Will We Choose to See Beyond Our Own Greeds, to Other’s Needs?
Ecclesiastes 5:10
The lover of money will not be satisfied with money; nor the lover of wealth, with gain. This also is vanity.
1 Timothy 6:8-9
If we have food and clothing, we will be content with these. But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.
Words of Grace For Today
It would seem to be common sense that money is necessary for life and a lot of money will make for a better life. Much of humanity has lived so. Before there was money it was wealth of whatever kind was recognized in their day.
Wisdom has always taught that pursuing money/wealth is a sure route to despair and futility. The writer of Ecclesiastes is right, such pursuits are all vanity, and vanity that serve nothing in life or in death. In fact they hasten death even though one may still walk, talk, breathe and chase after more money/wealth.
The writer of 1 Timothy has it correct if incompletely so. When we have the necessities of life we can be content, though the necessities of life are more than just food and clothing. They also include clean air and water, adequate shelter, meaningful labour and being able to love and be loved. With these we ought to be content, though we rarely are.
Built into our DNA, our survival, is the drive to make things better for ourselves and those with us. So even after we have the necessities of life we strive to have more … and that striving is rots our souls at the core.
Our ability to labour on earth is not intended to be used for ourselves alone. It is to be labour that makes life possible and better for everyone.
Today, just another today, is a day …
when we are able
by Grace
to labour
for God’s bountiful blessings to be enjoyed by more and more people.
My wounds grow foul and fester because of my foolishness.
Colossians 2:11-14
In him also you were circumcised with a spiritual circumcision, by putting off the body of the flesh in the circumcision of Christ; when you were buried with him in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead. And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, 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
There is really only one huge challenge in life, and that is: to perceive, comprehend, and wisely respond to the reality one faces each day.
Our minds are marvellously powerful organs, capable of visions and imagining a better tomorrow. We are also able to hide from the reality that we face, and make life going forward next to impossible for ourselves and/or for people around us, even people around the globe (now and in the future!) Oh, what power we have!
When one is ill, the symptoms can be mild. One can try to ignore them, continue with the aid of medication to minimize the symptoms, share the illness with unsuspecting contacts, and likely end up with worsening illness if not in the short term then as a chronic condition (which one may not even recognize as being a result of one’s ‘carrying-on with a stiff upper lip’.)
When the symptoms become severe, as the Psalmist reflects today, with fouling and festering, the illness is hard to ignore. A stiff upper lip will not do. Yet one may be so out of it that one cannot figure out how to or be able to provide the necessary care to bring about healing. The psalmist makes clear that the challenge is to find the cause of ones illness. Admitting that the cause is ones own foolishness is difficult, or at least all too often avoided by us humans.
The Colossians passage puts it right out there: we humans are very successful at … sinning. And it leaves us spiritually rotting, festering, and fouled. God uses Jesus’ story to convince us that, no matter the power of our minds to deny reality and our successes in building a perspective of life for ourselves that excludes God and God’s saving love for us, – no matter what God works to save us. Our sins are nailed to the cross. The illness of our spirits are healed. We are spiritually ‘circumcised’, so that God’s mark is made on us, a protection from all illness is provided to our souls, and we are set free to live as God created us to live: being the reflectors of, the voices of, and the hands of God’s saving love for all people.
Young William McCormick Sudbury, ON, with a group of two dozen people was awarded the Ontario Medal for Young Volunteers this last Apri;. Only one piece of his volunteer, work McCormick started A Place to Call Their Home with his brother, with a goal of reaching out to underrepresented or underserved populations by sending care packages of school supplies, and providing clothing to groups in need. He said, “My parents have always tried to instill in us a deep sense of gratitude for the situation we’re in.” Then came his rare words of recognition of the blessings he enjoys through no merit of his own: “I’ve been provided a loving family and all the support I could ever need. It was really important to try to give back.”CBC Morning Brief <info@newsletters.cbc.ca> for Friday 20 May 2022
If we could only see the true reality of the day we face each day, and our place in it (for most of us that is a place of privilege so great it has been unimaginable for most humans who have ever lived!)
Since we rarely do see God’s reality for us which includes both our foul and festering souls and God’s healing, loving grace, God uses every means possible to open our eyes, ears, minds and souls to the day that comes our way.
This also comes from the Lord of hosts; he is wonderful in counsel, and excellent in wisdom.
Ephesians 2:17
So Jesus came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near.
Words of Grace For Today
While the world (that’s all of us) gauges and categorizes different people for different receptions, different responses, and different levels of care, those most in need are all too often left to fend for themselves.
