August 2020 – Page 2

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – Aug 22

Saturday, August 22, 2020

Lake as Muddled Mirror of the Sky

So Dimly We See God

Except in Jesus’ Sacrifice to Save Us

Daniel 2:47

The king said to Daniel, ‘Truly, your God is God of gods and Lord of kings and a revealer of mysteries, for you have been able to reveal this mystery!’

Philippians 2:10

He humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth.

Words of Grace For Today

What is it that God created us able to accomplish and control?

Everyday life presents us with constant reminders how little of our lives we control. An invisible virus mutates from a previous one, jumps to humans, and spreads around the world. We cannot stop it, so limits and restrictions are placed on how we live and move. It’s a pandemic lock down. Everything needed to stop the pandemic in it’s tracks is known or at least estimated. Yet no one has enough control over others to make those extreme measures happen. It takes only a few people to refuse to comply before extreme measures are wholly ineffective. So authorities implement strict (but not extreme) measures not to stop the virus, but to ‘flatten the curve’, to limit the number of people who have it at one time. That so that health care services are not over taxed, and/or the bodies do not pile up faster than they can be buried (depending where in the world the authorities are.)

Some strict efforts are effective, despite the constant refusal by these people, those people, and oh, those other people, who somehow think they are exceptions. Somehow they think that they do not need to keep distances, or they do not need to stay home when healthy or sick, and their gathering must go ahead, limits be damned.

So the numbers known to be currently infected continues to fluctuate, up and down. Always in the background everyone knows that the count can escalate quickly out of control … as it has in many places around the globe … and the death count escalates out of control as well. Lately 20-40 year-olds have a great increase in infection. They get minor symptoms mostly, and they spread it to the more vulnerable among who the severely and permanently affected numbers climb, as do the deaths.

Survival of the fittest? The natural course of events? Culling of the herd? All this is spoken as if to excuse the hubris and lack of empathy necessary to see the pandemic this way. It takes just one small mutation and those 20-40 year-olds will be the ones dying in droves.

There are many great mysteries in this world, and we encounter plenty of them up close and personal in our short lives on earth. Though the spread of Covid 19 and how people intentionally make that happen is no mystery.

The real wonders fill the universe in all time and space. God reveals them to us many times each day … if we have eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts and minds to understand.

One great revelation of mystery comes with Jesus’ life. What was a mystery before is how God works and intends us to live and work and play. Jesus is most powerful and influential demonstrates that for us to see by humbling himself. Jesus does not ‘know his place’ as superior to all others. His is God’s place, above all in every way. Yet God sends Jesus to humble himself, to submit himself to the torturous power and destruction of Evil, in order that we humans may understand (at least a tiny bit) for what God created us.

It is not to ensure that we are the ‘fittest’ and that we survive while others die.

God created us to face the unknowns of life, sacrificing ourselves so that others can have life and have it abundantly. Humble sacrifice is Jesus’ Way which we are called to imitate.

Having received life by Jesus’ sacrifice, we praise him for who he is: God, above all else.

Our tomorrows remain as unknowable as the mysteries of our todays. Yet we are secure in God’s hands, secure as no other effort or perspective or … anything.

So we are able to comply with the pandemic restrictions, remind others to keep complying even when people are fed up with them, and we work to save everyone without excuse … for we are all in this together.

Humbly complying with restrictions and ‘standing together’ for each person, we may survive. But if we all proudly ‘stand alone’ in our failing to comply with the restrictions asked of us, then more of us will surely fall.

Choose, deadly pride or life giving humility. Sometimes life’s choices are clear and possible for us to make.

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – Aug 21

Friday, August 21, 2020

A Secure Tomorrow

as Impossible for Us

as for Grass and Trees

Isaiah 47:13

You are wearied with your many consultations; let those who study the heavens stand up and save you, those who gaze at the stars and at each new moon predict what shall befall you.

Matthew 18:1-3

At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, ‘Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?’ He called a child, whom he put among them, and said, ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.‘

Words of Grace For Today

We humans tend to get agitated by the trouble that may befall us tomorrow.

We go to all sorts of lengths to try to secure our tomorrows. All that is in vain. There really is nothing that can secure our tomorrows, not wealth, nor power, nor status, nor anything under the sun, not even education or integrity.

In Isaiah’s day, and still today, people look to the stars and moon to predict their tomorrows. This also is a futile effort.

Jesus points to the way of his followers. We are to become like children. We trust like children the Word of God. We hope like children for our tomorrows.

We are able to celebrate today and tomorrow, as children, in the moment.

