This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
Luke 21:33
Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.
Words of Grace For Today
What will you do, or have you done, for Thanksgiving this year?
Will your celebrations reach all in your family?
Will your celebrations reach anyone beyond your family?
Will you pause, reflect and consider why you celebrate as you do?
Will giving thanks be the centre of your celebrations, or just a small piece, or even an aside to all the other activities?
As we celebrate Thanksgiving year after year, it loses it’s meaning for many of us. Instead it takes on as its purpose, the immediate experience of our Thanksgiving foods, football games, and family gatherings. We learn to identify Thanksgiving with the warmth of these traditions, with the results of our own efforts. Giving God thanks has become an obligatory part of our weekend.
Doch, the true warmth of Thanksgiving remains the spirit on fire God gives us humble saints, so that, by our labours, we can share that warmth with those struggling to survive the coming cold, and all evil. (KAS sermon for Thanksgiving 2021)
(‘Doch’ is that wonderful word from German that means ‘but rather’, a word that encapsulates God’s response to our sinful ways.)
God’s Word will endure forever. God’s Covenant with us will survive forever even if heaven and earth come to an end. God will always be our God, and we will be God’s people.
Since God does this for us though we certainly deserve nothing, each day gives us opportunity to give God thanks in thought, word, and deed.
Then Naaman said, ‘If not, please let two mule-loads of earth be given to your servant; for your servant will no longer offer burnt-offering or sacrifice to any god except the Lord.’
Romans 12:1
I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.
Words of Grace For Today
Naaman is a great Aramean warrior … who has leprosy. A slave girl taken from Israel in a raid advises Naaman’s wife that the prophet in Israel can cure him, so the Aramean king sends Naaman with great treasure to beg the king of Israel to cure him. The king is distressed and cries, ‘Am I God, to give death or life, that this man sends word to me to cure a man of his leprosy? Just look and see how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me.’
Elisha hears of this and sends word to Naaman to come and be cured. Naaman comes, Elisha directs him to bathe in the Jordan seven times, and Naaman erupts in a rage at how senseless this is, and how the Jordan is no better than the rivers at home. His servants intervene and ask him if Elisha’s directions were more difficult, would he not follow them. Since they are so simple, why not follow Elisha’s prescription. Naaman relents, bathes in the Jordan, and is cured. He returns to give the great treasure he carries to the prophet of God, but Elisha will accept no gift.
Naaman responds with his insistence of two mule-loads of earth, a promise to not worship other gods (except when he brings his master to worship his master’s god).
Repeatedly in scriptures the references are earthy, mundane, even scatological.
What is clear is that God does not ask of us anything other than or less than a sacrifice of our own hearts, minds and bodies in response to all that God does for us. Bringing great treasure does nothing to win God’s approval or thank God for God’s great deeds. For what more can God for us than to cure us of our diseases for which we are cast out of the community by God’s own people? It is often said by elderly people, if we have our health, that is everything. It is not actually true, but it does reflect how health does determine the baseline of our physical lives, which does determine much about the parameters of our physical lives. The truth is that our spiritual health determines everything about the parameters of our lives, no matter our physical limitations.
No matter how great we think we are, no matter how wealthy we think we’ve become, no matter how much comfort we live in, the value of life is measured only by God’s presence with us. Everything else is at most secondarily significant and most is barely worth considering, except as a means to share God’s Grace with others.
We reach high. We reach far and wide for the greatness that will make life, all in vain.
A young fisher lived with his beloved wife in a humble fisher’s shack near the shore. The day she found out she was pregnant her husband caught the largest fish he’d ever seen or heard of. He celebrated because it would feed them for months. Then the fish spoke and offered to fulfill the fisher’s wish if he were set free. The fisher loved his wife and knew she wanted a true house for a home, and he made his wish. He arrived on shore to see their shack gone and in it’s place stood a marvellous house.
As the pregnancy progressed his wife became more and more demanding, never satisfied with her marvellous house. She wanted a queen’s castle and to rule the country. The fisher caught the magical fish again and freed him for his wish fulfilled. He arrived on shore to see their house gone and in it’s place stood a huge castle.
It was not long and his wife was again not satisfied with her castle and ruling the country. She wanted to be pope and live in the Vatican. The fisher caught the magical fish again and freed him for his wish fulfilled. He arrived on shore to see their castle gone and in it’s place stood the Vatican including St. Peter’s Cathedral.
Late in the eighth month of her pregnancy the fisher’s wife became more and more unsatisfied being pope, and she demanded that she become God and live in God’s own home in the heavens of eternal glory. The fisher caught the magical fish again and freed him for his wish fulfilled. He arrived on shore to see the Vatican gone and in it’s place stood their humble fisher’s shack. There indeed God lived … and twins, a girl and a boy, were born the next morning. (free retelling of Fisher’s Wife)
No matter how high, far or wide we reach, God sends us higher, and we inevitably fall, fall free, fall as trapeze artists with no safety net to catch us.
