For thus says the Lord: Your hurt is incurable, your wound is grievous. There is no one to uphold your cause, no medicine for your wound, no healing for you. All your lovers have forgotten you; they care nothing for you; for I have dealt you the blow of an enemy, the punishment of a merciless foe, because your guilt is great, because your sins are so numerous. Why do you cry out over your hurt? Your pain is incurable. Because your guilt is great, because your sins are so numerous, I have done these things to you.
Therefore all who devour you shall be devoured, and all your foes, every one of them, shall go into captivity; those who plunder you shall be plundered, and all who prey on you I will make a prey. For I will restore health to you, and your wounds I will heal, says the Lord, because they have called you an outcast: ‘It is Zion; no one cares for her!’
1 Peter 2:24
He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.
Words of Grace For Today
If we spent everyday counting our sins …
we would have no time for anything else.
If God spent any time counting our sins and letting us pay for them,
we would have no time for anything else.
God’s attitude towards us and our sins is made clear in Jeremiah’s words with one word: therefore.
It seems to be unexpected. It would not be the way we are with those who sin beyond count in such despicable ways.
Yet this therefore is for God the way God is. The way God is for us.
For God sees our incurable countless sins and …
and therefore God defeats our foes that do us woe. We who were called outcasts, are called most blessed.
God turns our sins into opportunities for us to learn of God’s mercy. Jesus’ story is God bearing our sins on the cross, so that we can live free, healed, and even righteous.
I live as an alien in the land; do not hide your commandments from me.
Ephesians 5:15-16
Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil.
Words of Grace For Today
Wise words and free advice usually end in people trying to fool themselves they are good enough as they destory their neighbours and the aliens in their land: their contributions to the days being evil abound.
Words of free advice and wise words are like rules; whether most people admit it or not the human stance on rules is that they are good. Others ought to follow them all. Themselves are allowed all sorts of exceptions and ‘understandings’ and leaways so that all their bending and breaking of rules is acceptable.
The challenge in life is not really to know what one must not do and what one must do. The challenge in life is to have an attitude towards others and all creation that brings one to deal with it all wisely, as followers of Jesus, as faithful people, as good people, as those who live grateful for everything that is.
To inspire humans to live such lives requires more than admonishments, exhortations, and pithy wise words on how to live. The Word must reach deep in the heart and transform it from greedy to generous. That takes a miracle.
A miracle it is that only God can bring to be for each person.
Jesus’ story is that God does that for each person.
Take that to heart, no matter what the day brings.
Do not let the downtrodden be put to shame; let the poor and needy praise your name.
Luke 1:58
Her neighbours and relatives heard that the Lord had shown his great mercy to her, and they rejoiced with her.
Words of Grace For Today
The way the world works, the downtrodden, poor, and needy are left out to ‘flap in the wind.’
God works through the downtrodden, poor, and needy as Jesus’ story makes so clear:
John the Baptist and Jesus are each born of mothers who are of no account, Jesus’ mother even more so than John the Baptist’s/ Elizabeth is married to a priest. Mary is not even married and she is engaged to a poor carpenter, from a nothing place called Nazareth.
Those who fear and love God know how to celebrate God’s work through the downtrodden, poor, and needy: we celebrate for God raises up the lowly, and brings down those who consider themselves to be on high. The wealthy are brought to poverty. Rulers are brought down to be peasants. Powerful are brought down to powerless. Oppressors are turned on and oppressed. This is justice, God’s way.
The miracle is not this justice.
The miracle is that without making the downtrodden, poor, and needy new occupiers of the wealthy, ruling, and powerful who ignore those on the outside of their privilege and comfort, God takes the outsiders (the downtrodden, poor, and needy) and blesses them with the blessings so amazing and over-abundant that those wealthy, powerful, rulers, and oppressors have no hope of living as fully, as blessed, as well.
God brings us on the outside to be God’s insiders, who carry blessings enough to share with all people. That is the miracle; to be feared by those who try to gain it themselves, and to be celebrated by those to whom God gives God’s favour and Promise.
My holy name I will make known among my people Israel; and I will not let my holy name be profaned any more; and the nations shall know that I am the Lord, the Holy One in Israel.
John 17:26
I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.
Words of Grace For Today
To know God’s name and to keep it holy is a gift given to us all, though we often, more often than we care to admit, we turn our back on the gifts from God and use God’s name in vain, and more as our own avenue for our own selfish wishes. All in vain.
God in God’s name is what brings us to live with grace and hope.
