Whether we see others as ‘weeds’ in our lawn of life
God sees us each as precious and
God shines Light on each of us,
the light of love and life.
Isaiah 56:7
These I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer; their burnt-offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.
Colossians 3:11
In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!
Words of Grace For Today
We humans keep building walls, us and them.
God keeps telling us and showing us that God is for all people, without any us or them.
Christ is all and in all … and for all peoples!
…
Christ is even for me, and for you, sinners though we be, God has claimed us a God’s children and made us saints, able to share God’s light with all people …
without any ‘us’ or ‘them’
or
walls
or
judgments
or
condemnations,
…
…
just
Grace for all.
It’s a wonderful dance of love, this life is (at least as God intends for us, and makes possible for us to live it.)
Ready or not here it comes, one day at a time, one hour at a time, one minute at a time … one decision at a time.
Set a place for Elijah, keep an eye for the poor at your gate, invite in the homeless …
This is God’s day, and out day to give everything back to God, one decision in one minute at a time.
Praise the Lord! O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures for ever.
Colossians 3:17
Whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
Words of Grace For Today
Giving God thanks surely involves using our voices and God’s name, though when we use God’s name constantly in our communication with other people it is a grand misuse of God’s name, grace, and steadfast love.
Truly, in word and deed, doing everything in the name of our Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God is so much more than mere words of thanks, or constant mention of God’s name.
Giving God thanks is an attitude towards life that brings us to reflect God’s grace towards others.
It is to give of one’s self so that others will live, whether they accept and practice faith in Jesus Christ, or not, for all people are God’s creatures, God’s precious people, people God forgives.
Giving God thanks is to extend to all others the same grace that God first has given (and continually gives) to us.
More often than not it is to do it anonymously, so our names are not known or remembered, so that our God’s name is not known or remembered … rather that God’s grace towards us is experienced as God’s grace towards other people. We certainly are not to bring people to worship or adore us for our good deeds and gracious words. We certainly are not sent out into the world to bring people to worship a ‘small god’, a godlet of any kind even one they name Jesus.
There are enough people worshipping a godlet of some kind or another, and too often they call that godlet ‘Jesus’. It certainly is not.
The past president of Tanzania is one very visible example: Covid 19 hit and shut down country after country in Africa with restrictions and precautions. What did this ‘Lutheran Christian’ do? He prayed. Certainly good. Then he announced to the country that his ‘godlet’ ‘Jesus’ had cured all Tanzanians of Covid 19. There was to be no mention of any respiratory illness as Covid 19, though there were thousands of cases everywhere. His godlet Jesus caused the avoidable death and long term disability through Covid 19 (and long Covid 19) of thousands of Tanzanians. That kind of godlet, no matter what it is called, is certainly not the Jesus of Nazareth, Son of God, healer of our every ill, the creator, redeemer and sanctifier of the universe and all people in it.
Small gods, godlets, are made up every day by so many people looking for a way through life’s challenges.
God walks with us, seeing all we do, and still God’s steadfast love endures for ever for us and all people.
Because God is gracious to us, therefore we can be gracious with all the deadly covidiots out there, and all the abusers, and all those with power who abuse it, and all those who thought (and those that still think) residential schools were acceptable, … and all the enemies of life abundant for all.
Treating the enemies of life abundant for all is how we give thanks to God, for God’s grace worked first for us.
…
Happy 90th Birthday Celebration Dort!
Very sorry we cannot cross the border to be there to celebrate with you.
The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
Galatians 5:22-23
By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things.
Words of Grace For Today
While Canada struggles with the reality outed now that residential schools were a place of mass deaths for first nation’s children forcibly taken from their families, the real problem lies so much deeper, and it’s effects are far more widely felt.
Canada is not a place of justice.
Canada is a place of ‘law’, where ‘law’ means that while there is process, the results are still the same as if there were no law: the result is arbitrary and moulded around the law to fit the desired results … by police, by lawyers and crown prosecutors, by judges, and by appeal judges.
Anyone can be arrested, tried, and convicted for anything.
I am living proof, as are thousands of others.
