See, I have refined you, but not like silver; I have tested you in the furnace of adversity.
Luke 6:22-23
Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.
Words of Grace For Today
This life may be terrible and even horrendous, but it will be all right in heaven, so this is all right, too, right?
What doesn’t kill you, makes you strong, right?
Too often these rather stupid simplifications of valid ideas are used as excuses to allow psychological or physical violence and abuse to continue. The truth is there are scars from many things that do not make one stronger.
Perhaps the worse use of these is to justify that some people can enjoy great wealth, privilege, and comfort, while others struggle to stay alive, and others die very ignoble deaths, all in order to make the ‘chosen’ few able to be wealthy, privileged, and comfortable.
God did not make creation for us to live in a while and then escape from it’s injustices to heaven. God made all of creation, saw the accomplished work of creating, and said, “It is Good!”
Life for all people is designed to be GOOD!
GOOD does not mean without pain or suffering evil, for then there is also no possibility to love and experience joy. Pain and suffering – and – love and joy are part and parcel of the kind of life God created us for.
We live and love and experience joy. Some day the people we love will suffer and die. We will then also suffer and experience pain.
And it is all Good.
It is true that those who enjoy wealth, privilege, and comforts now at the expense of others being able to live abundant lives will, for eternity, suffer their choices to be blind and deaf to what they do to others.
It is also true that those who suffer and know only pain, will for eternity be released from that horrible kind of experience and they will know joy forever.
Our lives here and now are not to simply accept all suffering and pain as necessary. It is to work as hard as we can to mitigate and minimize all pain and suffering, to provide an abundant life for everyone!
That’s a life full and long of hard, dedicated work of love, not the sentimental kind of love, the real kind of love that puts one into action and pulls one to sacrifice so that others can live well.
What makes us strong, truly strong, is to know that even as we suffer and are in pain God walks with us, still creating, still seeing all that God does through us, and God says, “It is Good.”
Therefore we know that already today all will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well.
For you bless the righteous, O Lord; you cover them with favour as with a shield.
Acts 13:52
The disciples were filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit.
Words of Grace For Today
Covid 19 presses challenges on us all, unequally.
The homeless and outcasts in Canada are recognized as deserving homes and inclusion, so thankfully an effort is made to provide for them. They receive safe places to live and eat if for no other reason because not to do so would lead to an outbreak among them that could not be contained and would spread to us all. At least this care is provided in the cities … well sort of … in some cities.
Immigrants who live multi-generationally with many people to a housing unit, many people to a bedroom, are now and again provided separate housing in hotels for those who must self isolate or quarantine themselves … again for our protection.
Pastors gather to discuss their ministries … and it becomes mostly a ‘bitch’ session, complaints of how difficult life is for them and their families, though most retain full pay and adequate work, and none lack for the necessities of life, even in Covid 19 times. Humour creeps into the conversation lessening the dark tone of complaints. Yet where is their overwhelming sense of gratitude? How does one inspire people to remember how blessed they are?
How often Scriptures record gratitude and thankfulness as the most appropriate and life giving response to all of life, all that appears to be good and all that appears to be bad.
For God covers the righteous with favour as with a shield, and in the face of great threat to their lives for being Christian still the disciples were filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit.
How then will we live this day?
Full of complaints, self-righteously expecting more from life?
Or
Filled with joy and gratitude, no matter the challenges that come our way?
Do not cast me off in the time of old age; do not forsake me when my strength is spent.
2 Corinthians 4:16
So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day.
Words of Grace For Today
What used to take little effort and next to no time or thought, now takes great effort and forging onward through pain, dealing with lack of clear sight, and being exhausted way too soon each day.
Fear makes it worse.
There is almost no resolution.
‘If you have your health that is everything.’
It’s a nice sentiment, though the truth is more clearly ‘if you do not have your health, then nothing else can compensate for that. Life is a finite experience, and without health (as old age takes if from us piece by piece) that finite experience becomes smaller and shorter and smaller and shorter and then will soon end.
Our real comfort is that God does not ‘unbless’ us as we get old and ill.
Even as our bodies and minds seem to waste away, God renews our faith and trust, and thus we are able to continue on, blessing others with all we have left in life, of life itself.
Is a trumpet blown in a city, and the people are not afraid? Does disaster befall a city, unless the Lord has done it?
Luke 24:26
Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?
Words of Grace For Today
A family of four, the parents of whom had chosen to serve as pastors in the church, arrived back on Canadian soil, ruined by a congregation that had a history of ruining pastors. Financially broke with only two old cars, they needed a place to live. They could not afford a house and rents were kept out of reach by artificial manipulations, to enrich the wealth of the few landlords that lived locally and the many who lived elsewhere.