God does not deal with us this way. God hears the cries of all in need and responds with most excellent wisdom (not which furthers the unjust powers of this world – that’s all of us) but a wisdoem which serves God’s most precious, life-giving love.
God sends Jesus and with God’s own voice he proclaims peace to all, those near and those far off. All receive the offer of peace and the promise of peace.
How counter to the world’s systems, protocols, rules, and ethics! God provides to all without distinction. That might just expand our minds to think about the most needy in our neighbourhoods, the wealthiest in our neighbourhoods, and the most lost in the middle in our neighbourhoods.
‘How are you?’ is a simple phrase, too often a throw-away. Yet, God gives us the ability to ask it of all our neighbours with the most precious love.
After nearly a week taken for recovery of health and renewal of strength, even for me God offers:
Whatever troubles our hearts (and there seems to be no end to the possibilities; and as we grow older they seem to multiple geometrically) Jesus’ Word offers and promises peace.
Breathe.
Let that peace permeate all the worries of this day, all the efforts of this day, and all our accomplishments of this day.
One Would Hope Enough Brains to Figure Out Something Better for the Environment,
Like Haul It Out (As The Law Requires)
1 Samuel 3:19
As Samuel grew up, the Lord was with him and let none of his words fall to the ground.
Luke 10:16
‘Whoever listens to you listens to me, and whoever rejects you rejects me, and whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me.’
Words of Grace For Today
Letting one’s words fall to the ground.
That’s a great image of losing one’s voice, of not being heard, of not being enough that one’s voice reaches any ear and merely peters out like a plane out of fuel and they bite the dust.
But
To have God ensure that one’s words do not fall to the ground! Now that is something blessed.
We really don’t know what we’ve got until we lose it. And then when we lose our voice, and people shun us (though we’ve done nothing to deserve it, it’s all lies and deception made up to cover other’s sins), and we are cast out, unable to work, or earn a living, and we become dependent at best and desperate at least, and dead at worst.
So after one has been made to be nothing by other people’s cruelties that seem to have no end, when God comes along and promises to ‘not let your words fall to the ground’, it is to be raised from the dead and to be brought home again.
So it is.
Whoever listens, listens. And whoever rejects a person, rejects the one who gives life to that person.
May we learn to listen more carefully, kindly, with empathy to those ‘cast out’ by the world’s ways.
That’s what those two good ears God gave us are for, after all! Holding glasses in place and hanging ear rings from them may be good and even beautiful, but listening …
to be damned by our own blindness and foolish ways?
Jeremiah 31:34
No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.
John 6:28-29
Then they said to him, ‘What must we do to perform the works of God?’ Jesus answered them, ‘This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.’
Words of Grace For Today
‘This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.’
Or to put it another way: It is God’s work, not ours, to believe in Jesus.
Here we see Jesus responding to questions that really have no good answer, not as those asking would understand what a good answer might be.
The person comes with a certain way of seeing the world. It is a very unhealthy, sometimes really destructive way of seeing the world. It is a common way of seeing the world. It is to see the world as if God really did not exist and as if God did not create the universe and everything in it and as if God did not love every person in ways we can at best imagine only a little bit.
One such common question is ‘How can I save myself and my family from the threat of the foreign powers that rule our world?’
There are lots of things that one could try to do. Maybe they are even possible to do. But none of them will save you from the real threats to you and your families lives, because the foreign powers are not the greatest or the worst threats to your lives. The greatest threat to life is always to assume one lives outside God’s favour, blessings and grace.
Another common enough question is, ‘How can I get a [fill in the romantic preference, girl/boy/woman/man/monkey (just kidding)] to fall in love with me?’
The reality is no one can get anyone else to fall in love with them. Often people think they can ‘trick’ or ‘seduce’ another person to love them, but the result cannot ever be love. It is much, much less and if it’s based on deception, it will always be destructive to all parties.
The right question is, ‘How can I love someone with all my being, even when they might never love me in return? And if they never do, can I then learn to love someone else with all my being?’
The answer to that question is simple: be honest, open, trustworthy, kind and … be yourself. Then if someone should love you, they will love the real you.
The tricky part of all these ‘love me’ questions is not the love part, it is being ‘me’, and being ‘me’ in such a way as to be the best that God created ‘me’ to be.
But, as is almost always the case when people ask important questions, the problem is in the person asking the question, not the world around them; and usually the problem is they have not figured out how to be themselves. They imitate, pretend, hope, and fail, but they never really know who they are.