Abuse comes in many other forms as well. It comes from narrow focus, diverted interest, and biased justice. Lack of safe drinking water for communities for decades and longer. Preferential treatment for those with connections and promised support of those in power, puppets really for money-power interests. Biased application of laws; it used to be worked against women, now it’s worked out against men. More men die of violence and abuse than women, and more men die of suicide, a direct result of abuse than women, yet our attention is focused on the missing and murdered women. A larger view of the atrocities is required to be able to address the real issues.
Only a large view of what is happening can start to address the real issues and make real change possible … but those require we broaden our focus, hold our interest and provide justice based on truth … while those with power, wealth and influence have no interest in doing so; it would mean a loss of privilege for them.
It has been so since the beginning of time.
Canada is no different.
Canadians may be polite on the surface; but the corruption and abuse run as deep and wide among us as anywhere at any time in history. We just cover it with a thin layer of deceitful niceness.
And either directly, indirectly, or by omission every Canadian is implicated, and guilty, awaiting sentencing by God.
Thankfully God is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love or there would be no hope for any of us, not at all.
There is another way to live: The Holy Spirit makes this possible for us: the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
Now that’s a way to live, and to address the abuse, corruption, violence, and killing that is so much a part of life around us – whether we choose to see it or ignore it.
This way of living guided by the gifts of the Spirit gives us the courage to see reality, the real terrible things that go on around us, in our names, each day, against good, honest, innocent people.
This Spirit-led way of living gives us the courage to respond to our terrible reality so as to change it, including the residential school mass graves now being uncovered for all to see.
A helpful, healthy, and effective response begins with the everyday responses we give to those around us: honest kindness, gracious truth, and generous joy … so that when the really devastatingly huge issues arise we are well practised in responding with peace, self-control, and gracious truth!
In this way as well God is abounding in steadfast love for us.
The living water of Christ that spans the globe in the oceans,
Breaks in on us (at the right time and place)
and Gives Us Life
For this we give thanks.
Psalm 48:10
Your name, O God, like your praise, reaches to the ends of the earth. Your right hand is filled with victory.
Acts 3:1
One day Peter and John were going up to the temple at the hour of prayer, at three o’clock in the afternoon.
Words of Grace For Today
When Jim, George and Helen, Wayne, and Frank went on a canoe trip, they were not fully prepared for what they would encounter. (Pretty normal for most of life for most of us.) Three days out a storm threatened a great deal of rain. They made camp on an island, not as far as they had planned to be that day, with one day before their return.
They set their tents rotating out to kitchen duties, to prepare supper, a pot of hearty soup. Chilled as they were when George and Helen started out they called on their southwestern US residence and added a bit of extra pepper as they fried the meat for the soup, knowing it would take off the chill.
Jim relieved them so they could set up their tent, nicely trenched as they knew it needed to be to provide a dry night’s rest. Chilled as he was from the afternoon paddling in the rain he added a bit of extra pepper to the soup in addition to the vegetables he chopped up and added to the meat.
Wayne, his tent set up and nicely trenched, returned with more firewood and took over from Jim, stoking the fire and warming himself as he went. He stirred the soup, more a stew by now, and added some minute rice, and a little extra pepper to take the chill off the wet evening.
Frank arrived, tent setup but not trenched, since he’d gotten the last available spot and the rocks and roots were not about to be trenched.
He added a bit of pepper to the stew to take the chill off and then as everyone gathered divide out the stew to each person, with only a small bit left in the pot, all covered with dark spots of something.
…
With gusto they all started to dig in, hungry after a long day paddling and a wet afternoon, as the rain continued to fall … having no effect on the heat created in their mouths and stomachs by ‘just a little extra’ pepper in the stew.
…
There is a right time, a right measure, for everything.
Help us, O God of our salvation, for the glory of your name; deliver us, and forgive our sins, for your name’s sake.
1 John 4:10
In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.
Words of Grace For Today
The beginning of every moment, every event, every situation, every life, every day … of every every is God’s Love.
God’s Love that created a universe with life in it, and us as life self-aware in among the many forms of life,
God’s Love that gave us freedom to love, and therefore freedom to not-love (that is: to sin),
God’s Love that holds the universe together (whether it’s String Theory or particles and strings, it’s all God’s Love),
God’s Love that holds life together, even our lives, giving us our daily needs, including meaningful labour and the ability to love and be loved,
God’s Love that gives us God’s answer to our sins: forgiveness and renewed life,
God’s Love that walks with us each moment of each day, even when we walk ourselves into the hell of the Evil One’s influence (as God’s Love keeps us walking right out the other side of hell back into life abundant),
God’s Love … it is the every every of our lives.
