of finding ways to give life to other people, many who do not want anything to do with God or a healthy, abundant life.

Everyone gets to choose, to turn away from God, or to acknowledge that God is right here with us.

The sun shines long these days. God’s Light shines brighter, longer each day, and through each dark night. Seeking is less required or helpful, than being alert, noticing, and giving God thanks.

Listen & Trust

Tuesday, June 7, 2021

Our Path

Is All in All

Embodied and Spirit

Psalm 143:8

Let me hear of your steadfast love in the morning, for in you I put my trust. Teach me the way I should go, for to you I lift up my soul.

Romans 14:17

For the kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.

Words of Grace For Today

One would think from the bare Romans passage that Paul (and also much of Christendom since) would hold that God cares not for our physical life in creation, rather that our souls are God’s only concern. That errant belief in many and various ways presents itself through history, always to the detriment of those who hold it and those upon whom they burden it.

God created creation and called it good. God intended that we live in creation, that we live fully in creation. It is an error, and a dismissal of God’s good will to create us in creation to live here fully, if we hold that God would have us separate ourselves from creation. That is a futile effort anyway. We are creatures and wholly part of creation.

It is also an error, and a dismissal of God’s good will to create us in creation to live here fully, if we live as if the pleasures of being alive, limited to the body-pleasures, were all that God created us to live for and to live from. Food and drink, and sex of course, and a variety of other body-related pleasures are not the extent of being alive. To live so is to deny the best parts of being alive, of being able to reflect God’s love for other people and for all of creation. To live just for the body pleasures is to deny that God created us to be able to be inquisitive, to think, probe, learn, and organize seeming chaos into an understanding of how creation works so that we can live well in creation. It is also to deny that God created us in God’s image, able to be aware of more than the physical world. We are, in a word, able to be aware of spirits, in us, in creation, and God’s self: God the Holy Spirit is not a random ‘add-on’ to the Parent-Child persons of the one Godhead.

We are in a word so much more than just bodies, yet never to be disconnected from our bodies.

Even Paul, good Hebraic understanding that he had, understood that, and though he disclaimed any precise knowledge of life eternal after death, he asserted that we were resurrected to new life, bodies and all.

In the morning then, we not only enjoy a good cup of hot coffee with breakfast after Eucharist. We also enjoy the prayers and the Eucharist, reminding us that we are God’s, fully able to live out God’s Grace, not on our own, but by God’s blessings of Grace poured unending on us.

No matter the challenges we face each day, we put our trust in God, and look to God for guidance in the way we should live also this specific day. We give God for the provisions for our body in this world, and for God’s Spirit that awakens in us our spirit so that we can enjoy God’s righteousness and peace and joy.

As we find our way this day, we lift up our spirits to God, give God thanks for our food and drink, and look to God’s history with us and all of God’s people, God’s history of steadfast love. In this love we put our trust, for it is that which holds the whole of creation in all time in it’s own order, and our places in it.

Whatever the Challenges of Our Days …

Monday, May 31, 2021

God’s Deliverance

Awaits Us

Each Day

Isaiah 56:1

Thus says the Lord: Maintain justice, and do what is right, for soon my salvation will come, and my deliverance be revealed.

2 Corinthians 6:2

For he says, ‘At an acceptable time I have listened to you, and on a day of salvation I have helped you.’ See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation!

Words of Grace For Today

We’ve waited, waited, and waited …

and now is the day of salvation.

Except it is not that our enemies are eliminated,

It is that we are redeemed and set free from our sins.

We still will struggle to maintain justice, to do what is right, and to be gracious with people who are not just, who do wrong, and who are everything except gracious.

What is new, and is new each time we recognize that the Kingdom of God is at hand, is that we know that God has and continually delivers us.

That is the basis for living in grace, living out grace for others, and finding hope, joy, and peace in each moment whether it’s a challenge or not we are in the middle of.