Whether we see others as ‘weeds’ in our lawn of life
God sees us each as precious and
God shines Light on each of us,
the light of love and life.
Isaiah 56:7
These I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer; their burnt-offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.
Colossians 3:11
In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!
Words of Grace For Today
We humans keep building walls, us and them.
God keeps telling us and showing us that God is for all people, without any us or them.
Christ is all and in all … and for all peoples!
…
Christ is even for me, and for you, sinners though we be, God has claimed us a God’s children and made us saints, able to share God’s light with all people …
without any ‘us’ or ‘them’
or
walls
or
judgments
or
condemnations,
…
…
just
Grace for all.
It’s a wonderful dance of love, this life is (at least as God intends for us, and makes possible for us to live it.)
Ready or not here it comes, one day at a time, one hour at a time, one minute at a time … one decision at a time.
Set a place for Elijah, keep an eye for the poor at your gate, invite in the homeless …
This is God’s day, and out day to give everything back to God, one decision in one minute at a time.
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.
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.
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!
As God mixes us bad people in with creation and comes up with Grace and Wonders!
Psalm 71:16
I will come praising the mighty deeds of the Lord God, I will praise your righteousness, yours alone.
Ephesians 2:10
We are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.
Words of Grace For Today
It’s simple: God created us to do good works.
We sign God’s praises for God’s righteousness, God’s alone.
It’s all way too simple said this way and expounding on just these words will leave out the truth about God all together.
We will set ourselves up to have to praise God, and God alone. We will set ourselves us to do what we are created to do: to do good works. We will fail, and many of us will lie to ourselves and others in order to pretend we are not failing … so great is the cognitive dissonance when we cannot do the good deeds we think we are created to do.
Not that we should give up on doing good works and praising God alone.
On our own we can never do either.
How is life then ever at all good enough with us for God to even pay us any attention?
Simple in a word, and as complicated as the whole universe held together at the subatomic level, yet vulnerable to even the smallest parasites and viruses!
Grace is that Word. God acts first to forgive and renew us. Then, guided by the Holy Spirit (in spite of our wishes and understandings that would lead us astray) we are able by Grace to do good deeds.
Thanks be to God, for the greatest miracle is that God chooses to save us, again and again.
We start each day with prayers. We end each day with thanks.
All day long we are caught (if we stop to notice at all) by the wondrous miracles God does to forgives us and renew us … we are caught up on God’s Kingdom, and we share it, imperfect and ungraceful as we are, with others … who are also imperfect (needing forgiveness) and ungraceful as the like us bungle through life, as if we were wild elephants in a china shop.
Crash, Bang, Crash.
Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle
We keep breaking God’s heart of steadfast love. And God keeps on forgiving us and renewing us.
Now that is a simple word and as complicated as moving to live in the mountains and ensuring we can enjoy both sunrise and sunset; The way the world works, we are privileged if we can have either one or the other … but both, and new life? That’s a miracle for which we can give God thanks and praise each day.
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.
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.
Great is our Lord, and abundant in power; his understanding is beyond measure.
Mark 10:27
Jesus looked at them and said, ‘For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.’
Words of Grace For Today
Tina stood outside her camper, breathing in the sunset air with light pounding against the still lake waters. How had it come to this? Such beauty, wonders, and peace after a decade of Gaslighting?
She had not earned it, nor felt any claim to it, though her attachment to the land and waters ran through her bones deeper than it had a right to.
For mortals this would be impossible to imagine; but even this is not impossible for God.
For years what troubled her is that people could do what they had done: lied, gaslit, scapegoated, made false reports to the police, blatantly lie in court (even police officers), and then the lies the judges told in order to convict her, send her to prison. How could people choose to do such things? How could people think they would get away with it, and then it seemed they got away with it.
She had always known she had not committed the crimes, or done the terrible things reported and rumoured about her around town. The impact of being declared a criminal though ran deep and she questioned what she had done wrong to ‘earn’ this kind of treatment, even if people were so evil, corrupt and cruel to do to her and say about her the things they had.
It took years of loneliness, despair, prayer, hope, and many repeat acts of people lying about her, pushing her back down as she tried to gain a voice. That was it for the first few years, silenced about the false police reports and false charges. Then silenced about the lies told to the courts. Silenced by unjust and cruel judges. Everyone was so afraid of the truth, now that the ‘game was afoot’ to scapegoat her for evil they had previously, otherwise done, and which they still continued to do.
It took years of coming to understand that the evil done to her had very little if anything to do with her at all. All those years of confusion, pain, loneliness, silence, and lost hopes. Slowly, ever so slowly she came to understand how very little it had to do with her and how terrible the things were that she had learned about, the lies and games that people played creating the lies, the horrendous perversions that people participated in and covered up, with influence, money, and raw force.
