March 2021 – Page 2

WORD and CREATOR for US

Sunday, March 21, 2021

The Journey Forward

is on

Word-calmed Waters.

Paddle Onward Without Fear.

Isaiah 48:13

My hand laid the foundation of the earth, and my right hand spread out the heavens; when I summon them, they stand at attention.

John 1:1-3

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.

Words of Grace For Today

God, who comes to our rescue, who delivers us again and again, who sanctifies us making us holy and thus wholly capable of bearing the Good News of Grace to all people … God, who loves us, is the One who spoke a Word in the beginning before anything including time, spread out a right hand to create the heavens, laid the foundation of the earth.

The universe was not created by some godlet. Nor is our God some inconsequential being, to be ignored or dismissed.

It’s more than ‘turtles all the way down’ that the earth is founded on; it is founded on unconditional love.

In the beginning was the Word. We later came to know this Word as Jesus, the communication from God in a human life; the language we can understand.

The heavens and earth may come to attention when God summons them. God did not create us so bound to God’s Word. We get to really mess up terribly, ignoring the Creator and the Word if we so choose … which we humans do all too often.

The Word came to communicate that God accounted for our rebellion and sin and evil. God forgives us our rebellion and sin and evil, and sets us right with God our Creator and Sustainer. Thus we may forge ahead each day, each minute, not hounded and horrified by the depth and breadth of our past rebellion and sin and evil. We may live free of that, and bind ourselves anew to receiving God’s blessings in such an abundance that they spill off us to those around us; they flow through us to others even emptying us … purifying us and taking the life right out of us as we become the bearers of God’s Good News of Grace to all people: God loves us!

Now with God standing with us, why would not the hoards of armies surrender to us making noise? Why would the walls of Jericho not crumble at our trumpets’ calls? Why would the chaos of un-creation void (the ocean waters) and the storms of chaos breaking in through the heavens not obey the Word spoken: ‘Be still!’

May our hearts be also stilled this and each day, from the chaos of fear, false pride, jealousy, and greed, so that we can calmly face the challenges of each day, even if it is one day among many of a pandemic.

Breathe deeply

Relax

Meet the challenges with patience and assurance that God is with us, saving us, guiding us, inspiring us to do holy things for all peoples.

God! Where ARE YOU?!

Saturday, March 20, 2021

W hen the dark storms of evil threaten …

Judges 6:13

Gideon answered him, ‘But sir, if the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us? And where are all his wonderful deeds that our ancestors recounted to us, saying, “Did not the Lord bring us up from Egypt?” But now the Lord has cast us off, and given us into the hand of Midian.’

Mark 4:38

But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, ‘Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?’

Words of Grace For Today

Why is this happening to us?

Where is God?

Does God not care?

When unjust judges take life from us …

When the one who said, ‘I love you. Marry me?’, turns on you with physical violence or worse (because it is unseen) psychological gaslighting, lying to police and to church and to courts, destroying your reputation, leaving you so far in debt you will never get out, and your health plummets into pain and disarray …

When friends, bishops, and seemingly good people join the gaslighting as if you were a social pariah or dangerous sexual deviant, scapegoating you instead of dealing with their own failings to deal with reality and truth …

When there are no friends left to stand by you …

When flood waters wash away your home and life and hope …

When wildfires rage wiping out your home and life and hope …

When petty warlords churn your homeland into a war-wasted horror of death, bombs, night raids and killings, rape, torture, and dread of your neighbour falsely (or rightly) betraying you bringing death squads to your door to take you away never to be seen again …

When powers turn on your way of life, destroy it, and work to extract resources and power from your home land, leaving masses of your people without the necessities of life …

…

When you have lived in the wilderness for years, eking out a living of a kind, and you read of the wondrous deeds of God, as God saved our ancestors from these, similar and other worse assaults on their lives,

Then you and we will rightly ask, “God! Where are You!?! Do you not care for us!? Will you not save us, NOW! Before it is too late!”

Gideon asked this for his people. In time, as God instructed him, ((his ‘army’ blew the trumpets marching around Jericho, bringing down it’s walls, delivering it and then the rest of the Promised Land into their hands. — That was not Gideon. That was God delivering Joshua and the people. God did this so many times.))

