Sunday, April 10, 2022
What Time Is It?
Spring Snow Heavy Falling Time.
Waiting for Summer?
Or
Living in the Wonders of Spring?
Isaiah 8:17
I will wait for the Lord, who is hiding his face from the house of Jacob, and I will hope in him.
Titus 2:13-14
… while we wait for the blessed hope and the manifestation of the glory of our great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ. He it is who gave himself for us that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good deeds.
Words of Grace For Today
Enlyn Ott, Executive Director of Healthy Congregations, wrote early on in the Covid Pandemic (16 April 2020) in her invitation to her then upcoming workshop:
Constant change, new models and numbers are a way of life for us now. Regular patterns are upended. Relationships need to be maintained in new ways. Technology is used in places that never considered it a possibility before, raising issues of inadequacy as well as a sense of accomplishment. Death and illness are only a breath away.
I have decided to take a line from Winston Churchill for my workshop at the upcoming Navigating the Rapids conference. It is entitled “For Such a Time as This.” What time is this? And what kind of time is it calling us to?
Isaiah begins, I will wait …
Titus continues a previous thought with while we wait …
This ongoing, perhaps never quite ending, Covid Pandemic, among so many other things has taught us again that we wait. We must wait. We must wait for the day when we can rush out with no thought of protecting ourselves and others. While we wait for ‘normal’ to return, we need to protect ourselves and other by physically maintaining distance, by wearing the best masks we can get, by improving ventilation and avoiding areas with poor ventilation, by constantly washing and sanitizing our hands, and ‘staying the blazes home!’ when we do not need to go out.
What is this ‘normal’ that we wait for?
Is it worth the wait!?
There is no advantage to anyone by disregarding reality, denying reality, and pretending that Covid is not here and here with a vengeance, and coming yet again with new and more contagious and deadly variants. The real problem we all have is that while we wait we have to know what we are waiting for! Otherwise we can go mad, and like so many, head out without waiting, without caution, without protection for ourselves and others … and with our denial of it’s reality we make the reality of the pandemic last and last and last … and kill and maim more and more people.
On this Psalm – Passion Sunday we remember Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem so celebrated by people, by people fervent with hope, but hoping for a saviour that was and is never to come, a political, a military, a worldly saviour to lead us into our own cruel and evil ways of living off the backs of others, instead of continuing as it is now when others live off our backs, while 2% of the 7 billion on earth live off the backs of the 70% who have next to nothing, and off the backs of the other 25% who believe they have lots, but have so little. The other 3% are God’s saints. Maybe the percentage is larger. One cannot know.
This Sunday we remember how Jesus rode into Jerusalem, and we remember what followed.
Confrontation
Celebration
Betrayal
False Charges
False Conviction
Capital Torture the Sentence
Cruel Taunting
Death
What kind of a saviour suffers these things, and willingly?
The Saviour of the world
Our Saviour
Our Saviour who redeems us from all iniquity and purifies for himself a people of his own.
The ‘normal’ we wait for is certainly not the return of what was ‘normal’ prior to the Covid pandemic and all it’s changes to our lives.
What we wait for is life,
blessed life, as one of Christ’s own, redeemed and purified, still sinners and always saints.
Constant change …. What time is this? And what kind of time is it calling us to?
This is, as always, God’s time, God’s blessed time for us. Our blessed time in God’s time, in God’s blessed creation.
This time, like all time for all generations, calls us to return to Christ, to confess the reality of our lives, the inevitable brokenness of our lives, and to give thanks for the blessings that flow over us so abundantly, waiting
waiting for us to share them with all other peoples.