Now when these signs meet you, do whatever you see fit to do, for God is with you.
2 Timothy 2:7
Think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in all things.
Words of Grace For Today
Happy Mother’s Day, to the mothers in my life (and in yours.)
How can we meet the expectations that we and others have for how we honour our mothers on this day … when we cannot go see them, give them flowers, ….
There are telephones, and the internet, thankfully.
How can we hug the precious mother who gave us life?
and hopefully astounding love?
In these times this is not possible, or legal, or even advisable … since even if we are asymptomatic we could be contagious and hugging our mothers could share more than we wanted to. We could share that nasty virus that is likely much more dangerous for our mother than for us.
So let words and gestures abound.
Let humour abound.
Let our imaginations abound.
Like the care facility that made a mock up of Tim’s to allow the residents a bit of normalcy: an opportunity to place and receive an order for coffee and Timbits.
Or the children who showed up outside their grandmother’s care-home window, called her to tell her to look out the window, and they danced in a ring, well a sort-of-ring, that turned out to be the shape of a heart! before they rolled all over the ground before standing up in a line to take their bows.
Whatever is required, when we live immersed in God’s Word day in and day out, no matter the challenge that we face, God will be with us as we find our way forward.
Courage, Faith, Love and Hope, all this God provides aplenty for us.
Surely the Lord your God has blessed you in all your undertakings; he knows your going through this great wilderness.
1 Corinthians 4:2
Moreover, it is required of stewards that they should be found trustworthy.
Words of Grace For Today
God has blessed us greatly. This wilderness that we are all going through called Covid 19 pandemic affects us all differently, but we humans are ALL in this together, like it or not!
God is with us!
And
We are stewards of so much. Will we be found trustworthy as stewards who share what is given into our charge as our Creator intended we would?
Like at no other time, the whole world needs us to be faithful, active and proactive!
CBC news reported yesterday that lawsuits and hate speech abound in response to Covid 19.
Lawsuits are explained that we humans lash out at others to blame them when we are hurt, to make someone else accountable.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said the COVID-19 pandemic keeps unleashing “a tsunami of hate and xenophobia, scapegoating and scaremongering” …. [It] is fast becoming a human rights crisis.”
Who are the targets of the hate speech?
Jews, Muslims, migrants, refugees, older persons, journalists, whistleblowers, health professional, aid workers and human rights defenders!
Guterres called on political leaders to show solidarity with all people and on educational institutions to focus on “digital literacy” at a time when “extremists are seeking to prey on captive and potentially despairing audiences.” He called on the media, especially social media, to “remove racist, misogynist and other harmful content,” on civil society to strengthen outreach to vulnerable people and on religious figures to serve as “models of mutual respect.”
“And I ask everyone, everywhere, to stand up against hate, treat each other with dignity and take every opportunity to spread kindness,” Guterres said.
There is not one person in Canada who cannot do something each day to stand up against hate, treat each other with dignity and take every opportunity to spread kindness!
I’m not one to give orders, but here is the one that counts the most:
Get to it!
Every morning remind ourselves, this is what the world needs most. God has given us abundantly, now use everything we are and have to end hate, treat everyone with dignity, and spread kindness.
no matter the challenges or frustrations of this day
Psalms 119:77
Let your mercy come to me, that I may live; for your law is my delight.
Mark 1:30-31
Now Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once. He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.
Words of Grace For Today
Since forever people have called upon God, and with various degrees of real expectation on a scale from demanded to hoped that God would respond and save them.
On the demand end of that scale of calling upon God for deliverance, the Psalm seems to reflect the old and very common perversion of faith that says: because I have done X then God must do Y for me.
It is about trying to control the uncontrollable things about life. It is trying to raise oneself above the reality of life to become a little godlet: ‘Look at me! I am so X, that I can control what happens to me, to you, in the universe, … why I even can control what God does!’
The hubris of it is astounding, or it would be, if it were not so common … to every human to some degree. After all life is cruel, short and brutish, right?
As Jesus does for Simon’s mother-in-law, why would we not want Jesus to be with us today, walking in to our elders’ sick rooms, struck with Covid 19 as they are, needing ventilators to stay alive and dialysis to cleanse the poisons from their blood?
It’s a bit harder to make this plea for Jesus’ healing with a sense of being able to demand intervention to save a life.
How are we to call upon God?
First off, if we are going to error about communication, then the best one to do this to is God. Save great exercise of kindness and politeness for those we live with and among. The people in our lives need our kindness and politeness. God, on the other hand, already knows we can be less than kind, faithful, loving, and even decent. God is not hurt by our stupidity, if we really come pleading (or angrily demanding) to God.