For God promises we have everything we need to live abundantly and blessedly.

Hallelujah!

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – Aug 20

Thursday, August 20, 2020

In the Darkness

The Light of Love Binds us Together

Love is our Hope

Proverbs 10:12

Hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all offences.

John 13:35

By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.’

Words of Grace For Today

See yesterday’s Words of Grace: love is God’s attitude toward us. Jesus’ record replaces ours and God sees us, just as we are, with Jesus’ unblemished record in place of ours. Wonders upon wonders is God’s love for us, all of us.

Our response to such wonders can be to choose to imitate Jesus’ sacrifice for each other, and for the strangers, among us and around the globe. That love is remarkable. It is rare. It is denounced. It is maligned.

All because it is feared, for it changes everything. It unseats power and wealth and privilege.

It establishes new order, God’s order, and old order. An order not based on greed or competition, but rather built on empathy and care for each other, and all others.

Hate is the opposite of love. Hate is a piece of death that grows and consumes us.

Love is a mystery.

Love is no mystery.

Love is unfathomable.

Love is doing the simple, caring things.

Love is doing and paying the cost for the most expensive thing: forgiveness.

Love covers all offences.

Love is life.

Love is the mysterious sub atomic string/wave/particle that holds the universe together, that gives life, and that gives life meaning.

Love is God’s way for us to live abundantly.

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – Aug 19

Wednesday, August 19, 2020

We bow to our Creator

Humble Glory

Exodus 33:13

Now if I have found favour in your sight, show me your ways, so that I may know you and find favour in your sight. Consider too that this nation is your people.

2 Thessalonians 2:14

For this purpose he called you through our proclamation of the good news, so that you may obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Words of Grace For Today

It is easy to have silly hopes … and it is foolish to live one’s life built on those silly hopes.

One can, for example, hope that (contrary to all experience past and reasonable expectation for the future) that one will have a [fill in your desired, unreachable thing, like a ‘private lake’]. It is all silliness, hoping to possess things. It is foolish then to build one’s life so that one can finally buy a boat, and then store it away for the day that you can make it’s maiden voyage on your ‘private lake.’

To have hope that inspires the best of life into one and drives one to live the best and that draws from one better than one can imagine … to have that kind of hope one cannot foolishly build one’s life based on silly hopes. One needs to understand profoundly what is before one in the present, what is behind us in the past, and what lies ahead for us in the future.

Moses, wise as he was, is not always written about as if he were so wise. He asks of God, who has just told him that God favours Moses, that Moses will be able to live knowing God’s ways (in Hebrew this knowing is also to be intricately wound up in, to be active in the doing of God’s ways). And to what end does Moses make this request? To find God’s favour.

Yet, God’s favour is already pronounced by God! Moses is making a circular request.

This is us, all too often. God saves, loves us, favours us, and tells us so. We respond by asking that if God loves us and favours us we may know how to earn God’s love and favour!

We all too often want not to be in God’s debt, but we want to know ourselves, and be seen by others, to have earned all that God has gifted us! So Moses is written about as if Moses did not accept God’s favour, but wanted to earn it. Indeed, Moses wanted others to see without a doubt that God favoured Moses. It was required for his and his people’s survival.

There is so much more going on than a silly wish, to earn God’s favour. We can learn if we see.

The second passage also contains something to see. Paul writes to the Thessalonians that his proclamation of Jesus the Christ to them is to bring them Jesus Christ’ Glory.

Christ’s Glory is not something that many people would seek: it involves betrayal by one’s friend, a false conviction, a torturous cross, and death. Only then does it come to anything like what we might expect as Glory.

But Glory, God’s kind of Glory it is. It is that God brings us to life abundant through our being betrayed, being falsely convicted and our bearing our own crosses, which indeed kill us. Then we can start to understand the sacrifice for others lives that Jesus accepted, that Jesus calls us to accept.

On this cross, on this glory, we can hope that God will show us how to live the abundant life … not so that we can earn God’s favour. Rather we ask that God will show us how to live the abundant life that does not require things at all. Rather we ask that God will show us how to live the abundant life as our response to trusting that God saves us, loves us (unconditionally), and favours us.

Knowing this love, trusting this love, we are able to answer Christ’ call to sacrifice our selves, even our lives, so that others may have life, and have it abundantly.

That’s Glory. That’s Grace. That is us as Jesus’ humble followers.

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – Aug 18

Tuesday, August 18, 2020

Shadows.

We may only see Shadows

But they point to the Light.

Psalm 100:5

For the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures for ever, and his faithfulness to all generations.