Doch, when we inevitably stumble into free-fall, since we know God alone saves us, we can remain calm and still, fully trusting that God will catch us, sometimes with something as simple as bathing seven times in the Jordan, and bring us home to God’s humble ‘fisher’s shack.’
Now therefore revere the Lord, and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness; put away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord.
John 12:26
Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honour.
Words of Grace For Today
There are more than enough gods out there that people worship, not least of all themselves as godlets. After God delivers us into the Promised Land, Joshua and other faithful leaders call to us to put aside these other gods and our efforts to be godlets. They call us to be faithful servants of Jesus the Christ, the Trinitarian God, Parent, Son, and Holy Spirit.
As adults we make it so complicated, as if truth were relative, not absolute and clear, so that we can fabricate reality on our own to fit our own deceptions and destruction of others, as poor Wendy does, creating a fabricated ‘record’ of her office’s lies about being abused by an honest person (easy to victimize since she has autism).
Children often have not yet learned to lie with their parents and adults (and pastors like Anne, who has built her life on lies and bullying honest and vulnerable people to make her way.)
Before their Thanksgiving dinner his dad asked Jim, just 4 years old, to say the prayer. He began his prayer, thanking God for all his friends by name, for Mommy, Daddy, brother, sister, Grandma, Grandpa, and all his aunts and uncles. Then he gave thanks for the turkey, dressing, fruit salad, cranberry sauce, pies, cakes, cream and even the milk. Then he paused …. After a long silence, Jim looked up at his mother and asked, “If I thank God for the broccoli, won’t he know that I’m lying?” (reworked TL 2021 SERMONSHOP 1996, Al Henager, 1st Presb. Ch., Fordyce, Arkansas)
Sometimes, for some of us, we gain wisdom as we grow older. We see the fresh honesty of children and regain our perspective on who we are, God’s servants who can only beg for mercy. Some of us then can share this perspective of who we are as mere beggars with others, so that more and more people live an abundant life.
Jim’s grampa, Hank, is thankful for every little bit of harvest, even overjoyed when it does not go well, as it did this year. His wife and grown sons to be truthful are dismayed. She asked him finally how he can be so oblivious to how bad it’s been this year. Hank responded: I start the year, humble and thankful for each day I do not lose the farm, like so many of my friends did when we were younger. I’ve come to realize that the land, some of it in our family for generations, really is not ‘our’ land. It is on loan from God and we only beg for mercy and good harvests. Then he added, of course it helps that our sons make most of the decisions now. (TL 2021 “Hank’s Humility”)
As we enter this Thanksgiving weekend, we remember who we are, who we serve, whose people we are, and to whom we call on to save us: we serve the Lord Jesus in sincerity and in faithfulness. We acknowledge every day that we owe everything we have and are, even that we have breath this day, to God’s marvellous and bountiful Grace.
I gave them my statutes and showed them my ordinances, by whose observance everyone shall live.
Philippians 4:8
Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.
Words of Grace For Today
What did God do?
What do we do in response? What can we?
God, as Ezekiel reminds us, gave us God’s commandments, so that in following them we might live well. In response we built a great tradition of interpreting God’s Laws to fit every circumstance and every variation through time and place. Yet we are left with no hope of being able to actually obey all God’s commandments, down to the last little minutia that we’ve broken them down into … nor the spirit of the commandments, not at all.
Following Laws guided us for generations, though it really did not provide a way to live well. Either we have to admit we fail to follow God’s commands or we have to try to deceive even ourselves in order to seem to follow them.
Enter Jesus, who leaves us with a story written in the life of God’s own son living as a human. The point of Jesus’ story is that God loves us unconditionally and forgives us and renews us for life, life lived well. We only need to surrender our pride to the fact that God loves and saves us when we least deserve it. That seems to be a proverbial bitter pill to swallow, so we avoid the point of Jesus’ story and make it in to so many other things that are inconsequential …
and off we go into the wilds of life all on our own, no better than our ancestors who either ignored God’s commandments or pretended to keep them while breaking them morning, noon, and night.
Paul, assured that God saves him and all others, by grace alone, not by our merit, travels to share the Good News of Jesus’ story, and congregations form around his teaching. One in Phillipi supports Paul as he travels on to spread the Good News to more and more places. The letter to the Philippians is one of Paul’s warmest, kindest, most heartfelt. Filled with gratitude and wise advice on how to live our the renewed life given to us by Jesus.
In the passage for today, Paul gives advice on how to focus one’s mind to the greatest benefit of all those the saints work to share life abundant with. It is to focus and think on whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise.