The gracious reality of God is that God chooses to listen to us, no matter what. God responds, most often with a chuckle and a quiet, ‘no way!’ Or too often with a tear dropping steadily in pain as God dismays at our behaviour so lacking in gratitude as we mostly are, as God must simply say, ‘No, that’s not how life works. You are free. Freedom means suffering is part of life. I am here, suffering with you. Do not let your hearts be troubled.’
Grace abounds also, and sometimes God’s answer is YES! and our request for life, health, and faith are fulfilled. Likely God had it in the works already. Or someone stepped up to make things change, or life just developed that way anyway. Those times of desperate need answered with a YES are more common than we seem to remember.
So we pray today again: God save us! Save us from ourselves, from each other, from the works of the Devil in us all. Save us from destruction, pain, illness, and death. Save others. Do this because you, God, choose. Do this because it will give witness that you watch over your people. Do this for whatever reason, but please do this for us, today; if that is not too much to ask.
Few if any of us can pray, save us from this Covid 19 pandemic; because almost all of us have already suffered some loss because of it. We can pray, loudly, clearly and hopefully,
God deliver us, that we may live to give you the glory!
Today …
Today we can start giving God the glory: be thankful for everything we have.
Share with those who desperately need what we take for granted.
Laugh heartily at the good things, the humorous things that surround us each day.
Smile gently at those you meet; we are almost all struggling in some way, more so these days.
Catching Rays
Look up to see the Light
Life is colourful, and most coloured by our attitude. Life is beautiful.
You are a God ready to forgive, gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and you did not forsake them.
2 Timothy 2:13
If we are faithless, God remains faithful – for God cannot deny Godself.
Words of Grace For Today
God is often seen (as God is reflected often in Scripture) as a wrathful, judging, and destroying God … God who we need fear, obey, and worship.
Amidst this rough view of God, a reflection of our image of ourselves on to God, these words of God’s character repeat often in scripture:
God is ready to forgive, gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
These words are taken up into our liturgy. We repeat them Sunday after Sunday (perhaps not every Sunday if our congregation uses many of the liturgies available to keep our hearts and minds freshly engaged by the Word, also the Word in liturgies.) That is one of the benefits of liturgies moulded for centuries on scripture, repeated and repeated and repeated … the words are so familiar that we know them as our Good Shepherd’s voice for us!
This promise of God is … amazing!
It is filled with that amazing grace that saves wretches like us!
We all need forgiveness, from God and countless other people. We need God to be gracious and merciful to us, to be slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
As God is to us, God creates us, Jesus calls us, and the Holy Spirit equips and inspires us to be to all other people:
forgiving,
gracious and merciful,
slow to anger,
and abounding in steadfast love!
Even when we no longer have even a tiny trace of faith or hope or love or mercy or grace or forgiveness in us, (due to whatever Evil or stress, even Covid 19 and it’s side effects on us all) God is still faithful.
God is still faithful!
God remains always faithful to even the most terrible wretches, like us.
And be reflected by all water and life in Creation
Isaiah 42:16
I will turn the darkness before them into light, the rough places into level ground.
Luke 1:78-79
By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.
Words of Grace For Today
Darkness. Total, deep, profound darkness of the soul. No light at the end of the tunnel.
When we find ourselves there, to put it into cosmic terms, in a black hole that pulls everything around it into nothingness …
When we find ourselves there it seems that everything is lost, not only things that build a sense of continuity and security (like jobs, homes, family, church, and even the tool that enables one to create – a camera, a pencil, a computer, a canvas), not just life and all good life at that for us and for creation, but meaning, history, presence and future ….
When time and hope are lost into the void and emptiness that is left to us, then only memory of, or re-spoken promises made in the past, or that little light at the end of the vortex can save us from going totally bonkers.
Covid 19’s threat (the lock-down, our isolations, our ‘staying the blazes home’, our financial concerns, the risk to our and our loved ones’ health and lives), for most of us does not approach the vortex of a black hole where no light exists. For some of us it does.
Whether its a total black out, or a brown out, or we have already gone a bit bonkers so that it all looks like dark colours everywhere …
However this affects us,
We yearn for Light, if yearning is still possible.
God promises to turn darkness into light, rough places into level ground. The dawn from on high breaks in on us in darkness, in the shadow of death, and guides us in the way of peace.
That’s the promise that we can remember … if we can remember.
That’s the promise that we can re-speak for others … when they cannot remember, we can, and we can still speak.