God in God’s name is what brings us to know the love that holds the universe together.
This is the gift that gives us life.
This is the gift that we turn away from when we follow our own ways, deceits, and greed.
This is the gift that God extends to us again and again, each time we turn away from God.
This day, which will it be for us, to turn from God, or to accept God’s grace bring us to return to God?
It will be both and neither, as God wishes.
So we live in God’s favour, blessed and living as we breathe.
The Lord brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; he frustrates the plans of the peoples.
1 Corinthians 1:20
Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?
Words of Grace For Today
If only …
If only we could have known …
If only we could have known God’s will for us and …
If only.
These are the words of regret, as if wishing the past were different could change anything.
The only thing that we have is … or better said:
The only time we have is now.
We cannot change the past. We cannot determine the future.
We can and must and do live, choose, act, and … well everything is in the present … except memories that are immutable, wishes that are unreliable and impossible to make happen in the future, and hope that is all about the future being different than the present seems to determine it will be.
The present is what we have and here and now is when we live, choose, and act.
So plan away for the future, and regret your foolish past, or dance on other’s graves of the past. None of it makes any difference. It is all like worrying. The only thing it will get you is lost time in the present and more things to worry about in the next moment.
What is sure are God’s promises, blessings and gifts … all given in and for the present so that we can hope for the future to be God’s and we will be in God’s time, now as always.
As for our plans we make to get ahead or live on our own: God puts those plans in the crapper. As for all the wisdom that teaches us how to live successfully in this greedy, supposedly ‘zero sum’ life: God puts it in the crapper as well. That wisdom and all our plans only work to separate us from God’s blessings, gifts, and promises.
Hang on, though, leaving what others consider ‘wise’ and giving up on making ‘plans’ that others anticipate from us will leave us looking different than most others around us. Instead of lying to get ahead, we may well end up in poverty with our integrity intact and blessed as God walks with us … instead of chasing money, privilege, comfort, and status while destorying others along our greedy way.
Today,
Well today …
Today, as in each present moment, we rest in God’s promises for the future, God’s forgiveness for our past sins, and bold to live the present with integrity … and able to enjoy a good night’s sleep, the warmth of the winter sunshine, the snow spread across the lake and the beautiful sunrises and sunsets, and the warmth God provides in so many and various ways.
Foreigners shall build up your walls, and their kings shall minister to you; for in my wrath I struck you down, but in my favour I have had mercy on you.
Colossians 2:13-14
When you were dead in trespasses … God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross.
Words of Grace For Today
God has a beef with us, and (in the terms of today’s many times corrupt courts) issues a warrant for our arrest and incarceration in hell forever.
God finds us, and leaves us at the mercies of our evil enemies, who control us and take our lives as opportunities for their perverse desires. This is indeed hell.
…
Thank God that is not the last God has to do with us, for God is clear in judgment against all who sin, who turn away from him, not just our evil enemies but us as well. Even more so God is loving and merciful to all people. God takes that writ and the consequences of our suffering in hell for eternity and nails it to the cross of Jesus, God’s only Son.
And there it stays …
and
when we again turn away from God another writ is issued, we suffer, and then God relents and forgives us and nails that writ on the cross.
So it continues through all time
as the cross
is weighed down with writs so countless not even the stars nor all the particles of the universe are so many.
This is how powerful and enduring God’s love is, God’s mercy is, God’s Grace is.
Thus (despite the chippiness of so many people around us because Covid continues with all it’s variants of concern to threaten and thus governments and wise people -no more so than us ourselves continue to restrict our lives) we wake to each new day thankful for all that God provides that contributes to our survival one more day, so blessed are we by God. In this our enemies’ and their destructive deceit withers up like crab apples left to be pecked at by birds and to rot on the trees until they freeze and drop as fertilizer for another summer’s growth.
God’s justice, mercy, and love have reigned, do reign, and will always reign supreme.
Even More Than Those Visible in the Countless Clouds.
The One That Counts Is Each One of Us.
Joel 2:11-12
The Lord utters his voice at the head of his army; how vast is his host! Numberless are those who obey his command. Truly the day of the Lord is great; terrible indeed—who can endure it? Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning.
Luke 12:36
Be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks.
Words of Grace For Today
A clean blanket of soft snow gently covers the scars of days past, as the sun forgets to rise, or so one might think if one did not believe …
Doch!
How can one not believe since
God utters his voice at the head of his army; how vast is his host! Numberless are those who obey his command!