Arnold had invited, begged, persistently courted and pursued her. In court he’d said she was the one who had pursued him, for his money, for his children, for his home. All of that was lies. He had pursued her for the good company she was, for her great way with children, and, after he’d seduced her, for the sex. He made out that he was charmed, needy, and fulfilled by her. But he really knew nothing about love at all. He begged her to marry him and not just have an affair. She agreed and he promised they would marry when she was divorced. And when she was divorced he said they didn’t need to get married, that it would be just like they were married.
On it went, a marvellous, unbelievable six months of being in love, with the isolation from friends, the constant critique of little things mostly of things he did and blamed her for, the silence about her past, and all the stories about how perfect his first wife was. All that even after he confided to her that he had driven her to kill herself when her two life insurance policies overlapped and both paid out handsomely making him a multimillionaire in months. She was perfect in every way, and when she made a wrong decision he made sure she changed her mind and made the right one, especially the last decision to end her life.
He went to work on Tina right away, and got her on a drug that caused her to be suicidal, and he drove her hard, hard, hard until one day with half a bottle of sleeping pills and a bottle of alcohol Tina was ready to find her freedom from Arnold’s abuse.
How had it come to this?
How had that come to sitting by a lake breathing in the sunset with light pounding against the still lake waters. Such beauty, wonders, and peace after a decade of abuse, Gaslighting, and one suicide that failed only because the cream in the Irish Cream slowed the absorption of the sleeping medication – that took three days to work it’s way out of her system?
How had it come to this after that?
Great is our Lord, and abundant in power; God’s understanding is beyond measure.
So many times Tina had resigned her to God’s care and understanding of what was being done to her, for it made no sense at all, not at all, at all!
It took years but it had come to this, by the lake.
Tina still did not understand, though she agreed, For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.
…
Where are you today? How did you get there?
What unbelievable challenges blocked your path so many times in so many ways?
How has God shown you, that for God all things are possible?
Shout aloud and sing for joy, O royal Zion, for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.
Luke 19:37-38
As he was now approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen, saying, ‘Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!’
Words of Grace For Today
July 1, 2021 approaches and the end of all (almost all) health orders providing restrictions because of Covid 19 will come with it, in Alberta. Unless or until the Delta or some other variant changes everything, again.
Still people are hungry for release, for freedom, for the lack of order that can be filled with their chaos, for ‘life like it used to be’ but really never was – which is always a stupid person’s excuse to want things so simple that dictators can easily take over. There will be a party of all parties, with instances duplicated all over the province, in kitchens, around dining room tables, in halls and in door conference spaces, in tourist destinations and next to the lakes, and in the bush … well that party has already started here, down the way, with fireworks and drinking, smoking and loud music and screaming into all hours of the night. Why not!?! It’s freedom, Right!?
Everyone loves a good excuse to have a party, well almost everyone, or truth be told everyone does except for the introverts (which is estimated to be somewhere between 15% and 50% of everyone).
Jesus enters Jerusalem. He is known to speak with authority and that the authorities are threatened by him. He is the common people’s hope for change. Even though he rides on a foal of a donkey, people shout and throw palms and lay down their garments for his path into the city. Which is a great excuse for a party … and for the authorities it is a great excuse to be rid of him once and for all.
God enters our days, usually quite quietly, walking with us, inspiring us to be the saints forgiven by God that God has made us to be. We make no fanfare.
Jesus is heralded as King with great fanfare, noise, and pomp. Yet he is not the people’s king to free them from foreign dictators. He is King of the universe, and King of our hearts, minds and breath … and of out lives if we continually accept that we need forgiveness, Christ forgives us, and we can live free from sin and the free from the power of the Evil One.
Each morning we have more reason to celebrate, to shout for joy, to bring on a party, than even when Jesus enters Jerusalem.
Yet it is quiet. The sun shines bright and hot on the cool of the morning, so warm already even the song birds are done until evening. The shadows are long from the northeast, the shade provides a momentary cool. God has been here even before it became light and we are quiet, the meadows and woods and lake are quiet. The partiers from last night are now quieted.
There is no need to make loud noises, for this is common, everyday, every place: God is long since been with us.
We pray that God will be with us on 1 July and for months beyond, for Covid 19 is here to stay with us so we pray that the vaccines will stay effective, that the whole world will be vaccination soon, and that we will learn to be the opposite of covidiots – covid-smarts, and all-life-smarts, knowing and trusting God’s Grace as our sole breath and life.
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.