So, the father decided they would look for property so that he could build them a house. They found and bought a property with an old, falling apart, mouse-infested homestead house on it, he built them a sound and environmentally responsible house, and they had a secure and safe place to live.
It sounds simple.
A young couple in their thirties, living between their parent’s houses, needs a place to establish themselves, to live together and forge their own way in life. They cannot afford anything available on the market, so they look at what they can afford. The best option is a repossessed townhouse that has the carpets ripped up, holes in the walls and doors from feet and fists, and lots of wear and tear everywhere. They buy it and recruit their friends and family to help them ‘make it right’ and safe to live in.
It sounds simple.
Life is much more complicated than the simple stories or dreams we have.
The family of four lived planed that the house would take a better part of a year to build as they lived in that homestead, two bedroom house with an earthen basement. Finances and construction were stressful beyond belief as step by step the father learned what needed to be done in the next step of construction. There was no room for errors or redoing any step. Fortunately a retired house builder volunteered to draw out building plans from his hand drawn design, research the new processes and materials they used, and generally keep the project from going off the rails. The parents both worked, he half time as a pilot, sinking every penny and every minute they had into the building project. In the end they moved into the not quite finished new house when the old house started to fall apart and become unlivable.
It took three years of literal blood, sweat and tears … and a lot of help from friends and family, and in the end the family did have a sound house to live in.
…
The young couple looked at the ugly, dirty insides of an otherwise sound duplex and estimated that it would be livable in a few weeks. Friends needed a place to live and they would share their new place with them. The friends apartment they were in flooded. The project started with volunteers joining in to gut the townhouse of thousands of nails and staples on the floors, dirt soaked carpets on the stairs, a huge assortment of things stuck into the walls, a folding door that did not work, and … and … and.
The project could not be completed in a few weeks. Drywall patching took that long, as the obvious holes were finished and then less obvious ones were found, outside walls without insulation were discovered, and useless space was made into useful closet space. Dingy curtains came down, ripped out curtain rod supports were removed, rotted baseboards and trim were removed, thousands of nails removed from nearly everywhere, and tens of thousands of pin holes in the drywall were patched. Finally with most of the walls bare, the priming and painted started, a sliding door was custom fit to the poorly designed bathroom near the entrance, the kitchen cupboard fronts were removed, the hinges soaked and cleaned of paint and grime, new paint freshened the kitchen, the upstairs floors were covered with a proper sub-flooring, and finally one, then two, then three rooms had new flooring installed. Painting continued, clean up continued, door bottoms where cut to fit the new floor height, and after cleaning up every day the construction mess, out went all the garbage to the appropriate disposal sites. New material for flooring, baseboards, and the assorted things that had to be replaced came in and were stacked even as the saw dust filled the air from cutting wood. The odd fix like a dryer vent needed to be installed. Appliances arrived. Old ones were carted off.
Four weeks past with painting to be done, trim to be cut, painted, and installed, flooring to be installed, but the end started to look possible in a week or so.
It took more than a month and finally the couple has a place to live and share with their friends.
…
God provides. Sometimes it requires lots and lots of blood, sweat, and tears to get to the basics, a safe and secure place to live.
…
God provides all we need, most of all to trust that God is with us, that God is for us, that God saves us. For this the Messiah suffered an agonizing death on a cross, unjustly condemned. Only then, three days later did God raise him back to life, to demonstrate to us hard-headed, hard-hearted people God’s glory is not in quick fixes or miraculous resolutions or taking away our free will. God loves us and wishes us to learn to love God, ourselves, our neighbours and even our enemies. That does not happen overnight or in an instant. It takes much more time than renovating an ugly, dirty townhouse. It takes much more time and effort and investment on our part than building a house from the ground up with the minimum of experience and money.
God’s glory is in saving us from our twisted ways and view of God, God’s creatures, and all of God’s creation.
For us to learn to love God, ourselves, our neighbours and even our enemies takes more than a life time. It takes the bending of time and space and reality that we build around us … until we can see the world and all that is in it as God created it to be … Good!
He said, ‘My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.’
John 14:19
In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live.
Words of Grace For Today
Christ is Risen!
He is Risen Indeed!
Though we Christians have said this for generations, I would guess that for most Christians and non-Christians the events we celebrate today have had little effect on their lives. Either we simply ignore the consequences that follow from God raising Jesus back to life after being crucified unjustly and cruelly, or we’ve become so accustom to the story, it’s so familiar, that we take it for granted. It’s not like anything we do today is going to change what God did, right?