Titus 3:4-5

But when the goodness and loving-kindness of God our Saviour appeared, he saved us, not because of any works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy, through the water of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit.

Words of Grace For Today

We try so hard. In life we try so hard to make life turn out our own way.

God moved with love to save us. God did not wait for us to do what is right. God jumps right into the middle of all our plans and rescues us from our wretched sins, sets us back into good life, and calls us to be the instruments of Grace for others.

Amazing Grace. You know the story most likely of John Newton, ships’ captain who loaded slaves in Africa and delivered them into the New World. God reached out and touched his heart. He gave up slave trading and became a pastor. He penned the hymn, Amazing Grace, as an expression of profound and utter thanks for what God had done for him, saving himself from his life of sin, carrying for profit people carried as cargo with little care for their survival or decency or that they are humans.

There are many ways in every age that we treat other people cruelly, demeaning them, as less than human; all to think that somehow we are better than others. Ahh, the sin in it, which destroys our victims, so many bystanders, and even ourselves.

We may Gaslight, scapegoat, and falsely convict others, not once, but over and over again. Even then God reaches out to us and offers us new life, life renewed, life based on truth, and dependent on God’s goodness, loving-kindness, mercy, steadfast love, and faithfulness – for generation upon generation.

From our wretched existence God rescues us.

God loves us unconditionally, when we deserve nothing, not even the breath we breathe.

If we are fortunate, we will have time in life to learn to share God’s goodness, loving-kindness, mercy, steadfast love, and faithfulness with all people in for our generation.

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – Aug 17

Monday, August 17, 2020

Royal Purple

God’s Glory and Favour

For All to See

Zechariah 8:23

Thus says the Lord of hosts: In those days ten men from nations of every language shall take hold of a Jew, grasping his garment and saying, ‘Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.’

Acts 2:46-47

Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

Words of Grace For Today

Living with thanks, and with success that others recognize and want to be a part of, to join in. This is to have the goodness of heart and faith, of a purity and strength that others will …

No … that’s all wrong.

The way of following Jesus does not guarantee at all that others will notice the abundant life that God gives to us. That kind of prosperity is not to be equated with being blessed by God, otherwise there are so many evil ways to get there, and the ends could be seen to justify the means. This is exactly what the Devil wishes us to do. Reduce following Jesus into a code that we keep and which keeps others out.

Jesus embraces all nations, all creeds, all colours, all every kind of human. We humans are the ones who create artificial boundaries and exclusions in order to pretend we are special.

Jesus brings all nations to our doorstep to show us how varied the Kingdom of God is, and how much work there is for us in welcoming all people. So they flock to us for help. It is not because we are special, it is because God is special.

This account from Acts is remarkable, that the followers of Jesus had the goodwill of the people. That was in some ways true and in so many other ways it was not true. Jesus was a threat to so many people and so many people wanted to be done with him … and it will not take long before the followers of Jesus are hunted and slain like vermin in the floor boards.

In preparation for the persecutions to come, God gives them a respite, a time of calm, a time of relative safety … before the persecutions begin. Then all hell breaks loose against them.

Whether we are grieving a loss, reorganizing our lives after a loss, resting from the ‘funerals’ or caught in the middle of the persecutions, Jesus has a task for us. Even or especially in the middle of this Covid-19 pandemic Jesus’ task for us is to welcome the stranger into our midst, just as they are. We get to exercise God’s unconditional love.

What a life!

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – Aug 16

Sunday, August 16, 2020

Looking out from down low

Psalm 136:23

It is he who remembered us in our low estate, for his steadfast love endures for ever.

Hebrews 13:3

Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured.

Words of Grace For Today

It is so easy to forget our past, when we were so much less than we are now. Become wealthy and soon one easily forgets what it is like to struggle to survive without enough money. With God and God’s people it is different, though.

Become educated and it is easy to forget how it is to be ignorant and vulnerable. With God and God’s people it is different, though.

Yet as one becomes more educated one learns that one really did and still does know so little. This is closer to how it is in our relationship with God, if we care at all for the Truth of Jesus’ love and life for us.

When God forgives us our sins, it may seem easy to forget our sins, now that Grace has saved us. We can easily pretend or delude ourselves that we somehow no longer need forgiveness, though as we grow, if we learn to be honest with ourselves then we recognize that we still sin, and more profoundly and profusely then we care ever to admit. We desperately need to be forgiven, more it seems each passing day.

