‘So perish all your enemies, O Lord! But may your friends be like the sun as it rises in its might.’ And the land had rest for forty years.
John 17:22
The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one.
Words of Grace For Today
God creates.
God creates order for all of creation … and for us.
Peace and rest come only when God’s order prevails.
From a very limited human perspective it may seem that when one’s enemies perish and one’s friends rise like the sun with might, then God’s good order prevails. Thus the passage that when one’s enemies have perished and when the sun rises on one’s friends the land can rest for as long as it takes … for forty years.
Reality is different: God’s will does not eliminate enemies by making them perish. God’s will eliminates enemies by converting them to friends. And that is the key to celebrating God’s love for us, to know that God does not wish us ill. God does everything to offer us the greatest thing, God adopts us as children even when we are yet still God’s enemies.
It is everything that God wishes us well. God breathes the essence and the best of life into us, and through us to the rest of all people and all creation.
It is God’s unconditional love for us that drives us to answer God’s call to follow Jesus. Just as in this pandemic we really do not know what will come next, so we know not where Jesus will ask us to follow. We do know from his ministry that Jesus does not overthrow governments, neither does Jesus take us into retreat from the world. Jesus takes us out into the world to meet people with diseases to heal them, with demons to free them, and with doubts to reassure them of God’s good will to all of creation.
It is for us no more a tried and true path that Jesus (also during this pandemic) calls us to follow him on than it was for the fishermen near Capernaum. The path we tread, though full of challenges, is an exciting life. It is life as we were created and redeemed to live.
For you have delivered my soul from death, and my feet from falling, so that I may walk before God in the light of life.
Acts 12:7
Suddenly an angel of the Lord appeared and a light shone in the cell. He tapped Peter on the side and woke him, saying, ‘Get up quickly.’ And the chains fell off his wrists.
Words of Grace For Today
If we think … or rather, when we think that we are not doomed, doomed to die for our sins … When we think that we are not doomed to die in chains for crimes we did not commit, as a result of other’s sins … When we think we can somehow escape from the terrible injustice that sin throughout the world causes, our sin and others’ sins …
… Then …
Then there is really no hope for us, not at all.
When we recognize, first, that we get what we deserve, total annihilation; and second, if that does not get us, then we get what others deserve but choose that we suffer for them which destroys us, just perhaps more slowly and unjustly … then we know that we NEED to be delivered … and only God can save us.
In either case when God rescues us from our sins and from others’ sins of destroying us, then …
Well … then it really is like an angel tapping us on the shoulder and telling us to get up, our chains fall free, and we can walk out into the world.
Then we can sing with the Psalmist: We praise you Lord God, Creator, Redeemer, Advocate for you have delivered our souls from death, and our feet from falling, so that we may walk before God in the light of life.
It is no small thing to walk in the light of life before God. First to walk … that is no small feat when one remembers how close we just were to death. Second to walk before God … for it is in submission that we bow, kneel, and remain still before such as God the creator of the universe. Only very few people have ever seen God’s face and not been annihilated, have survived to walk anywhere. So to walk before God, that is a wonder and great miracle. Third to walk before God in the light of life, for that is to live, and not just survive or get by or put in our time or endure … this is to live in God’s light of life! This is to live so abundantly that God’s light shines everywhere around us, into us, and through us to the world around.
We, who were so close to death, now live to the fullest extent possible for a human. This is an extraordinary blessing from God that we certainly cannot claim to deserve.
This gives us reason to hope again hope, no matter the challenges that face us and threaten to undo us, no matter how destructive Covid 19 is or any other virus or disease or violence or injustice or anything at all, at all … no matter what comes our way, we still trust God walks with us and in God’s time all justice and truth will prevail, all joy shall return to the earth and all it’s inhabitants, and blessings will flow freely through us to all people. That will be the Day of the Lord, and for this day we patiently wait, providing to all we can everything we can so that God’s blessings may flow through us saints already in these days.
Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord rescues them from them all.
2 Corinthians 1:5
For just as the sufferings of Christ are abundant for us, so also our consolation is abundant through Christ.
Words of Grace For Today
For God’s people there are abundant sufferings matched by abundant consolations; the righteous suffer many afflictions and the Lord saves us from all the afflictions.
Covid 19 is not the only source of suffering for so many people this year.
Even before Covid 19 there were all sorts of sources for suffering that disrupted lives, ruined lives, falsely jailed innocent people, disappeared people, and even killed people.