So in the reading for today the people come to Jesus and ask, ‘What must we do to perform the works of God?’
Which is an odd question. They might mean, ‘what must we do to do what God would have us do?’ but instead they ask, ‘what must we do in order to do the things that only God can do?’
The obvious answer is ‘you cannot do a thing since you simply will never do God’s work for God’. God does that work just fine, thank you. And only God does that work.
But telling the people who are asking in earnest this odd question is not kind. So Jesus answers another question, perhaps a question the people meant to ask, and perhaps the question that they could have asked. Always Jesus answers the people with something that is REALLY important for them to hear.
So Jesus tells these inquisitive people: ‘God’s work is to believe in me, the one God sent to you!’
That’s what they need to hear. It’s all about believing in Jesus.
The thing they do not hear is this: only the Holy Spirit can bring a person to believe in Jesus. Oh, people, dear stumbling, controlling people. No one can bring themselves to believe. And look at all the work, the words, the movements, the effort spent over the last 2000 years to get people to believe in Jesus!
Writing long before Jesus’ day Jeremiah knew well what faith in God was all about. It is about God working in us all that God wills for us: that we know God and love God, ourselves, our neighbours and our enemies, and all creation! Jeremiah sees that God does it all for us: ‘No longer shall we teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for we shall all know God, from the least of us to the greatest, [as the Lord says]; for God, and God alone, will forgive our iniquity, and remember our sin no more.
For the Lord is righteous; he loves righteous deeds; the upright shall behold his face.
Ephesians 4:23-24
For surely you have heard about him and were taught in him, as truth is in Jesus. You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.
Words of Grace For Today
Ah Ephesians, Ephesians. So like so much truncated and 1/4 turn twisted faith. Jesus shows us we cannot save ourselves. The twist is simple: after Jesus saves us, then we are able to save ourselves.
Ha!
The world and people in it would have to be of an entirely different creator for that to be possible.
Yes, the Holy Spirit gives us the courage to recognize that we should, and by God’s grace sometimes do,
put away our former way of life, you old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts, and to be renewed in the spirit of our minds, and to clothe ourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.
This is a marvellous miracle for us when God accomplishes this in us, and in those around us, or anyone on this planet … and then we go off the rails, back to our old ways
like Ephesians, thinking we can save ourselves, and not being able to at all, but making up story after story as if we can, have and will …
which is the devil’s fertile ground for all the destruction that follows in such self-delusions.
So we beg: God save us again,
and again,
and again,
and again without end,
so that we might reflect the power of your grace for us, so that others may know your grace for them.
Oh, God, give us a bit of righteousness, today, if you could. We certainly do need it. We all need it.
(The Parties are the BEST. I do the sweaty labour, God does the drinking, Works out the best for us all!)
And I Keep Getting New Invitations!
Isaiah 42:6
I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations.
Ephesians 3:12
We have access to God in boldness and confidence through faith in Jesus.
Words of Grace For Today
When Sheila gave gifts they always spoke loudly of the strings she attached to them. She gave her husband, a high school math teacher, two airline tickets to Hawaii one Christmas, and a membership in a local fitness club. It went without saying that she expected him to get fit to show himself off in a bathing suit by the middle of February when they would be on their way to the sun and beaches and the surf.
Sheila gave her three kids full scholarships to the university of their choice along with memberships in the local chapter of the conservative political party. It went without saying that she expected each of them to pursue a career that would gain them recognition so that their contributions to returning the conservatives to government happened sooner rather than later. When her oldest daughter decided to major in philosophy, political science, and economics she was pleased. She was not as happy that her daughter chose the university most noted for it’s liberal, even socialist, professors. She didn’t know about the anarchist movement among the PPE students. When her daughter decided to continue on to law school, her mother was so proud. She even offered to pay for law school. Her daughter graduated at the top of her class and passed the bar in three provinces. And she accomplished the extraordinary: she passed the bar in three American states as well. About that time her second daughter was just finishing her degree in education. Her mom didn’t say much. But when her oldest, the lawyer, took work with the innocence project and then her second daughter started teaching in an inner city school, both living, working and contributing to political parties not their mother’s conservatives, she demanded they repay her for their education costs.
Both thanked her again for her generous support, and told her there was no way they would think of trying to repay her.