This advice is not a formula on how to fulfill God’s commands, or how to earn God’s forgiveness and approval. It is what we can do after we humbly accept that we can only beg for God’s mercy … and then set out to be God’s Grace for others. Starts with what we spend our time thinking about.
So what’s on your mind today? What will you expend energy towards? How will you shine Christ’s Light into the darkness?
Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth; give me an undivided heart to revere your name.
Hebrews 13:9
Do not be carried away by all kinds of strange teachings; for it is well for the heart to be strengthened by grace, not by regulations about food, which have not benefited those who observe them.
Words of Grace For Today
The heart as centre of consciousness, choice, intention, deliberation, and emotion (not quite as we would assign cognitive functions to the brain or ‘head’), the Psalmist prays may be undivided and the writer of Hebrews asks that it be strengthened not by might or power but by Grace.
Ah, the ways of living connected with creation are as extraordinary and seemingly out of sync with the way the people of the world proceed through life.
There are always ‘all kinds of strange teachings’, even today as fake news is manufactured as fast as people swarm to it on the internet, sharing it like viruses and diseases that infect one’s thinking and one’s being until one is so afraid and disconnected from God’s good creation and all God’s blessings that anything can be the truth. Lies are manufactured to deal with all kinds of situations, and against good people who threaten to expose these poor lost souls to reality.
It makes for proceeding through life a minefield of uncontrollable psychopathic variants of humanity that would rather spin a lie than participate at all in any truth. For truth has a way of expanding across all sorts of lies, webs of lies, and networks of liars, exposing with clear simple light the evil that is there, so obviously there. Only by constant denial and fabrication of more and more lies do the lies cover themselves in more shtako, as if that could ever hide them from the truth, the light, the Grace of God.
The truth cuts open the darkness. The light burns out the rot. And God’s Grace heals the wounds so that life can continue for all. Yet so many refuse to live in the light and dive back into the darkness of lies as quickly as they can, again and again as Truth, Christ’s Light, and God’s Grace continually work through the saints to bring life, abundant life, to all people and all creation.
So we pray each day, save us from being carried away by all kinds of strange teachings that benefit no one, and teach us your way, O Lord, that we may walk in your truth
Rend your hearts and not your clothing. Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.
1 Thessalonians 5:9-10
For God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him.
Words of Grace For Today
Rending one’s clothing was a way of symbolically taking apart the life that had gone wrong, and allowing God to reassemble life in harmony with God’s will.
Like many of our religious practices we have reduced rending of clothing to a superficial act that really has no impact on our actual lives. So Joel calls people to not just rend their clothing, but to rend their hearts, and thereby to allow God to reassemble life to be in harmony with God’s will.
This simple act changes us at our foundations.
Jesus provides us God’s way forward for us: we rely solely on the Grace of Jesus the Christ, so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live … and live with him.
Living by Grace alone we have no place for wrath.
We embody God’s Grace. As God is, so God makes us saints gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing. This is quite the life, in which rending our hearts is a small and yet complete act of love.
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.
Acts 10:43
All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.
Words of Grace For Today
That day when all will know God, and no one will need to teach about God or learn about God will be the day
we hope
when all sin will disappear, when humans will no longer sin.
God has a different plan.
If sin disappears we will have lost our freedom to choose and with that our ability to love,
for love entails the commitment of self to another person, a commitment made as a free choice. Otherwise it is not love.
As our ability to choose to love persists, then we must (a priori) have the choice not to love, which is to sin.
As long as love exists, sin exists.
God does not end sin … and therefore love.
God allows us to love and to sin … and
God deals with our sins by forgiving them, exactly when we do not deserve that forgiveness.
This is Jesus’ story: that God so loved the world that God gave his only son that all who believe in him should be saved. This believing is not something we accomplish other than by the work of the Holy Spirit in us. Jesus saves us by grace alone.
Each day we breathe we have choices, and when we choose to love we, they people we love, and all of creation benefits. This is how God created us to live.
If we choose to not love, then God offers us forgiveness, free forgiveness and renewed life, renewed so that we can again choose to love … or not.
God’s love for us and mercy is unending. God continues to offer us forgiveness as long as we breathe.
…
And for now we need to use that breathe to learn and teach one another of God’s Grace, for it is a lesson we never quite retain.
They say to a tree, ‘You are my father’, and to a stone, ‘You gave me birth.’ For they have turned their backs to me, and not their faces. But in the time of their trouble they say, ‘Come and save us!’
Hebrews 11:1
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
Words of Grace For Today
Trees as fathers, and stones as mothers. That surely is a mixed up version of perverting reality that I have not run into … often.
There are plenty of other versions of perverting reality that I hear of, read of, and encounter in daily life all too often. It starts with some terrible perversion of reality driven by hubris, thinking oneself is so much more than one really is. After a person allows that to happen, there is no telling what will come next. When one thinks one is no longer a creature of God, no longer anything less than a godlet, the mess one creates is pure … pure evil.