For every suffering that we have known, God provides us a consolation. Therefore we can hope that even in our time God’s desire for all people will be realized. God’s desire is that all people will come to know God’s Grace and Justice (as Martin Luther King Jr called it: a double victory). For even people who work terribly against God, God wishes (and with a wish makes it to be so) that they know life as blessed by God and enjoy the benefits, challenges, sufferings and consolations that God provides to each and every saint.
We remain sinners and we are also God-made saints, completely, wholly and simultaneously.
Afflictions from within ourselves and outside ourselves, and to match each affliction we receive consolations.
…
Why then do we continue to suffer, day after day, year after year, and decade after decade?
Our time is simply not God’s time. We are so blessed to enjoy God’s blessings … and we remain alive in this world, still broken humans in a broken world, able though to share God’s blessings with all people.
Ours is not to ask when God will convert our enemies and persecutors into saints. Ours is to live lives as God’s saints, able to know God’s Light and Love because we are so broken, and able to bring God’s Light and Love to bear on life for so many people … as we wait for God’s desire to be fulfilled in our time.
Can mortals make for themselves gods? Such are no gods!
1 John 5:20
We know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding so that we may know him who is true; and we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life.
Words of Grace For Today
We all need clean air, clean fresh water, nourishing food, adequate clothing, sufficient shelter, meaningful labour, and the ability to love and to be loved.
At our core we strive to provide these necessities for ourselves and those for whom we are responsible. For some this striving (their own or others) results in great comfort, luxury, wealth and power. Still those who enjoy these exorbitant benefits strive for yet more. So it is with this in-born striving of us humans.
All of us get lost in this ‘dream of success;’ those who enjoy so much more than the requirements of life, and strive for yet more, AND the rest of us who can dream that such exorbitant comfort, luxury, wealth and power may one day be ours … we all get lost.
Lost we look for orientation and create ‘gods’ who can provide meaning, order, and verification that we are RIGHT in having or dreaming for such extreme privilege while others die for lack of the basics for life. The ‘gods’ can be called ‘gods’, or they can look like a sport, or a business goal, or a way of being ‘better’ than others, of succeeding at something other than serving God’s Grace to all people.
These ‘gods’ are not real. I call them godlets; we try to foist onto something quite finite the infinite of the divine. It does not work. Instead our minds, hearts and strength are perverted, twisted, and ultimately destroyed.
We are fortunate. We have the story of Jesus and God’s Love expressed in his life, ministry, death, and resurrection. This is the truth of life. This is an absolute truth, unchanging and eternal. This is the source of all that is life, of all that holds life together for individual persons and for communities.
Because we have received the Truth of God’s love and grace for all creation, then we can enjoy the necessities of life as those things that God calls us to share with all other people, exorbitantly …
as God has shared them with us,
even if we are homeless, poor, persecuted, and our death is sought by our enemies.
Compared to God’s work for us and all people, our enemies’ threats to us are nothing.
Everyday Marvellous Things Make Our Lives Livable.
We Rarely Notice Miracles.
Miracles, Everywhere All the Time!
Genesis 18:14
Is anything too wonderful for the Lord? At the set time I will return to you, in due season, and Sarah shall have a son.’
Luke 17:5
The apostles said to the Lord, ‘Increase our faith!’
Words of Grace For Today
If one takes an honest look at the world, sunk deep in trying to respond to Covid-19 and all it’s variants overwhelming the best minds and health care systems, where in Tanzania there are no more cases just because the President says he prayed and God delivered them all – though cases just like Covid 19 keep showing up in overwhelming numbers in the hospitals – and corrupt leaders use the cover of Covid 19 to do in all sorts of justice with destructive injustice –
Yes, if one takes an honest look at the world, we need a miracle to deliver us.
If one takes an honest look at one’s own self and family, the view is likely not that much better, and we need a miracle there, too.
We need miracles everywhere in our lives!
Vaccines were developed in less than a year with an efficacy far above past vaccines, nearly 95%! That’s a great miracle. Not just once but in different countries by many different scientific teams developing multiple vaccines!
So what do leaders do to cover their failures to safe guard their people: They complain that production facilities have to be redeveloped, to ramp up a much larger production than original capacity provided for … which means delivery schedules in the short term are reduced.
Ahh, we have fewer vials, of the miracles, when if there were no miracles we’d be waiting months if not years for even the first vials.
We need another miracle: the miracle of gratitude which grows out of strong faith. So we cry: Lord, increase our faith!