When we learn this anew each day, then it makes sense to give thanks to God for all that we are, for we have and are nothing on our own. Only by God’s hand do we have anything given to us as stewards of it, nor are we anything other than the chemicals our body is made of, except that the Holy Spirit breathes life into us each day.

As we remember how much we daily depend on God’s good Graces, then it is not difficult to remember each day to pray for and work to support those in prison.

Yes, there are some real criminals in prison. They are people capable of great destruction to property and person without much thought of the damage they do. There are also many minorities, especially men, who have been taken advantage of and invited into a world where crime is the only way of life. There also are a great number of people, men and women, who are falsely convicted and never did anything to deserve to be put in prison.

Someone decided they would be their target. They would be lied about, false witnesses would be found against the person, and false reports and charges are brought against them … and judges easily lie about the evidence before them and convict people, on the basis of easily identifiable lies. The measure of correct judgments is that a fully informed, reasonable person would agree with the judge’s decision. But one has to be willing to lie, and reasonable has to be not that the person is actually guilty, but someone with enough money or power wants this person convicted, and the fully informed part of that has to be understood as meaning one had to understand that someone with wealth or power or a sadistic habit has to be satisfied … and yet another innocent person goes to jail.

We are to remember all the people in jails, not from our place of comfort and privilege, but as if the prison director had us in custody and was using the guards, some violent, some friendly, to sadistically ‘play’ with us, to torment us. And that some health care people working in prisons go out of their way to provide inappropriate, even deadly health care to prisoners/us; because if we are in jail then surely we deserve no good health care.

For people tortured, well it helps to have been tortured at some point, so that we can not only empathize with those who are tortured, but that we can also remember what it was like to be tortured.

If you have made it thus far in life without being tortured, then watch perhaps 12 Years a Slave, for an insightful presentation of what being enslaved is like, and to be tortured, having one’s life taken from one, piece by piece.

Then we can wake to each morning, give God thanks for all we have, and fervently pray for others’ in real need. One does not need much to be thankful. One needs only eyesight to see the world’s beauty. Or eyes to see the people in the neighbourhood. Or ears to hear the loons’ cry echoing across the water. Then one can be thankful, that one has something, has eyes, has ears.

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – Aug 15

Saturday, August 15, 2020

In the Storms of Life

God teaches us to trust

Grace.

Zechariah 7:10

Do not oppress the widow, the orphan, the alien, or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another.

1 Corinthians 1:28

God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are.

Words of Grace For Today

The way we humans organize our world and our lives, the strong step on the weak to lift themselves out of the morass of life into the rarefied air of privilege and comfort.

God’s intention for us is not so.

Jesus calls us to turn towards the poor, the vulnerable, the aliens and the outsiders and provide them the goodness of life, which God has already shared with us.

According to our world measures, God is not powerful. Yet God is all-powerful, unequalled in power.

According to our world measures where information is power, and time is money, God is not significant nor rich. Yet God is all-knowing and owns all of time, as well as everything ‘before’ and ‘after’ and ‘outside’ of time.

God turns our world measures upside down and shakes them out like an old gunny sack, showing that we have collected at most chaff, not the grain from which the bread of life is made.

God uses what the world considers refuse, cast aways, and expendable; with these God demonstrates his power with Grace, and his knowing everything about us with Love. God gives us in the darkest places hope, for out of our deepest darknesses God brings us the greatest experiences and lessons of how Grace works for us and for all people. These experiences teach us how futile evil scheming is. Only loving ourselves, our neighbours, and even our enemies, can bring us true joy, abundant life, and the meaning for our lives that God created us to enjoy.

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – Aug 14

Friday, August 14, 2020

Where to Go?

Why go for love

When it is right in front of you?

God’s unconditional love!

Psalm 73:25

Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire other than you.

John 6:67-69

So Jesus asked the twelve, ‘Do you also wish to go away?’ Simon Peter answered him, ‘Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.’

Words of Grace For Today

To be loved unconditionally.

To know that one is chosen, precious, cared for, watched over, and fully desired; this is to know one is loved by God. God equips us to embody this love for one another. We do this imperfectly, and only by God’s grace working through us.

Do you wish to go away?

There is much in life that is difficult. We learn early on that life is easier if we avoid what is difficult. The most powerful people in life learn how to avoid the messy parts of life, or if it is not possible to spin the events so that some one else is seen to be the cause of and main character in the mess. Passive aggressive personalities develop out of this, always presenting that nothing is wrong, and then behind the scenes, hidden from others’ knowing, they manipulate, scheme and carry out revenge and punishments for those that dare cross them. Variations of passive aggressive personalities, the more severe cases, are named personality disorders (like borderline personality disorder), or psychoses, like sociopaths and psychopaths. In whatever guise these people who adroitly learn to pass the ‘mess’ of life on to others, accumulate power by appearing to be devoid of ‘mess’. They end up destroying many many lives around them. As parents they most often raise children who are even more effectively destructive then they themselves. The ‘cleaner’ these people make themselves appear the more dangerous they become.