In time, as God instructed him, Gideon with just a small army, drove out a great army and captured it’s kings … using surprise and loud noise making.

The disciples asked this as the storm of un-creation on the sea tossed their small boat about at whim between the tall waves and battered it with wind. They knew their deaths into the deep of the void (what was before creation) was imminent. Jesus wakes and speaks only a word. The un-creation void of the deep waters and winds of the storm settle into the fresh breeze and calm waters on which life was sustainable as the fishers knew so well.

God may not resolve the danger that threatens our lives. God is not a puppeteer, interrupting our freewill and others’ freewill as we choose our ragged paths forward in life through creation and human-made un-creation as we go (which we and others must then try to survive if it possible at all!)

God loves us.

God stands with us.

God suffers and weeps with us … at the loss of any of creation and any of God’s creatures … for God loves creation and all in it, and created it GOOD!

God does give us, sometimes, the possibilities to struggle against the evil that threatens us and to survive. If we live, God is with us. If we die, God is with us and gathers us home … home at last.

So whether we live or whether we die, we are God’s beloveds, blessed and grateful for whatever life we get to live in this miracle of creation!

God does not ever abandon us. Not ever. Not even during a pandemic. The stories of God rescuing our ancestors provides us witness to God’s love and care.

Thus, no matter how great the waves of evil pound over us, we do not lose hope.

As we live, we are God’s people who stand with others as the great waves of evil pound over them.

This is love. This is grateful, hope-filled living.

This is life abundant.

God Bridges the WHOLE Gap

Friday, March 19, 2021

It’s an infinite distance

Between

God

and

Leviticus 20:8

Keep my statutes, and observe them; I am the Lord; I sanctify you.

Matthew 7:24

Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock.

Words of Grace For Today

God gives commands.

People receive the commands and reinterpret them as the necessary things to be done to be acceptable to God.

God corrects the reinterpretations back to God’s Grace: God acts for us first, bridging the whole gap between divine and finite humans. Then we get to act as sanctified people … and we still sin.

How do we wish to live, always running from goodness, or in a house built on a rock, the rock of God’s Grace for us?

Like the Moon

Thursday, March 18, 2021

Like the Moon in the sky and in the water,

We may think we choose our way,

Doch God guides us and inspires us

to live as reflectors of Christ’s Light!

Proverbs 16:9

The human mind plans the way, but the Lord directs the steps.

2 Corinthians 3:5

Not that we are competent of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our competence is from God.

Words of Grace For Today

Who are we?

We are fallible and arrogant, needing reminders regularly of how fragile our grasp on reality, truth, and goodness are.

We are able to give God all God is due: our lives in service to others so that they may experience and know the Grace of God which gives us renewed life, even though we deserve nothing but condemnation and expulsion to the emptiness of the Void.

Rather than giving us what we are due, God forgives us, redeems us, renews us and sanctifies us so that we can reflect the Light of the World to all in need.

It is only because God so constantly renews us and makes us holy (sanctifies us) that we are able to do anything good.

The human tendency is to forget God, God’s gifts, and claim all that is good is our own doing. This is a foolish error that costs us so much each day, and it costs so many other people so much each day.

We may think we make plans that we are capable of carrying out. So it is only with sinful plans! Any good plans we make, as well as the steps we take, are possible only because God has saved us from ourselves and through the Holy Spirit permeating our being inspires us to things so much better than we could ever do or imagine on our own.

God does not control us like a puppeteer. God inspires us, and if Luther is correct, we can at most surrender to doing what God asks of us and moves us to be and do. We, on the other hand, have free will (not to do good) only to do sinful and evil things, selfish things, destructive things, common things … and then lie to ourselves about how ‘good’ our evil ways are.

Oh, God, save us from our own sin, and the deceptions that allow us to think we can be anything without you! (Like thinking we can plan our own good way.)

God, help us to see the wonders of being and doing as you inspire and enable us.

God, help us extend this same Grace to all other people, sinful and evil as they are.

Proud or Humble

Wednesday, March 17, 2021

Call it as you will.

For Us

God’s Wonders of Grace

are Everything.