We have many a time already returned to God with our whole heart, perhaps with fasting and often with weeping and mourning at our sins, and awestruck by God’s Gracious love that renews full and abundant life in even our worst enemies who have many times tried to bring our death forward to one of these todays.
Who are we not to claim the hope that Christ has provided for us through our baptisms and the gifts of the Holy Spirit,
so that already overfilled with life only by Grace (not by our own merit or effort) we again this Advent (remembering that our waiting is also an every day attitude for us) wait for Jesus’ coming again as we would wait for our master to return from the wedding banquet, so that we may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks.
This we do out of complete gratitude and awe for God has also covered us with the clean blanket of Jesus’ soft forgiveness as it gently covers the scars of days past, even if the sun forgets to rise.
How else could we approach each day if not with such a deep faith as we receive and the Spirit nurtures in us?
Moses returned to the Lord and said, ‘Alas, this people has sinned a great sin; they have made for themselves gods of gold. But now, if you will only forgive their sin—but if not, blot me out of the book that you have written.’
Hebrews 3:12-13
Take care, brothers and sisters, that none of you may have an evil, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today’, so that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.
Words of Grace For Today
Moses was more than disappointed in the people. He’d been up the mountain, talking with God, receiving the ten commandments. They had waited, grown impatient and decided to take things into their own hands. Progress. They gather all their gold, give it to Aaron and insist he make them an idol of a god that they can worship, just like the ‘good old days.’
This is quite a step away from God, the God who brought them out of harsh racist slavery (the thanks they receive for their forebearer Joseph’s saving the Egyptians all from drought and widespread death) into the hardships of freedom – in the wilderness – as they learn to live faithful and trusting God so that they are prepared to enter the Promised Land.
This step proves that this generation is not ready to enter the Promised Land and will not. Still God forgives them and goes with them, in the ark of the covenant, as they wander the wilderness, raising another generation who will be prepared to follow God into the Promised Land. Well that generation is as much an unprepared, unfaithful generation as the last, as are all the successive.
Fast forward to after Jesus’ birth, ministry, crucifixion, and resurrection and the leaders of the early church and honest ones in every generation up to today (and all people into the future) know that the temptations to take things into our own hands is overwhelming. People have constantly turned away from God to worship idols of their own making from their own treasures (whatever it is their hearts treasure that is not God’s steadfast love).
The writer of Hebrews does as well as most leaders: he admonishes all the people to exhort each other so that they will not ‘take things into their own hands’ and turn from God. This admonition is futile. Worse it sets the people up to play judge against each other, thus taking God’s Grace and turning it into everything but Grace.
This is God’s Word: fear and love God with all you heart, mind, and strength, yourself, your neighbour and especially your neighbour.
This is God’s Promise: God will forgive us our ‘taking things into our own hands’.
We need not fear God’s judgment. On every day that ends with ‘y’ (including each today) we get to bask in God’s favour, God’s Grace, and in God’s steadfast love. We get to forgive each other and offer each other the gifts of the ‘Promised Land’ that God has showered down on us.
It is he who made the earth by his power, who established the world by his wisdom, and by his understanding stretched out the heavens.
Hebrews 11:3
By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the Word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.
Words of Grace For Today
In the Beginning was the Word.
God’s Word.
God created with Word.
Words are powerful, and
when words belong to God they are the ultimate power.
So many people through all time have wanted proof that God exists and that God created.
God created us so that we can imagine other realities than God … and though they are fiction we are fully capable of losing track of reality and living as if our fictions are actually real. So much so that we have
fake news,
fake science,
science deniers,
antivaxxers,
conspiracy theories,
governments that do conspire to lie and thus control populations,
international corporations that conspire to ‘own’ our private information, lie about everything, and thus control populations and governments,
women and men who gaslight others, especially the ones who love them,
pastors and bishops and religious leaders of all kinds who use religious words to control people and gain an advantage for themselves and their families and their kind (of wacky followers of faked religious words),
judges and lawyers for whom dark is light, light is dark, good is evil, evil is good, and their chaos allows them to continue to issue fake facts, fake decisions, and fake convictions to control hurt, destroy and destory people using the force of the state, which destabilizes society with this barbaric use of force, inviting chaos to overrun society,
and
Covidiots (who with their stupidity are ready to kill so many people and even themselves!)
…
and people who are ready to act illegally for no good reason other than that they can, like cops, bullies, and … well so many people thinking they must get more for themselves to be secure.