If God can bring a son to barren, post-menapause Sarah and ‘as good as dead’ Abraham, surely God can bring about a few more miracles for our time … to save us all.
Our response is to start with an open and honest take on the world around us and our own part in it.
God needs us saints to share the old, old story of Jesus and his love; that’s our response to wonders of wonders, that God makes us saints.
The Holy Spirit guides us to work in this world to bring God’s Grace and Justice to bear on all circumstances, for all people, so that all people will know how blessed we all are together.
(including the miracles of such vaccines as never before possible?)
OR
Complaining and demanding yet more miracles
amid a pandemic?
Psalm 145:10
All your works shall give thanks to you, O Lord, and all your faithful shall bless you.
Hebrews 6:7
[We can be like] ground that drinks up the rain falling on it repeatedly, and that produces a crop useful to those for whom it is cultivated [for this is to receive] a blessing from God.
Words of Grace For Today
Is it gratitude that defines us?
Are we like ground, thirsting and tilled and producing nourishment for many?
Who is it that we are this day?
The Morning After, the morning of redemption:
So what does this morning offer to us, to you, to me?
The light shines bright in the mild air across the cold undisturbed curves of snow marking the goodness of winter this day, if even for too short a time.
Where does the light shine in you, in me, in us?
…
Coming out of the city yesterday, on that wretched 1 mile stretch of gravel that the city has never paved like the roads next to it and the MD roads out into the country (who is being disfavoured with this anomaly?) I was peddling nicely along, tired and warming up for the hours it would take to get ‘home’. The flashlight on the front provided a good beam, strobing to save power, and the snow had collected in strips or rather been run off in strips down the road. It was bumpy, washboard … a real pain in the butt and jolted my whole tired body. I kept seeking out a smoother path, finally even on the side just outside the last clear strip. I did not make it to the snow. Instead turning the wheel demonstrated that that ‘cleared’ strip was not just cleared, it was run over and over and over until it was a shiny slick ice way. The front wheel lost all grip on the ice as I turned to the right. It slid left, the bike handle bars, seat and packs on the back rack went right, gravity took hold and I was on my back and right buttocks before the goose could crap or squawk. My back did not like it a bit. Fortunately I’d just taken food with a Tordol to ensure my back did not give me problems and from experience it lessons the arthritis pain on the trip on the bike there and back.
I lay there a bit, lights red and brilliant white strobing in the dark near the ground, then rolled over to test if I were still functionally one piece if not at peace with the cursed universe. The left doubled mittens came off to dust off the snow, light and sticking everywhere.
I stood, more dusting off as a car whisked by without stopping to inquire about the strobes reflecting off the ice and snow.
Then, with miles to go, I pulled up the bike, turned each wheel and the pedals each a turn to ensure they were not damaged, and set off walking towards the west, smoke plumes far to the north and west, wheeling the bike back and forth between the snow and ice strips trying to find sure footing for myself and for the wheels. Most of a mile later, on the pavement I tested the grip. It seemed sure enough. So with the cabins ahead to the right I mounted the ‘old steed’ and powered by my tired legs set off on the all too familiar route of gradual rises that require walking and the grades where I can wheel free, forward and down just a bit. At the creek, steeper down I was more than wary, and stifled the gravity pull, more for the oncoming traffic that filled the lane ahead than for myself – for I was too tired to remember I ought not want to put cheek or anything else to the ground at great speed. Fortune was the first time I was barely moving, still in first gear, trying to find a path forward through the rough ground below.
Onward the night went, progressively faster and slower, approaching me and passing me by at varying speeds, with smells of leaking gas and oil, the plumes changing direction and the night sky moving against the ground lights, the airport strobe, and the reflections off the smoke plumes so far distant, the nearest just beyond my destination of warmth, shelter … All the while knowing the toughest mile is always the last pulling the bike through the snow after the road ends when I am left to more pedestrian advances through the snow toward … rest.
This morning …
After a late night of letting my overheated muscles cool to normal and my mind to find it’s rest, I woke twice to stoke in the dark, and then once again as the dawn barely started to push the dark west, each time not wanting to rise, but it needed be. Until finally I woke to bright light beyond the coverings, and slowly pulled the cobwebs back with more light and then a walk outside, and on to the late morning routine of Eucharistie und Frühstück, thankful for the fire that provides boiling water for coffee, and writing.
A morning of redemption from the monotony through yesterday’s exercise and today’s recovery.
So I ask again, mostly of you:
So what does this morning offer to us, to you, to me?