Genesis 16:13

So she named the Lord who spoke to her, ‘You are El-roi’; for she said, ‘Have I really seen God and remained alive after seeing him?’

Luke 18:13

But the tax-collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”

Words of Grace For Today

God is Great.

We are Not!

Knowing who God is and who we are is the foundation of all wisdom.

Not knowing and living out who God is and who we are is the foundation of all sin and evil.

With wisdom one can live well, even in abject poverty, under terrible injustices, and even in ill health.

Without this foundation of wisdom informing one’s daily living, we are all lost.

We would do better to stand far off from those acceptable hypocrites who pretend to control governmental or church power.

Their illness is their lack of any real wisdom, which they spread to as many people as they can.

We do better humbling ourselves before God, for our sins are great (just not those sins and crimes the gaslighters lie and say we have committed.)

But by God’s Grace alone we would have no life worth living at all.

With God’s Grace pouring out over us … life’s wonders never fail to inspire us to graceful thoughts and acts for others.

Show Us and We Will (still not) Be Satisfied

Tuesday, March 16, 2021

Use Whatever You Have, Even If It Is Only a Tent,

and Build a Life

Reflecting

God’s Grace for All!

Exodus 33:18

Moses said, ‘Show me your glory, I pray.’

John 14:8-9

Philip said to him, ‘Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, “Show us the Father”?

Words of Grace For Today

Since the beginning of time people have wanted to ‘see’ God, and in seeing be the one to control what others heard about God, thus ruling over others.

Others like Moses, when God calls them, want to be shown that the one calling them is really God. They are preparing to ‘lay it on the line’ and they want some reassurances. Nothing like the Glory of God to convince one to answer God’s call to serve.

Others like the disciples, Philip among them (who speaks up this time), are called to serve by Jesus and they want to know that Jesus, the human they see in front of them, is able to call on God and have God show ‘himself’ (for they thought of God as a father). Then they will be satisfied, or so they think and say.

But seeing God’s Glory is not likely going to satisfy anyone who is not already satisfied seeing and living in God’s presence, in God’s creation, day after day. Those people are sacramental mystics, and that is what we can see of God’s Glory.

That and God’s work (including sending Jesus to live among us as a full human, full God) to demonstrate that God’s creation works for us when we live out the same gracious generosity that God shows us in giving us life abundant in this miracle of creation.

“Show us God!” we say with so many before us.

God responds with miracle after miracle of meeting our sins with Grace. Grace is God’s unconditional love demonstrated with forgiveness, redemption, more abundant life, and sanctification!

When we rest in God’s Grace, then we can build the best life we can for us and ours, and all our neighbours, AND we can serve Christ by being God’s Grace for others.

What a life!

Furnace or Grace, What Do You Say Today?

Monday, March 15, 2021

God Speaks Clearly.

what do you say with your life today:

‘Into the furnace!’

‘Welcome to the Light of Christ!’

Daniel 3:17-18

If our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire and out of your hand, O king, let him deliver us. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods and we will not worship the golden statue that you have set up.

Acts 4:20

For we cannot keep from speaking about what we have seen and heard.

Words of Grace For Today

When God speaks, there is no one who ….

Well, that cannot be true, because people react on the full spectrum from loving worship to full our rejection that God exists, yet alone speaks clearly to people … for people to hear.

God is not a puppeteer, pulling the strings of control over humans, or any part of creation. Yet when some people hear God speaking, clearly, lovingly, they and we cannot keep from speaking about what we have seen and heard. That is the life of a sacramental mystic, who encounters God talking at every turn in creation, even in and among those most dangerous of animals, the two-legged kind that speak every kind of word on the spectrum from life-giving truth to life-robbing, evil lies.

What kind of word do you speak this day?

Amidst a pandemic, do you speak truth that supports, enhances, and inspired people to life healthily and abundantly, blessed by God.

Or are you off worshipping another kind of godlet, one who demands strict adherence to reality denying lies, controlled thoughts and expressions, and (like the king who is ready to throw Daniel and his companions into the furnace), the painful death of anyone who will not ‘fall into line’ worshipping your life-sucking godlet.