God loves us not for our sakes as if we somehow became more valuable and the purpose of the universe just because God loves us. Rather God loves us for God’s name’s sake, for God’s message about God to be seen and heard by all people through God’s grace acted out for us in forgiveness.
God forgives us and we receive life again. The rest of all humans, those long since have lived on earth, those that live now, and those that will live, receive a clear message about God: God loves people. God loves us. And God loves them!
We get to screw our lives, because we are going to anyway, and because we become the raw material for God’s communication to all humans: God’s clear message that God loves us, and that God’s Love is the beginning of all, it is the every of all, and it is the end of all in all (the purpose and the result and the finality – the end of all time for each human as well as that for all humans.)
Until then we are privileged to be the message of God’s Love for all people: that we are forgiven and renewed, and that we can live for others, as Jesus lived for others, that all people may have life, and life abundant!
So it is that we enjoy the reprieve from the record-breaking, sweltering heat of climate change that sat over us last week with the cool more common in autumn.
So it is that we prepare for the next days of heat, hopefully not record-breaking.
So it is that we learn to enjoy winter all that much more, and especially autumn, after the bugs are gone and before everything freezes requiring more wood for a modicum of warmth inside.
So it is that we enjoy having an ‘inside’ that can be heated against the cold outside.
So it is that we enjoy everything about life, and find pure joy in a breath of fresh air, a stormy day, and a calm morning sunrise … as we wait for our last sunset that comes to harvest every mortal creature … knowing God’s Love walks with us each precious day and will walk with us also then.
Until that day our purpose is to be the message for all humans, that God loves us all!
In this is love, not that we loved God but that God loved us and sent God’s only Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.
Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.
Matthew 5:13
You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.
Words of Grace For Today
Jesus sends the disciples out into the world to share the Good News, that God has sent Jesus to demonstrate God’s love, forgiveness, grace, and favour bestowed on all peoples.
We are out in the world, now in a world that ‘does not need God’, has no room for God, and pretends that everything is fine (without God.) The Good News is needed more than ever before.
How is this sending by Jesus different than God ‘exiling’ the people of Israel to foreign cities, cut off from their homes? It is done by force, first of all, against the people’s will and established by the sword of a alien ruler, not of faith in God. When Jesus sends the disciples, they choose to follow Jesus and they choose to obey him as he sends them. The exiles are not able to travel ‘back home’. The are captives in the foreign city. The disciples go out and they return ‘home’ to follow Jesus as he goes about the Galilean countryside.
How is Jesus sending the disciples the same as God ‘exiling’ the people of Israel to foreign cities? The passage for today from Jeremiah provides the link: in both sendings God’s people are to seek the welfare of the places and cities where they go. The exiles are more permanent, perhaps life long, and even many generations long. Their well being is intricately tied to the well being of the cities to which they are exiled. The disciples bring nothing with them, so their welfare is tied to the welfare of the places they go as well. The difference for the disciples is that at some point they get to leave the welfare of the places the visit and reclaim the welfare of home as their own, perhaps … if the welfare at home is controlled by people who will welcome them home.
The passage from Matthew ties it together nicely: the quality of one’s life as a disciple of Jesus, as a person of God’s people is not determined by the prosperity of one’s surroundings. Rather one’s life is determined to be of the greatest quality because God has adopted us as children. No matter what comes our way we remain God’s children.
Like salt we do not change as the surroundings around us change. We remain salt.
The danger to our lives is not prosperity or poverty. Each we can deal with easily enough, poverty perhaps more easily than prosperity because in prosperity it is too easy to forget from where the goodness of life comes. We too easily attach goodness to the things of luxury and comfort, rather than to the essentials of life provided always by God’s goodness and grace. Soon we start to assume that we can make it well through life without God’s blessings, grace, forgiveness and guidance. In poverty we do struggle to remain alive, though there are few reasons to doubt that the goodness of life comes not from things, but from God, because so often without any goods or things to divert our attention from God’s blessings we immerse ourselves (in order for life to continue) in giving God thanks for all the goodness that pours over us each day.