That’s the promise that we need to re-speak, to proclaim with all the vivid colours of the rainbow splashing about …
because even if we do not notice them, there is someone onto whom those colours (carrying Light) will splash.
And they will be saved from the vortex of absolute darkness, by our generous, reckless, prodigal re-speaking a promise that created, redeemed, and guides this whole universe of creation to be able to seek peace.
Peace is not something we attain and hold on to.
Peace is a manner of being in this universe, when participated in brings us to reflect God’s intent for us, but which is lost as quickly as a candle is snuffed out by even a gentle breeze.
Peace be with you, also this day, whatever this day is for you.
Splash and be splashed by the Light and Colours of the rainbow, God’s rainbow of promise, faith, hope, love, grace, and life – abundant life.
God Created Wondrously and Created us in God’s own Image
Job 9:8 – 9
God alone stretched out the heavens and trampled the waves of the Sea; God made the Bear and Orion, the Pleiades and the chambers of the south.
Colossians 1:15-16
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him.
Words of Grace For Today
There are endless wonders visible to us in creation.
Covid 19 has throttled back our use of fossil fuels. Out of country flights are cancelled across the planet. In country travel is limited to essential movement only.
Gasoline sells for on average between 71.6 and 94.9 per litre. I bought gas for $.43 last week! The price I used to pay was as high as $1.20, and usually around $.95. Oil sold last week under $13 a barrel. It was as high as $113 in 2011 and from 2010 to 2019 averaged $72.5.
This virus has given us a reason to give creation a reprieve from our onslaught of carbon emissions. Areas that have had impossible air pollution over the past decades are showing air qualities the likes of which 40 year-olds have never seen there! That certainly is not the intent, but it’s likely a better reason for the global economic lock-down!
See https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/covid-19-air-pollution-1.5501810 for some astounding images of air pollution clearing.
The real connection is interesting. Air pollution taxes our immune systems, making us more vulnerable, also to viruses like the corona virus of Covid 19.
The wonders of creation in Canada are all around us, especially if you live outside the cities, near a real lake or near the mountains. Others cannot travel to enjoy this, but even in the cities there are parks where one can (still) walk by yourself or with your family, as long as one keeps physical distance from others.
The greatest marvel is that of all the wonders God created, God created us humans in God’s own image. We are not to try to be gods as if we were creators or controllers or destroyers of all creation. The later we’ve come close enough to accomplishing in this last century. This is the evil in us destroying all things around us, as we rationalize that we are doing what is necessary and good.
Humans are again and again capable of extra-ordinarily reflecting God’s Grace for each other, and for creation.
We notice these. Celebrate these. Share these. And we overflow with thanks and gratitude for the wonders of all creation, from sky to sea, to mountains, to the sinner/saints we see each day.
Let the redeemed of the Lord, … those he redeemed from trouble … thank the Lord for his steadfast love, for his wonderful works to humankind.
Luke 14:22-23
The slave said, “Sir, what you ordered has been done, and there is still room.” Then the master said to the slave, “Go out into the roads and lanes, and compel people to come in, so that my house may be filled.
Words of Grace For Today
How wonderful, awesome (the real meaning of awesome is: profound awe at the ‘out of this world’, divine presence encountered in the mundane),
How awesome it is to have these two verses side by side.
First we, the redeemed from trouble …
And OH how the trouble is that we’ve been in! Our enemies (if we’ve lived a life worth something we’ve made plenty of enemies) have done us in … or if they have not we’ve done them in. Either way, how we’ve treated our enemies, and/or how they have treated us is nothing to be proud of in the presence of God! No hiding, no lies, no messing the truth with spin. We’ve been in great trouble, most everyday a little bit. And in lives where we’ve stood for something honourable, then we’ve been in a lot of trouble at different times. The evil in humanity cannot stand someone being honourable. It puts a spotlight on the evil, the spotlight of Christ’s light of truth.
And when we’ve been in trouble, done in by our enemies, or worse that we’ve treated our enemies with anything less than the grace of God, God has paid a terrible price to redeem us!
So …
First we, the redeemed from trouble, thank the Lord …
Now that’s a wonderful response to God’s awesome intervention in the messes of trouble that we get into! We turn into vessels overflowing with gratitude, spilling it across our paths as we proceed through the day.
We leave a trail of awesome gratitude and witness to God’s great mercy and grace! That’s what we spill out into the world – even if we also spew out sin, evil and a deadly virus.
We overflow with thanks for all God has done, out of love. This is thanks not just for God’s acting for us, but God acting for all humanity! No one is left out of God’s Grace and Love!