Right!
God keeps trying to reach us, to communicate with us, to bring the Good News to us so that we hear, and accept God’s will for us and all people: that God would love us and have us be that love for each other.
Christ is Risen, and may that make all the difference in the world, for you, for us, and for all the people we can make a difference for …
For all the boots of the tramping warriors and all the garments rolled in blood shall be burned as fuel for the fire.
2 Peter 1:17
For he received honour and glory from God the Father when that voice was conveyed to him by the Majestic Glory, saying, ‘This is my Son, my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’
Words of Grace For Today
Passion Week.
The week we remember Jesus’ last week, with all its normal human agony, scapegoating, and corruption leading to innocent death … and God’s response to all human sin.
We humans struggle against each other for advantage and privilege and comforts, struggling until violence consumes us and blood covers the boots of those fighting for us, often covering our own boots as we try to provide our own future advantages.
God promises that those boots and the blood on them will be burned as fuel for a fire. The fire of God’s triumph over evil and our sinful ways.
We still struggle against each other no matter how much God promises, no matter how many blood covered boots burn. God sends his son, and blesses him. God is pleased with Jesus, for Jesus is a word that we humans can understand, a life, a death, a resurrection. God’s NO to scapegoating. God’s YES to life no matter what comes our way.
We still struggle against each other.
So we remember.
We remember the last week of Jesus’.
We remember how God gives everything to demonstrate to us how much God loves us, forgives us, and gives us renewed abundant life.
Every day we have the ability to share that love, forgiveness, and abundant life with all people.
The Lord will become king over all the earth; on that day the Lord will be one and his name one.
Revelation 22:3-4
Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads.
Words of Grace For Today
The Day of the Lord has many names. It is the day when all the wrong, sin, and evil that humans have perpetrated against each other and against creation and against God will cease and the after-effects will cease as well.
In human terms the rule of unjust humans over others will cease, and God will be king over all the earth and over all people; justice and truth, mercy and compassion, forgiveness and life-giving love will be the way humans will interact with each other.
In divine terms, all that is accursed will no longer exist. The city of God, the New Jerusalem, will be founded (or revealed to us). Jesus is the sacrificial lamb, given to convince us in terms we understand, that God forgives and loves us unconditionally – and that there is no limit to the lengths God will go to to forgive us and more, to convince us we are forgiven. Except God will not violate our freewill as beings capable of love. God will love us, forgive us, walk with us, stand by us, care for us, guide us … but God will not take away our ability to love ourselves, each other, all creation, and God.
This Jesus will no longer be a sacrificial lamb. He will be raised to the most exalted position, to sit on God’s throne, ruling with sacrificial love, over all the universe.
The Day of the Lord has many names and many images and many hopes expressed in them.
The Day of the Lord is the day when all that is wrong will be set right.
Those who benefit from the wrong that is now perpetrated and live lives of comfort will cease to live in comfort. They rightly fear and deny that the Day of the Lord will ever come.
The great majority of humans who have ever lived, and the great majority of those who live on earth now, will no longer suffer the ignominy of being forced to provide comforts and luxuries for others at the expense of the basic necessities of life, and even their lives. For the great majority of humans the Day of the Lord is the expression of hope that provides the little comfort available to them; on that day all will be set right, and those responsible and blithely benefiting from the wrong will no longer exist.
The Day of the Lord has been anticipated for generation upon generation … and is yet to come to be. Still we do not give up hope that God will set right all the wrongs that are done against us. We do not give up hope that God will set right the little wrongs (and not so little) that we do to each other.
Freedom. Hope. Life based solely on forgiveness and love.
We are not yet at the Day of the Lord.
For now, our sins give witness to God’s response to our failings: God forgives and loves and renews us.
For now, we get to be bearers of the Good News that God has placed before us in many and various ways, and in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection: namely that the substance of life is love, and the glue that holds it together, and the lubricant that makes it still move is unconditional forgiveness and love.
For now we have quite the life to live and to live that life in the full expectation of the Day of the Lord pulling us forward through each day’s challenges (including all that Covid 19 makes more obvious.)
Do not hide your face from me. Do not turn your servant away in anger, you who have been my help. Do not cast me off, do not forsake me, O God of my salvation!
Luke 23:42-43
Then he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ He replied, ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.’
Words of Grace For Today
While the challenges of life and the challenges to life rise up against us, and enemies lay in wait and attack and remain ever ready to destroy us with violence, gaslighting, and/or false witness, there is no shortage of our own sins (having nothing to do with the false convictions made by false witness and dishonest, dishonourable, and lying judges, the gaslighting, or our enemies lies about us) which are the real threat to our very lives.