About then the youngest, Sheila’s only son, looked at what his mother was demanding of his older sisters. He passed on university and his plans to double major in architecture and engineering. Instead he took an apprenticeship. He figured he could work 5 years and save enough for his first year of university and maybe figured it out on his own from there to get his degree. He had no plans to owe his mother for anything, and he had no plans to join any political party. He volunteered at the local food bank and helped out at a weekly soup kitchen. His long term plan was to design and build low cost housing that promoted healthy living, but he’d never dared tell his mother that.
Sheila’s husband graciously accepted the airline tickets for two, visited the ‘fitness club’ of his choice, and in February took that trip to Hawaii with his ‘fitness’ club’s owner, who was two years younger than he was, but about as committed to nothing as anyone Sheila knew. After the first 5 hours he and the ‘fitness club’ owner agreed to go their separate ways. Sheila’s husband didn’t need to put on a swimsuit once during the vacation and he enjoyed every minute of it out in the sun and inside in the air conditioning. He’s filled for divorce and never looked back.
God gives us greater gifts. There are no hidden, unspoken expectations. There are no performance reviews, or right political party to join (though there may be a few not to join). God provides everything we need, and only asks (and asks clearly for anyone to hear who has ears to hear) that we share everything God gives us (less things and more so Grace, forgiveness, love and life abundant) with everyone we possibly can figure out how to share them with.
Most importantly God takes us by the hand and guides us, if we but listen. We are not on our own, ever. Secondly, God does not deal with us so graciously so that we can hide it all under a bushel basket in the back yard and pretend that life is somehow the same. Everything is different, not because we have earned it or changed, or done the right things, or not even that we’ve believed the right things. What changed is that we have acknowledged that God is there with us.
God presents us, like any proud parent would, to the world. God is not bragging about us, but showing off what God can do … with sinners like us. God invites the nations into God’s kingdom of grace. God puts us on the invitations as examples of how life is good for those who acknowledge, with boldness and confidence through faith in Jesus, all that God has done for us!
Have you seen the invitation with your name on it, or are you still trying to ignore it? First God wants to give you everything that life has to offer and then God wants to show you off as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations.
Sing to the Lord a new song, his praise from the end of the earth! Let the sea roar and all that fills it, the coastlands and their inhabitants.
Colossians 1:21-23
And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him— provided that you continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised by the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven. I, Paul, became a servant of this gospel.
Words of Grace For Today
Colossians puts it right: God reconciles us to Godself, we who were once estranged and hostile in mind [and often physically against God’s people.]
Then the writer goes off the ‘Jesus rails’! The writer makes our being reconciled conditional on our continued life of faith, without shifting from the hope proclaimed to all creatures. No, no way. If our salvation (our being reconciled to God) is conditional on how we continue, then we are all hopelessly toasted! None of us can do our way forward on our own continually doing the right things as God would have us. We always remain sinners, very good sinners, too.
We are saved by grace alone!
Paul became a servant of the gospel of Jesus, as many of us even today.
Because God reconciles us, therefore we can sing a new song to God, each day.
CBC Ideas presents 29 April Part 1, and 4 May Part 2[yet to be broadcast at this writing – available only for about a month], Myth of Normal reclaiming Autism, ADHD, Bipolar Disorder, Schizophrenia, and Dyslexia as evolutionary advantages, exactly those that have helped humans flourish! “Neurodiversity” as the gifts that helped and help us adapt to rapid changes.
The restless gene, the nomadic gene, helps us regulate dopamine, reward and pleasure; those with less sensitivity to dopamine, the neurodiverse, need more endless and exciting stimuli to feel good, rewarded. Today it’s thought to be the source of ADHD.
The big bang of the human mind is recognized as that moment when persons started to have an inner voice, thought of self and reflection of one in the world around; and then human thought flourishes and develops.
So these are God’s gifts to us all, Autism, ADHD, Bipolar Disorder, Schizophrenia, and Dyslexia: “Neurodiversity” of all kinds.
Without them we humans many not have survived at all, and with them we homo-sapiens flourished through the last 50,000 years.
We can all sing new songs. That’s quite easy, and doable, given God’s blessings.
Even us neurodiverse can sing a new song to God, in fact we are the ones who create those new songs!
O Lord, you are my God; I will exalt you, I will praise your name; for you have done wonderful things, plans formed of old, faithful and sure.
Ephesians 1:4-5
… just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will ….
Words of Grace For Today
Oh Ephesians, Ephesians! The end of one thought ending a sentence and the beginning of another in the next sentence, and both thoughts could stand separate from their sentences, to be placed together as they are here, in one sentence, and since there was no punctuation in the original Greek maybe we can get away with it, and maybe not. Though I’d think so, for now.