The powerful king who demanded Daniel worship his godlet, had not encountered God, Daniel’s God, who may or may not deliver Daniel (and us) from the fiery furnace of destruction (the actual fires of burning or the fire of lies that destroy our reputations.) Whether God chooses to deliver us does not deter us from remaining faithful. For we will not begin to worship a godlet who takes life from so many people, promising the greatest life, and delivering it’s followers into a long life more painfully greedy and selfish than death in a fiery furnace ever could be.

We have seen. We have heard. We have known. God is gracious, unconditionally loving, and prodigiously generous. We need nothing more than God’s blessings and opportunities to worship and serve God … with every word and breath … even if it be our last.

On the spectrum from life-giving, self-sacrificial, unconditionally loving (reflecting God’s Grace for us all) to the Devil’s empty promised, self-made life at the expense of others’ lives:

What kind of word do you speak this day?

From the outcast homeless poverty captured person to the most powerful ruler or judge of the day, God allows a simple question to sit before us each day:

What kind of word do you speak this day?

Searching Famine, Hear and Obey

Sunday, March 14, 2021

Listen and You Will Hear

the Colours of God’s Word

in the Sun Setting Through the Trees

Amos 8:11-12

The time is surely coming, says the Lord God, when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord. They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it.

Luke 11:28

But Jesus said, ‘Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it!’

Words of Grace For Today

A great many religious efforts through history and on-going today are well described by Amos’ Words from God: They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it.

To make up for the futility of our great and desperate searchings, we humans make up all sorts of things, religious things, rituals, ‘truths’ which are certainly nothing of the sort, ways of speaking, judgments against other people, wars, and great empires and ideas.

It is as if we have ourselves convinced that if we are seeking the Other, the divine, then what we do must be other than … well other than everything sane, practical, real, truthful, reasonable, understandable, and even reverent.

Yes, God is OTHER than we are, so other, infinite, immortal and on goes the list of how great God is compared to how miserably un-great we are.

All our efforts to bridge the gap between us and God are doomed to fail. That is the kind of gap that it is between Divine and us humans. Ah, you say, then with a long tradition behind you, ‘Why bother with God at all! Most likely God does not even exist!’ There certainly is no irrefutable proof of God’s existence, for sure!

The origin of our very idea of God is not knowable.

And for the faithful it does not matter.

We do not bridge the gap.

God created us and has gone to great lengths (in human terms of reference) to demonstrate to us that God already has bridged the gap between the Divine and us humans.

In a word we refer to it as God’s Word.

Jesus, the Word of God, God’s self, become human, so that we could encounter God as one of us, points us to how we can respond.

First off, we stop trying to reach God, or win God’s approval, or become one with God. God has reached us, given us God’s approval (freely, that’s Grace), and has become one with us.

We do not and cannot ‘have God’ in anyway, not in our hearts, minds, souls, or special religious rites of any kind.

God has us.

Second Jesus points us to obedience: Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it! We’ve made great traditions of obeying in order to be good enough for God. It’s all and always futile and destructive to us and those around us. Hearing God’s Word and obeying it is to trust that God has provided the Word for us to hear. It is trusting that we can hear it, without some special rigmarole or religious effort. It is trusting that we can obey it, not to earn God’s favour, but in response to knowing God has already granted us God’s favour, unconditionally and overwhelmingly abundant, so that we have enough to share with everyone else.

So we all know where that leaves us. We humans fight with each other who has God’s ‘real’ Word, and who ‘really’ hears it and obeys it.

Ahh Quatsch. Get over ourselves. God’s Word is not something we can claim over other people’s claims. It’s there. Written by our ancestors as they encountered God, mind you quite imperfectly so. God has put God’s Word all around us, in nature, in the materials we build houses and cities with. God’s Word is the stuff that makes a city a community, and a house a home.

Obedience is simple. Listen. Hear the ten commandments. They set limits. Hear Jesus’ Commandment: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and strength, and your neighbour as yourself and love even your enemy.

Limits and goal. Life is pretty simple. Listen and give it all you’ve got. You cannot take anything to the grave with you, so ‘spend’ it sharing God’s Word here and now.

If not now, when are you going to do what God created you to do?!