All of this fiction lived as reality seems to work …
until it doesn’t and
God’s Word,
God’s Creation,
and
God’s Steadfast Love
start to mess with their supposed ‘advantage’, ‘privilege’, ‘comfort’, ‘status’, ‘power’.
By faith alone, we trust God’s Word …
to have created all that is,
to forgive all that is sinful,
to offer renewed life to all sinners,
to accompany us no matter where or how we journey in life,
and
to promise that all will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well.
And we are able to live grateful for everything, beginning with our very breath each minute.
Then he said, ‘Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.’
Hebrews 12:28
Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks, by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe.
Words of Grace For Today
It was 2 am, and every sensible person was asleep or working the graveyard shift. Not Porgy. An alcoholic for decades with more than enough DUI’s to prove it, was drinking with his friends and when they all left at midnight he kept up by himself on the way home. At home he grabbed the left over beer and shifted from his pickup truck to his jeep. He set out to ‘run the muck around’ on crown land, except it was a foot and a half deep with snow. The better the challenge and the more fun.
He had toured all through the regular routes and left the run out to the hermit’s place for last. At 2 am his headlights off he winds onto the high road, now no longer on crown land for a ways, and follows the tracks that wind around an old basement filled with garbage and 20 year old trees, past the blocked off road above the illegal campsite sitting just 10 feet from the water of the lake, a road that can still be walked and from which the best views of sunset and fishers are enjoyed and captured by the hermit photographer. As he rounds the old deserted and abandoned camper and add-a-shack for a wood stove he guns the engine to ensure he wakes up the sleeping hermit and 50 yards later drives right through a wire that the hermit setup to slow down quads stealing wood from him. Up in the hermit’s wood yard Porgy’s jeep suddenly dies. It just stops. There Porgy sits, tries to turn the key to start the jeep but everything is black, dead, quiet.
The hermitage is holy ground. (Porgy has forgotten everything about ‘removing his sandals’ or giving God God’s due. God reminds Porgy by disabling his old jeep.)
Porgy has heard the ground is holy and not given it much credence. Now, completely dark, shut down silent, Porgy reconsiders. A light flashes down out of the sky. Porgy jumps out of his skin and prays earnestly for the first time since the last time he was drunk, “God save me!”
God has found a way to ‘speak’ to Porgy, even in his drunken haze.
It’s actually a military helicopter on an exercise, testing electronic surveillance, that God has put to use. Knowing all about Porgy’s DUI’s and alcoholism, the helicopter crew has been following his truck and then jeep for the last half hour, and having heard that the hermitage is holy ground they decide to play a bit with Porgy. They’ve remotely, temporarily shut off the jeep when they’ve known it would be safe. It was a good test of their equipment, logged and certified as effective at 500 metres.
As if in response to Porgy’s desperate prayer, the jeep lights up again. He starts it, and drives out as quietly as he can. Within days everyone hears a version of the story, Porgy’s version, how he went to visit the hermit in the evening and how God shut down his jeep as soon as he got on to the hermitage. He told everyone it must be holy ground.
Within days the military few know a different story, and they hear the story from Porgy. Only a faithful few realize that they played a part in it all, but God was at work. They realize that the hermitage really is holy ground. Humans (from his ex, the girls, the lay-pastor and bishop, the wealthiest people in town, the cops, lawyers, and more than 2 dozen judges) have sought to destroy a good, kind, and honest man, and they have only created a holy martyr, a hermit more safe from Covid than anyone of them, more blessed every day than any of them. Their practice surveillance of the area has long since established the hermit’s hard work to survive, his ingenuity, and his kindness to anyone who treads on that holy ground … and his efforts to save anyone from intruding in unholy ways on the holy ground. Their investigations of records they ‘practice’ accessing for ‘national security’ have given them enough of the completely unjustifiable effort of many different people to financially ruin him, to drive him deep into debt and poverty, and to even kill him … and the hermit’s blessed response of forgiveness to his mentally ill ex and the children and the binding of everyone else’s sins – putting their deeds over to God for judgment and offering them forgiveness if they would only but confess.
No one is holding their breath for that, since all the guilty people think no one will ever know who has done what or how.
But God knows, and a few intelligence people know, and a few honest people who listen carefully, and a whole lot of guilty people know.
That morning at 2 am, the hermit did wake up to the jeep’s engine noise, look out the window, and saw the jeep, and the light. He heard the near by helicopter and then saw Porgy start the jeep and drive away. When daylight came he went out and repaired the wire. All along, as for so many other things, the hermit gave God thanks, knowing that since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, we can give thanks, by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe.