By contrast the thoughts in the Isaiah reading are repeated often enough in scripture: God created long ago, marvellously created the entire universe and it was good; and it is all created as God planned and we are a part of that.
So the Ephesians writer (psuedo-Paul) is on track: God created us. More than just create our species and let it run its course in time, God planned for each of us in the particular, knowing we would sin, and answering that with a plan for salvation for us all. In that salvation plan, demonstrated to us in Jesus’ life, ministry, death, and resurrection, we are not merely grabbed and dragged along for the remainder of our lives. We are given a history (Jesus’ record) of being holy, pure and blameless, filled with God’s love for all of creation and all people, and then sent out free.
More than free we are adopted, and destined to be adopted long before time began, – adopted we are as God’s own children. Just because God so chose this for us. And as God’s own we get to be God’s grace for all other people!
Covid Blues, and anything else that may come our way, you are nothing compared to the life, pure and blameless that God adopts us into. Come what may, God has prepared us for all that, and for being God’s adopted for other people.
A 5th wheel 40 foot camper unit was moved in last fall before the snows fell. The owner said he was there, homeless with no where else to go, but there only for two weeks, the legal limit. Two months later his truck still came and went until …
nothing.
No tracks.
No guy.
Spring melt came, traffic came.
Still no truck.
Still no guy.
Still the 5th wheeler sat unattended back off the road, yet so visible along the entrance road to the random camping area.
Fishing season is done.
Very little traffic comes and goes.
The two huge dips in the entrance road fill with ice-water-slush.
For weeks it takes an off road, raised 4×4 to get in or out.
Then two guys, one tall and lean the other shorter and stocky, show up in a red diesel truck on a Sunday afternoon, ‘just back from working up north’ and they wanted some peace from their women, or they say.
The next day with no sign of any other traffic in and out the locks on the 5th wheeler are broken, the door left swinging in the wind, and things have disappeared out of and from around the camper.
The next day a crossover stalls after getting through those water-ice-slush filled dips in the road into the random camping area. Lucky for the couple within a small infant, with an hour a truck comes along, and pulls that poor wheel-locked crossover back through one of those dips (the deepest one) and out of the way. But the crossover sits there for two days, unmoved before the couple returns to retrieve it.
The 5th Wheeler, though, still sits there abandoned as it has all winter long, though now it’s door swings in the breeze.
For this, the owner of that old camper, homeless as he may have been, certainly was not prepared.
Maybe no one can be prepared for losing nearly everything and then having the little bit that is left vandalized and open to wild animals (especially the real wild and dangerous kind on two legs).
Even if that were to happen to us, we are adopted, and given new life, pure and blameless, as God’s own.
God save us!
Still we pray fervently to be spared this further indignity and threat to our very life … and we work diligently to prepare that nothing is left unattended, un-watched, secured as best anything can be. It cannot be God’s plan, that homeless people are victims of thievery, losing the last bit of everything they have to keep them alive. So we pray, God save us. And we work to be ready for all the tomorrows that we may yet live to enjoy.
Always,
Always,
Always,
Especially in the face of dangerous wild animals,
We trust God,
and since God has chosen us as children, long before the beginning of time, so that in this time all will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well.
He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
Acts 10:36
You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ—he is Lord of all.
Words of Grace For Today
In the quiet of the hermitage, holy by years of holy celebrations, the rain fell mixed with snow, and chilled the air, still above freezing.
This is peace.
This is peace,
For there is no war,
not here.
This is peace,
For there is no one seeking to kill me,
not right now, right here … that I know of.
This is peace,
For in the cool of the evening just begun the warmth from the woodstove promises safety and comfort against any chilling cold.
This is peace,
For there is plenty of clean water, plenty of healthy food and drink, and plenty of work to do so that boredom and lack of purpose have no purchase here … for now.
This is peace,
For the wind that has beat the tarps about is calmed, and the music of the meadow is natural other than the fans to cool the solar power systems, and they are reminders of what can be done with next to no carbon footprint.
This is peace,
For this is what God has provided, for this day, hear and now.
This is peace, for come what may, God walks with me in this meadow and beyond, as God walks with you where you are and beyond.
For all this we give God endless praise and thanks.
There are so many places and times that are not peace.
We remember the people who suffer
causing the lack of peace, and
those suffering the lack of peace.
For them we pray this day, that God will provide them peace, and a peace that ends violence and suffering.