If we are blessed we learn early on that the goodness of life is not in running away from what is difficult, but in facing it, being challenged, and overcoming the challenge. Sometimes there is a reward. For the most significant and difficult challenges the reward is ‘silent’ and ‘invisible’, seen only with eyes equipped to see God’s work.

The disciples know it is difficult travelling with Jesus. The disciples know there is danger staying with Jesus, the signs are clear that trouble BIG TROUBLE is ahead. Some people leave, no longer facing the difficulties and dangers. Jesus turns to the twelve and asks if they, too, will leave.

Peter’s response is that they will stay because they believe Jesus is the Holy One of God.

Where else would they go? Well there are lots of places they could go. And lots of other ‘teachers’ that they could follow. None are like Jesus, though.

That is what they have experienced, as Jesus reaches out to the worst sinners, the most vulnerable people (women and men alike, and children), and to the most sick. They have learned that the difficulty and danger of following Jesus is the only way to experience the real, profound, powerful, and live giving goodness of life.

So it is with us today. We need not seek out difficulty. It will come our way. We need only face it with all the grace and love Jesus has demonstrated for us.

Until the great difficulty finds us, for every day we have the ability, we ‘collect two days’ worth of firewood, one for this day, and one for the day we ‘cannot gather firewood’ and it is ‘cold, life threatening cold.’ Then when the ‘cold of difficulty that can kill us’ finds us, we will be equipped with ‘firewood aplenty’. We will have God’s real grace, embodied in the reality of this world like ‘firewood’, that we can draw on to see us through.

When we find ourselves having walked into a hell of our own or someone else’s making, knowing Jesus was here before us, is with us even now again, and that cooler days are ahead, we need to keep moving, right through the heat of hell to the refreshing air of a good thundershower providing cool winds and the water of life.

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – Aug 13

Thursday, August 13, 2020

Sacrificing a Tree

a dead tree for firewood is one thing,

stripping the bark to kill a living tree for no good purpose is evil.

Isaiah 53:5

But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.

John 11:51-52

He did not say this on his own, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus was about to die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but to gather into one the dispersed children of God.

Words of Grace For Today

We humans understand how innocent people or animals are sacrificed to ‘pay a debt’ and free us. There are two kinds of sacrifice, one destructive evil, one gracious goodness.

Rene Girard developed a few ideas that many have applied and adapted. At the core is his mimetic theory that we ‘remember’ we desire something by seeing others having it, which causes senseless competition between even friends. Competition leads to conflict and conflict cannot be between friends, so the friends use a scapegoat (an innocent, vulnerable bystander) on whom they pile fictitious blame. This cathartic release of blame onto a third party relieves the conflict between the two friends and they continue on, the desire that caused the conflict resolves into the senselessness it was at the beginning. The friendship is saved, the friends continue on.

The vulnerable, innocent scapegoat is destroyed.

This is the destructive evil sacrifice.

Girard interprets the story of Jesus’ sacrifice for us as God’s clear statement that scapegoating innocent, vulnerable people is not acceptable or needed, just as God’s clear statement by calling Abraham to the mountain to sacrifice his only son Isaac, and then stopping Abraham, was that God did not want any child sacrificed to himself.

God clearly does not want destructive evil sacrifice by any humans.

God does send his son, Jesus, to live, preach, teach, heal and sacrifice himself to the corrupt power of his time, the Roman empire and the Chief Priest. This is the sacrifice of gracious goodness. It is chosen by the one surrendering to sacrifice. The sacrifice does not destroy innocent and vulnerable people. Exactly the opposite, it gives life to all.

Jesus calls us to wisely sacrifice, sometimes little, sometimes everything, in order that other people will be able to live. We do not send someone else to be the sacrifice. We go ourselves, knowing that all we are and have is a gift from God, and if God can use us to give life, then as followers of Jesus we can give of ourselves, and even give everything of ourselves, in order that others may live, and live in the abundance of Grace, Love and Hope that God created us all to enjoy.

So much in life tries to get us to strive to achieve and receive at others’ cost (the destructive evil sacrifice). This is not the way of life for the followers of Jesus, and for all the children of God.