The light shines bright in the mild air across the cold undisturbed curves of snow marking the goodness of winter this day, if even for too short a time.
Where does the light shine in you, in me, in us?
Are we filled with praise and gratitude for all God’s generous gifts to us all?
Do we drink in those gifts, and give back to those most in need, the benefits of our being so blessed?
We are as fragile as grass in the deep freeze of winter snows.
And more precious than platinum to God.
Genesis 32:11
Deliver me, please, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau, for I am afraid of him; he may come and kill us all, the mothers with the children.
Luke 19:9
Then Jesus said to him, ‘Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham.’
Words of Grace For Today
Jacob, the trickster, who stole the birthright and inheritance from his brother, cries to God. Jacob is rightfully afraid that his brother has every right to respond and not kindly. That he will kill everyone in Jacob’s family is a possibility.
So Jacob cries for God to deliver him from his rightful punishment.
If any of us think we are in a different situation before God, we are real fools. Think again.
No one is righteous before God. All of us deserve punishment for our sins. All of us ought to humbly cry to God for deliverance, deliverance from our enemies that we do not deserve.
…
God responds to Jacob’s cry.
God responds to our cries.
God responds, graciously, mercifully, lovingly forgiving us and delivering us … maybe not from our enemies, but from the Devil and from us losing our souls (heart, mind, body in one whole big loss of our lives).
For we too, by faith in God’s Son, Jesus the Christ, so marked with this faith as a gift given to us freely by God, are also counted among the children of Abraham, God’s own people.
Humble pie.
Desperate pleas!
Gracious Deliverance!
We are in this together: this life, this pandemic, these challenges, … all of it.
God’s creation is a wonderful place to live and share life abundant with others.
‘Why do you complain against me? You have all rebelled against me,’ says the Lord.
Romans 3:23-24
Since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.
Words of Grace For Today
The all seniors cross country foot race was held yesterday in the land of the faithful.
One young woman, really a girl still and the star runner among the girls, decided the night before, that she would meet with her friends for supper, to celebrate that this year for the first time the senior girls would run along with the boys.
It was a fine celebration, with duck, wine, and chocolates, and it went on and on for the victory of being able to run against the boys was a long two year battle. The later it got, the harder they celebrated, until it was midnight, then 1:00, then 2:00 when the bar, long since closed, booted them out into the taxis called for the girls.
The star male runner kept to his pre-race routine. He had a solid supper, with plenty milk and fruit juice to drink. He went to bed at his normal 10 pm, woke up at 7:00, and did a short 1 km jog to warm up before a good breakfast. He was confident he was ready when he got a ride to the race grounds. He had received a call from his friend who had test-run the race course as soon as it was set at 8:00 to get the details of what it looked like.
The star girl runner woke at 8:10 with a headache and queasy stomach. She ate a full breakfast, with lots of coffee. She arrived at the race grounds looking a bit worse for wear but not anything like she looked at 8:10.
There were a number of sprints, and shorter races held first, so it was 12:30 before a lunch break was called. The girl ate a light, nutritious penitent lunch with plenty of juice. The boy grabbed french fries and a burger with a coke. By 1:30 there were two more shorter races to be run before the main 5K cross-country race. The girls in each race had held their own, winning one and placing second in a few more. Predictably the boys were stronger and faster.
At 1:40 there was one more race. The star boy ran to the wood with his nervous stomach and emptied the fries, burger and coke into the bush. That was common. Then, so confident of himself, he forgot to eat the sugar cubes he normally ate for his empty stomach to give him energy. The star girl, penitent to the core, visited the washroom and relieved herself of the vestiges of last night’s revelry.
Then their race was called. They lined up. Set their marks. At the gun they were off.
They started, almost slow compared to the other races, but fast for this long distance. The girl drafted off the boy as they entered the woods where the trail wound up and down and around the river valley before coming back into view for the last half kilometre to the finish line.
In the woods something happened that had never happened before ….
When the runners appeared the star runners where shoulder to shoulder. Not just next to each other, but with an arm around the other racer, they struggled to run. The pack came into view easily behind them, and though they could have passed the two, they stayed in formation behind them. It was a sight to see.
As they came closer it became obvious that the girl supported the boy with his arm around her shoulder. He was limping badly on his left leg, barely touching his right foot to the ground.
So it was they came in tied for first place across the finish line, with the other five boys and one girl runners in formation close behind them, tied for third.