Others’ attacks can physically harm us and even end our lives on earth. Others’ gaslighting can nearly drive us mad as we grapple with what is actually real and what is not, which is a whole other kind of hell to live through. False witness and false convictions and judges’ dishonest rulings can put our lives in jeopardy in jail, ruin our reputations, and make life very lonely as friends turn their backs on us and even our pastors refuse to communicate with us.
These are all terrible.
Still the worst thing that threatens our lives is not from outside ourselves. It is always from within. It is our own sins which can lead us to doubt God’s grace and to fear that God will turn from us.
Our own sins bring on the valleys of the shadows of death that threaten not only our physical life, not only our sanity, but our very souls … so that there is nothing left of life, and indeed of us. These experiences are when we lose our love of God and fear that God no longer loves us … and we only fear God.
We cry out.
We cry out if we are even still that capable: Do not hide your face from me. Do not turn your servant away in anger, you who have been my help. Do not cast me off, do not forsake me, O God of my salvation!
The valleys of the shadows of death are no illusion. They are certainly the work of the Devil himself/herself/themselves [in these valleys the gender is irrelevant!]
Our fear of God is no illusion.
Our cries are not illusions.
Always, always, always God answers us as he answered the criminal that hung on a cross with Jesus and cried out to Jesus for help: Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.
Today.
No waiting.
No delay.
Today, though we suffer greatly in these valleys, today we will be in paradise with Jesus.
These are the words that again and again usher us out of the valleys of the shadows of death and back into the Grace which gives us life, light, and hope. These words stymie the wishes and efforts of all our enemies. These words usher us back into abundant life.
God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’
1 Corinthians 3:22-23
Whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all belong to you [as God’s Temple, God’s Spirit dwelling in you], and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.
Words of Grace For Today
1 Corinthians 2:18 reads: Do not deceive yourselves. If you think that you are wise in this age, you should become fools so that you may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.
Blessed to have dominion over every living thing we humans have thoroughly deceived ourselves as if we owned and could do with the creatures and creation what we pleased, even if that meant ruining earth as a habitable planet for other species and even ourselves.
Everything is from God.
We are all God’s.
God’s Spirit lives in us.
We are blessed to be blessings to others, not to wreak havoc on others and the rest of creation.
Our dominion over anything is always as stewards, and stewards for a God that created everything, declared it GOOD!, and loves creation and all creatures in it.
It’s all about reality.
First and ultimate always is we are God’s.
We are not some other human’s possession or work.
We are not independent beings.
We are ALL in this together, as Covid 19 has taught us.
While we are not in the same boat, some are in a few people in each luxury yacht and some are bailing to save everyone in their overloaded leaky dinghies, and some are hanging on to flotsam for dear life.
God gives us dominion in order that everyone can live even through a pandemic (when the circumstances of life for each and all become more obvious) in a save boat.
We have lots to do, and always it is futile to proceed as if we were anything less or more or other than God’s stewards.
I hereby command you: Be strong and courageous; do not be frightened or dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.
2 Timothy 1:7
For God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.
Words of Grace For Today
If we try and try and strive and focus and discipline ourselves and practice then can we be strong and courageous, not frightened or dismayed? Can we learn with practice and discipline to not be cowards but emanate a spirit of power, love and self-discipline?
No.
We cannot pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and be anything better. Life is disappointing that way.
Doch, if we realize that God has already made us saints and there is nothing better, then leaning on God’s Grace instead of our own abilities (sinning boldly as Luther put it – which is not to just be great sinners, it is to serve God and know that doing so we will inevitably sin … and God will forgive, redeem, renew and guide us as saints) — then leaning on God’s Grace instead of our own abilities we can be (by God’s grace and only as God empowers us) strong and courageous. God’s Spirit of power, love and self-sacrifice and self-discipline will flow from God to us and over us, through us, and over all the people we interact with and more.
We are not alone; God is with us wherever we go, on that we can rely for everything in our lives. We work as diligently and consistently as we can, trusting that God will guide us. We spend time in prayer asking, praising, and … listening for God’s guidance that comes in the most mundane and surprising ways.
We are not alone; God is with us wherever we go, so that we are by God’s power, bold, courageous, strong, and remarkable saints.
There is nothing better we can strive to be or to improve ourselves in relationship to God’s love for us. What we can do is resist the temptation to not be what God has made us to be: saints … hardworking saints.
Trust God’s Grace. Love all people. God will show us the way forward.
It’s never boring, this life of discipleship, and never quite as we expect it to be; that’s being a God-made saint.