Then in the second verse, we read how when Jesus puts on a feast of celebration, and there are empty seats …
Don’t we know empty seats in our churches today as we put on feasts of Christ’s Body and Blood!
When there are empty seats, Jesus, our redeemer and saviour, sends us faithful servants out into the world around us to invite in everyone found in the lanes and alleys … the street people, the disadvantaged, the outcasts, … in other words all the people who need a good hot meal, all the people the world has turned against, all the people who’ve been left on the way side to suffer while others have trampled on to riches undeserved, on the backs of so many.
These are the people we, the redeemed, turn to in order to fulfill our Lord and Master’s command: Compel them to come!
Well, we are not to kidnap or force, but we have the words of Grace and Love of God to share with all those who are outcast, disadvantaged, suffering and could use a good, honourable, glorious feast! The words of Grace that we have … especially as Lutherans (though we’ve no copyright on them, they are for all Christians to embrace), that Jesus came into the world not to condemn but to save all people! … The words of Grace we have reach deep in the heart and soul of each person who will listen. We’ve experienced it ourselves and seen it in countless people. …
So we, who God has redeemed and saved from the trouble we are in, as we give undying thanks to God, turn as Jesus commands us, to invite the outcast, those whom Jesus also redeems, into a feast of celebrating.
The feast is Jesus last meal, the Eucharist, to sustain the soul. The feast is more. It’s a hot meal to sustain the body. It’s a gathering of redeemed people, overflowing with thanks, which sustains the heart and mind.
Except we cannot gather with more than 15 people, and not with anyone outside our core family, or maybe our ‘cohort’ family. Thanks Covid 19! [emoji of disgust.]
But we’ve been redeemed! We overflow with gratitude!
Certainly we can figure out how to share this feast of Christ’s Eucharist and Hot and Cold food, and of sharing each other’s presence, so that we can follow Jesus’ command to compel people from the roads and lanes to come. It may take a football stadium size area. Maybe an 80 acre farm so that no street person or family is closer than 8 metres to any other person or family.
That might take a bit of government approval, a careful plan for serving, and a few extra dollars … but in this time surely someone could put all that together!
Or on a smaller scale, any of us could invite an online meeting of families and street people to join together for the Eucharist and a real home cooked meal! Why not?
Do we or do we not overflow with gratitude?!
Or on an individual scale, we can always call others on the phone! And when needed deliver a home-cooked meal. Why not?
God guides us to both, as gift and blessing unearned.
2 Samuel 2:26
Then Abner called to Joab, ‘Is the sword to keep devouring for ever? Do you not know that the end will be bitter? How long will it be before you order your people to turn from the pursuit of their kinsmen?’
1 Corinthians 7:15
But if the unbelieving partner separates, let it be so; in such a case the brother or sister is not bound. It is to peace that God has called you.
Words of Grace For Today
God calls us to peace.
Peace between nations, between people, between spouses, and peace within ourselves.
Peace is much more than the absence of conflict.
Given merely the absence of conflict we humans always find our way into open conflict quite easily. It is because everyone is wrong about something, and they still think they are right. [Except of course me. I’m always right. Right?]
Girard provides that it is more complex than that, involving mimetic desires that lead to competition, which is ‘resolved’ through scapegoating. We compete with each other for what we see as limited resources/things. Aware we cannot afford open conflict with our closest friends we project our conflict on to some innocent, vulnerable bystander. Seeing that innocent as the source of our problem we destroy that person. Our urge to compete and destroy is ‘satisfied’, the thing we competed for becomes insignificant, and we are able to return to a ‘peaceful’ co-existence.
Except for the innocent person we’ve gaslit, attacked, destroyed and most often exiled or killed.
And except that, since we are not entirely oblivious to reality, we know we are now guilty of ruining an innocent person, of not working out our conflict with each other, and the root cause of that conflict is not addressed. It just goes underground in both of us, in our relationship, only to re-emerge at a later date. Then it will be an even less comprehensible conflict, which we will ‘resolve’ by destroying yet another innocent bystander.
Peace must be diligently sought anew each hour of each day, or it is lost. And it is lost long before anyone notices any conflict arising.
Peace is lost when we no longer see the souls of other people, for whom Jesus died, as the most important part of our own lives, when we no longer give everything we are to provide care for those in our daily lives, or when we no longer work to meet the needs and satisfy the yearnings of those with whom our lives are intertwined.
Peace is a marvellous way of being. It is fragile and can disappear in an instant with a [wrong] word or deed. It is threatened most by an errant thought.
God gives us peace. We can treasure it, with our hearts, minds, and strength.