That’s how we get a US president like Trump.
That’s how we get so many Covidiots that secure the continuation of the pandemic in stronger and more destructive ‘waves’.
That’s how we get so much fake news, so much that so many people can believe vaccines are dangerous, that climate change is not real, or that truth is only subjective and can be anything we want it to be.
There is nothing more destructive to all life, in us, around us, and through-out the universe.
Even those of us who have resisted the fake news perversion and return of chaos into our lives are caught up by this evil. There is simply no escape.
When we allow this to consume us, then …
Then … we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves or anyone else.
Faith.
Faith is all we have left.
Faith is what gives us hope.
Hope gives us, with no cause at all other than faith, to cry to God for help.
We cry and pray that God will save us.
As God promises in many and various ways, that by Grace salvation is ours, so God forgives us our sin, claims us as God’s own children, and sends us out to be the people who carry God’s Grace to others.
From ‘Trees’ and ‘Stones’ and all kinds of perversions of reality we pray ‘God save us.’
These Trees Will Soon Fall to Erosion by the Lakeshore
Shall We Consume Ourselves in Lament for Them?
Or
Get about Bringing Climate Change to an End?
And Pandemics?
Shall We End Them
Before They End Us?
Jonah 4:10-11
Then the Lord said, ‘You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labour and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?’
James 5:11
Indeed we call blessed those who showed endurance. You have heard of the endurance of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful.
Words of Grace For Today
We ought to be concerned (as God tells Jonah) not just for our little ‘tree’, our little corner of life. Rather we MUST be concerned for the whole nation, or rather, the whole earth.
Make that we ought to be alarmed in concern for the whole world.
Climate change is still denied by politicians, as if it would go away, as if is somehow not so clear that ‘the planet is angry at us’ as last year’s extremes are this year’s normals, and this year’s extremes are next year’s normals. Soon it will be last month’s extremes become this month’s normals … and on until we will have an impossible task of finding refuge on our own planet, anywhere.
The pandemic, Covid 19 is in it’s fourth wave in North America, and we seem to be preparing to suffer worse pandemics, perhaps even simultaneous pandemics, in the very near future … our future. No more of the ‘one pandemic in a century or so’. And we remain fully unprepared and unwilling to prepare and do what is necessary to prepare. We have leaders who ‘wish’ this Covid-19 away, and in doing so invite an even more brutal wave upon us all.
We can certainly trust that God is compassionate and merciful and we can use Job’s endurance as a role model. Doch! We ought not invite such great need for God’s compassion and mercy, nor for Job-like endurance, down upon so many of the earth’s whopping 7.4 billion and growing population.
We may not have planned this population overburdening of the planet, but we certainly knew it was coming and we collectively did very little about it, least nothing effective!
Sitting ‘where our bush used to give us shade,’ wallowing in our self-pity does no one any good. We need to get up and proclaim the Good News and God’s judgment for ‘Nineveh,’ whatever that will look like for us. We pray that we may see God at work as God worked through Jonah’s speaking to Nineveh!
No one would dare to venture on such a mission, without trusting God’s grace, abundant and endless, flowing for us all.
A glad heart makes a cheerful countenance, but by sorrow of heart the spirit is broken.
Philemon 1:7
I have indeed received much joy and encouragement from your love, because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you, my brother.
Words of Grace For Today
We know that good health is boosted by a good disposition and an attitude of gratitude, as is ill-health mitigated and recovery from ill-health aided by a robust spirit of gratefulness.
These are benefits to the individual who embraces God’s promises, summarized by Julian of Norwich as “All shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well.”
These benefits multiple when one who sees God’s creation with such confident gratitude also sees others benefiting from embracing God’s promises morning, noon, and night, and can give thanks for those who inspire this assurance.
To know with all one’s heart, mind and spirit that, despite our great sinfulness and destruction we bring on each other, ourselves and the creation that supports our ability to live, that God will bring blessings to us each day, and produce saints out of us wretched, most wretched, most woeful, wretched sinners. To trust that other sinners, as well as ourselves, will be able to bring God’s grace to bear on such profound brokenness of heart, spirit, and world, is to live by Grace.
Why would we choose to live any other way?
Why would we choose to follow any other promise, especially the empty promises of corrupt leaders, fake news makers and spreaders, and other agents of the Great Deceiver?
Why would we seek solace in revenge or further destruction, or satisfaction at other’s misfortunes?
Why?
As the leaves carpet the woods and meadows, the nights reach below zero clearing out the remaining wasps and other flying bugs, and as the days are shorter, fresher, more invigorating (motivating one to prepare for the deep cold that’s coming) …
How can we live except by Grace?
Breathe. Breathe deeply. Breathe deeply of God’s goodness all around.