We are God’s children. Simple and easy. Like salt it’s not complicated. Like salt too much stops life, but the right amount preserves sustenance through the sparsest of times.
When we lose our saltiness, our simple dependence on God for everything, and our ever present gratitude for everything, then we become useless. We lose grace and have no Good News to share. There is nothing left but to make up nonsense about life. We see so much of that, so much more than we could imagine civilization can endure and still survive.
To this saltiness-lost-world Jesus sends us with Good News.
To this saltiness-lost-world God exiles us to live out the Good News.
Wherever we are or go God walks with us, and guides us to share and hear anew the old, old story of Jesus and his love, for us and the whole of creation.
One step at a time today, again; not towards our goals, but towards God’s will for us.
You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.
Luke 11:2
He said to them, ‘When you pray, say: Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come.’
Words of Grace For Today
How can we live a perfectly righteous life, enjoying everything in creation as we and it was intended to be enjoyed?
The ten commandments are a basic framework of how to live well in community in God’s creation.
The first thing is to get things right about God: to know God, to speak well of God, to speak well to God. God is not just another thing in creation. Nor is God just another being in creation. Nor is God just another special entity beyond creation. God is Creator of us and all that is! God is the only entity beyond creation.
God is not disengaged from us or from creation. God is far more than creation and yet God is always with us in creation. God is intimately involved with every little detail of our lives and every thread of creation’s time.
God is also for us.
God is interested in us getting the best out of life that life has to offer.
In a word more powerful than we will ever be able to know: God love us.
God wants us to know God, and respect God.
God wants us to be for all of creation.
God wants us to respect creation and other people.
In a word more powerful than we will ever be able to know: God wants us to love God, and all of God’s creation, and all of God’s people.
That would make for a perfectly righteous life for us and everyone.
How far we fall from that ideal!
In fact, God does not acquit us on any charge as we live so much of our lives against God, against creation and against each other!
God judges us guilty, deserving of death!
And then God forgives us! Again, and again, and again, and on and on and on all our lives!
How can we respond?
Well we could try not to misuse God’s name, for starters, and thereby teaching ourselves to respect God, which is the beginning of love.
There is so much more that we can do, with marginal success, except one thing we can do nearly perfect all the time. We can pray.
We can pray as Jesus taught us, including that we can pray that God’s name be hallowed and that God’s Rule will come – though it is come near and will come completely one day whether we pray or not. Praying for it to come helps us to remember that we are able to act towards others with love since God’s Rule is already here.
As an aside since it is a huge issue today (again as many times in history): God does not have gender and God has all genders. It is our referring to God solely as having only one gender that skews our ability to see each other with love. It is our refusal to refer to God with any one gender (to say God does not have that gender) that skews our ability to see each other with love.
Historically Christians have referred to God as male, a reflection of a mistaken idea worked out against us all that males are more human, more like God, more powerful than females. Huge mistake.
The efforts to correct this are often as hate-fuelled and therefore so skewed as to make love impossible.
It’s time we prayed that God’s Rule would come now for us on these issues, so that we are freed to address God as mother, as parent, as Abba, and with all other labels of gender, so that we see that all genders are a reflection of God’s goodness and love for us all in creation!
As God mixes us bad people in with creation and comes up with Grace and Wonders!
Psalm 71:16
I will come praising the mighty deeds of the Lord God, I will praise your righteousness, yours alone.
Ephesians 2:10
We are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.
Words of Grace For Today
It’s simple: God created us to do good works.
We sign God’s praises for God’s righteousness, God’s alone.
It’s all way too simple said this way and expounding on just these words will leave out the truth about God all together.
We will set ourselves up to have to praise God, and God alone. We will set ourselves us to do what we are created to do: to do good works. We will fail, and many of us will lie to ourselves and others in order to pretend we are not failing … so great is the cognitive dissonance when we cannot do the good deeds we think we are created to do.
Not that we should give up on doing good works and praising God alone.
On our own we can never do either.
How is life then ever at all good enough with us for God to even pay us any attention?