… In the woods something happened that had never happened before to the boy in a race as the various racer’s recounted afterwards. His right ankle turned, he fell, rolled and lay in pain. The girl, just 2 strides behind him – some other racers say he was toying with her and was not looking ahead – stopped to help him up. He was ready to quit, his sure victory lost. But she kindly reminded him he was a racer not a quitter. She wrapped his arm over her shoulders, grabbed him by the waist and they hobbled on. The other racers, a few at a time coming upon them, at first stayed in the order they arrived, but when the path entered the last half kilometre they joined arm in arm in a line behind the two, who had developed a faster pace.
…
In the ‘race’ of life, if we think we are headed for the finish on our own, ready to win the glory of God, we are sorely deluded. Not a single one of us is pure enough for that.
It is only the Grace of God that picks us up (usually borne by another human who God’s Grace has saved) and carries us, each year, each day, each minute towards the glory of God promised to us at our baptisms. Not a single one of us can finish the ‘race’ on our own. Only by Grace do we move forward at all, and then only humbly with others’ aide.
…
The victory party for that race was more subdued by far than the girls’ party of the night before, though it spread across the whole community, as people heard what Grace and the other racers had done that day … for both the girls and the boys … and the whole community.
…
We are in this together, and only together by Grace can we make it through life, yet alone the pandemic … or anything else life and evil throw at us.
You have made me stride freely, and my feet do not slip.
2 Corinthians 3:17
Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.
Words of Grace For Today
Faced with the impossible challenge of facing war against Hitler, Churchill famously said: We have nothing to fear other than fear itself.
Taking office in 1933 FDR faced the great depression and famously said: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
This phrase as best researched seems to have originated with Montaigne in the sixteenth century, was probably picked up from Montaigne by Francis Bacon in the seventeenth, and then became a common proverb or axiom in later writers.
Over and over again in scripture as angels, leaders of God’s people, and Jesus himself greet people in great distress they say Fear not! For the Lord is with you! Or words similar.
Fear overwhelms our normal ability to deal reasonably with dangerous or challenging situations. We know that fear triggers a response generated in the brain below the cerebral cortex, which controls language and reason. Of course if we really are under attack in an imminent life and death situation, sitting and contemplating what is happening could be the end of us, so quicker responses, choosing between freeze, fight, or flight, are made by a faster area of our brain closer to the rest of our body.
Most of life is not helped by these responses, and in fact as a whole society, when we reduce our choices to these we end up with mass panic, if not in outright rioting mobs, then in masses of people unable to function and contribute to a societal solution, instead getting in the way of a solution and multiplying the problems faced.
God provides us, in the Good News that Jesus has redeemed us with Grace, not according to our works, a way of living that assures us: no matter what we face, God is with us. That reassurance, renewed in us by God’s Word each day gives us freedom from fear and all it’s causes, which are more than enough in this world to sink any reasonable person.
We, by Grace, are able to stride freely into each day, assured that this is the day of our Lord, God’s time, God’s creation, and God’s Spirit that accompanies us … giving us choices to respond to all sorts of evil with the same Grace that God gives to us.
We offer to others, by our very presence, the same Grace God exercises in and for us.
Calm reassurance of God’s Love for all creation in the face of Evil is God’s way of defeating Evil at every turn.
What a life, an abundant life, we get to live. God gives this life to us as pure gift! And we get to multiply it by giving it as gift to others!
It’s simple math: miracles of Grace beget miracles by God’s infinite factor of Love.
We have nothing to fear, but fear (Evil’s greatest presence) itself, and God has defeated fear and all Evil’s ways, even death!
The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn.
Matthew 5:4
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Words of Grace For Today
The spirit of the Lord God is upon me …
This is the best of all possibilities for us, that the Spirit of the Lord God be upon us.
This is not something for us, ourselves. This is for …
… the oppressed, the broken-hearted, the captives, the prisoners, and those who mourn.
Actually that is a partial list that stands in for those who need us, those who desperately need someone to give them aide, freedom, and/or hope. God sends us to bring God’s blessings to those whom God loves and wishes that, despite all that would rob life from them, they would have life and have it abundantly.
God sends us.
God sends us and blesses us to be able to comfort those who mourn, to proclaim good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners. That this is the day of the Lord.
Wonders and wonders.
The spirit of the Lord God is upon us … the Lord has anointed us
Nothing can be more marvellous for us.
The sun rises, the sun sets.
We can see creation falling apart all around us: the effects of sin and evil, corruption and deceit, and angst and despair.
OR
We can see the wonders of God acting all around us, bringing hope, comfort, liberty, release, and God’s time in all we encounter.