Mystic Communion With God

By God’s Grace Mystic Communion With God is Possible For Anyone

Saturday, March 13, 2021

Meister Eckhart

Philosopher, Theologian, Mystic

Dominicon Monk

born near Gotha 1260

Proverbs 16:33

The lot is cast into the lap, but the decision is the Lord’s alone.

James 4:15

Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.’

Words of Grace For Today

Many see that Martin Luther was pivotly influenced by Theologia Germanica, thought by many to be written by Meister Eckhart, while he was in hiding. Luther provided the title as he assembled editions of it from not commonly available manuscripts that came to his attention.

Luther is said to have written:

[N]ext to the Bible and St. Augustine, no book has ever come into my hands, from which I have learned … more of God, and Christ, and man and all things that are….Wikipedia.

While traditionally mystics are seen as having ‘ecstatic experiences’ of the divine, uniting themselves with the divine, unlike other humans, Luther’s theology provides much more profound understanding of the divine presence in creation: it is sacramental. That is God makes Godself known to any who wish to notice in the most mundane and common things.

This does not detract from the complete otherness of the divine, nor our being made in God’s image, nor our great distance from being anything perfect. Rather it affirms that God bridges the great gap between the infinite and finite. Traditionally Christians have affirmed that God is present in the Bread and Wine of the Eucharist, and in the Water of Baptism, and in the Word preached, sung and prayed, and in the gathering of two or three faithful.

Sacramental mystics do not strive to attain unity with God. We affirm the long tradition since Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, and Paul, Augustine, and Luther: We humans are sinful and cannot save ourselves. God comes to live among us to demonstrate to us so clearly that God is with us, God’s Kingdom is at hand, and that God delights in being present with us and in creation for all to experience.

Creation gives witness: God is here with us. God has made us saints, though simultaneously we remain sinners. We are able by God’s Grace alone to reflect God’s unconditional love for all, to all.

What a life!

Our enemies ought to cower at the power of God, who knows each and every thing they do.

Our enemies ought to run toward God’s love, for only there can they be safe.

For God will eradicate all Evil in God’s own time.

God delights in being present with us and in creation for all to experience.

So we pray:

The lot is cast into our laps, but the decision is the Lord’s alone. If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that, for the decision is the Lord’s alone.

We trust that no matter what comes our way, God delights in being present with us and in creation for all to experience.

Trouble is Nothing . . . For We Are God’s

Friday, March 12, 2021

Dark Clouds Sit On The Horizon

And Over Us.

Doch, God Is With Us

And We Need Fear Nothing nor Anyone!

Psalm 22:11

Do not be far from me, for trouble is near and there is no one to help.

Romans 14:8

If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.

Words of Grace For Today

When trouble threatens us, though we have done nothing to bring that trouble to ourselves.

When hoards of people believe the lies that created that trouble, repeating and augmenting the lies against us.

When the courts join in believing obvious lies and creating more of their own, and covering up their lies.

AND

There is no one to help.

When the violence of greed for resources spills into our communities, forcing us to choose to acquiesce to the greed to secure a small respite for ourselves at others’ cost, or face the violence that will surely destroy us, or we run for our lives to join the other millions of refugees.

AND

There is no one to help.

When the greed of unjust people rob us of our food, of our land, of our ability to provide for ourselves.

AND

There is no one to help.

When the world is against us in any way at all, taking from us the abundant life that God has given us

AND

There is no one to help.

THEN

We remember

If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.

God’s truth renews our courage to face whatever comes our way. We do not succumb to the temptations to give up God’s truth. We do not succumb to the temptations to fail to proclaim with our words and deeds God’s Word. We do not succumb to the temptations to fail to invite even our enemies to seek God’s peace, to be converted by the Holy Spirit, to provide justice based on truth, and to contribute to God’s double victory, standing with us and all people who face the trouble of other’s sins and evil that would rob life from us and them.

We pray with confidence:

Do not be far from us, for trouble is near and there is no one to help.

For we know God is with us always.

Though no one stands with us, God walks with us and we are God’s children. Nothing nor anyone can separate us from God.

Certainly not Covid 19, nor Covid19 restrictions, nor Covidiots!

Do not be far from me, for trouble is near and there is no one to help.