Simple in a word, and as complicated as the whole universe held together at the subatomic level, yet vulnerable to even the smallest parasites and viruses!
Grace is that Word. God acts first to forgive and renew us. Then, guided by the Holy Spirit (in spite of our wishes and understandings that would lead us astray) we are able by Grace to do good deeds.
Thanks be to God, for the greatest miracle is that God chooses to save us, again and again.
We start each day with prayers. We end each day with thanks.
All day long we are caught (if we stop to notice at all) by the wondrous miracles God does to forgives us and renew us … we are caught up on God’s Kingdom, and we share it, imperfect and ungraceful as we are, with others … who are also imperfect (needing forgiveness) and ungraceful as the like us bungle through life, as if we were wild elephants in a china shop.
Crash, Bang, Crash.
Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle
We keep breaking God’s heart of steadfast love. And God keeps on forgiving us and renewing us.
Now that is a simple word and as complicated as moving to live in the mountains and ensuring we can enjoy both sunrise and sunset; The way the world works, we are privileged if we can have either one or the other … but both, and new life? That’s a miracle for which we can give God thanks and praise each day.
Even the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as dust on the scales; see, he takes up the isles like fine dust.
Revelation 21:3
I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them.’
Words of Grace For Today
Wonders upon wonders stare us in the face each morning, noon, and night:
The universe is a great and expansive place. It is a great thing to wonder about: How did it come to exist? Where does it extend to? What is beyond? What holds it together? What is ‘next door’ to us?
Life around is continually renewing itself. It is a great thing to wonder about this process: What holds it all together? How is it that the ‘birds and the bees’ came to be able to renew life, to procreate and have life continue despite so many challenges to life? How much of it have we already destroyed or put in danger with our huge population and luxury demands for energy?
The atomic make up of this universe is a curious expanse. What regulates the sub-atomic pieces of the universe and life so that what we encounter has a semblance of order, an order that we ‘discover’ and passionately pursue understanding, so that we can ‘progress into the future’?
Human life and consciousness bring us to wonder about all around us, with curiosity and purpose to ‘make life better’. No more wonder is possible than to wonder how it is that we can wonder at all. What are we made up of? Certainly it is more than chemicals and happenstance!
The greatest wonder of all is that God deigns to live with us, as Jesus, and always as God who sojourns with us each day of this miracle of life.
God is the One who created all this, the universe of galaxies and black holes, life on earth of so many varieties and interconnections, human spirit of body-mind-soul, and all that is – even if we cannot know of it or even imagine it!
God sees the nations so grandly constituted for good and evil as entities smaller than grains of sand. God could scoop up the isles out of the oceans all in a moment and toss them into a black hole on the other side of the universe. God knows the inner workings of every life form and every interconnection between forms of life and even between each life form and the cosmic events of which we may or may not be aware. God knows everything about humans, the good, the bad, the ugly, and the miraculous.
God has all knowledge of all things. God has all power over all things in all time and beyond time. God has all everything above every thing and moment.
This God chooses to walk with us, each day. To love us. To protect us. To guide us. To accompany us in the best of times and the worst of times.
If God is for us, who can be of consequence standing against us?
No one. Not even the Evil One and those who do the Evil One’s bidding, trying to lie about reality, to create a false reality supposedly more favourable to themselves while destroying so many around them.
No, not even our worst enemies, nor the Evil that drives them … nothing can separate us from God’s love and grace. With God’s love and grace working for us, we are able to help God makes wonders happen for all God’s people, all God’s creatures, and even all of God’s creation.
Yet I have been the Lord your God ever since the land of Egypt; you know no God but me, and besides me there is no saviour.
1 John 4:13-14
By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Saviour of the world.
Words of Grace For Today
If only all in the world would only know our God as generously gracious, loving and merciful, and always walking with us, all of us.
If only we could know our God so, and remember that … every day, no matter what.
We can know that God is with us, for even in our darkest hour, the story of Jesus saving the world and us in it can always convince us anew that God is with us and for us, just as God worked to save God’s people from slavery in Egypt, from the wilderness, and from all the temptations of the Evil One.
Spirit and spirit, God meets us as we are and as God is: always fully spirited, always able to follow in Jesus’ way, giving good words and God’s good promises to all.
