“Stephan’s Quintet, a visual grouping of five galaxies, is best known for being prominently featured in the holiday classic film, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Today, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reveals Stephan’s Quintet in a new light.“
Isaiah 60:1
Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.
1 Thessalonians 5:5
For you are all children of light and children of the day; we are not of the night or of darkness.
Words of Grace For Today
It is in the darkness that we face our deepest fears.
It is also in the deepest darkness of our lives that God makes most clear for us God’s awesome power of love and grace.
Imagine you are far up north, on a clear, dark night.
Look up and around, and drink in the view of the sky, full of stars. These stars that have inspired so many humans to turn history to what it is for us today. Yet …
For all we do to ‘turn history’ to our liking, Forest Gump’s mom said it for us all
‘Life is like a box of Chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get!’
While the darkness may drive fear through our hearts more deadly than any spear or bullet, and while the light may show our failings in all too disastrous a view for all to see, in the end, what we get in life is not as important as what we give in life.
Whether we find ourselves in the brilliant, unforgiving light of day, or in the darkest moments of our lives, Christ’s light shines into our lives, our minds, hearts, and souls, and while that may illuminate our failings all too well, that light also shines grace and forgiveness over all our lives … and it brings us peace.
Look up and around, and drink in the view of the sky, this time though with so few stars. For this night the sky dances with waves of green and blue and purple.
How can we be anything but awestruck! And inspired.
God, once again (as whenever we need to be so inspired) dances the universe for us to see and believe, so that we might live in wonder and awe, willing to serve, guided by what we cannot see, but know only by faith.
Northern lights blazing over lake Thingvellir national park in Iceland
Have we not all one father? Has not one God created us? Why then are we faithless to one another, profaning the covenant of our ancestors?
Philippians 2:3
Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.
Words of Grace For Today
A mess grows on the ground where I split wood all winter long, and then stack the split logs with other pieces of wood that can be burned without splitting them. Every spring or summer I get around to raking it clean, down to the original ground. Shovelful after shovelful gets loaded up and carried away to a place where the inevitable ant farms will not matter, nor will the decaying wood cause trouble with the camp.
For lunch I often finish off with a few crackers. I cannot eat bread without suffering digestive distress until it passes. I seem to get away with eating a few crackers. Same kind of grains. Crackers are probably less nutritious with all the additional ingredients and processing. Doesn’t make sense that my system will tolerate the thing that is worse for me and reject the thing that would be healthier for me (if the bread is not also highly processed – not the kind of bread I would eat anyway, not after discovering and enjoying real good and hearty breads in Germany so many decades ago.)
Crackers or bread, they come from the same things, right?
And that crud leftover under the wood splitting pile, if one subtracts the inevitable dirt that gets mixed in, it too comes from the same thing, since it grows from the ground, right?
Yes. All grow from the same earth. Yet they are certainly not equal, not in so many ways and certainly not when one considers what to put in one’s belly for food.
Are all people equal, having come from the same creator, even having descended from the same father, Noah, maybe even the same father Abraham? Well, not so you would notice.
It’s not that people are unequal based on colour, creed, gender, slave or free, rich or poor, powerful or not. People are not equal because, well:
It’s that some people are through and through kind. Most people are not.
It’s that some people are honest. Most people are not.
It’s that some people are generous. Most people are not.
It’s that some people are forgiving. Most people are not.
It’s that some people are at peace with themselves, other people, and the world. Most people are not.
It’s that some people are grateful. Most people are not.
It’s that some people are loving, giving of themselves so that others will live well. Most people are not.
It’s that some people are hopeful. Most people are not.
By what measure then are we going to agree with Paul and in humility treat others as better than ourselves?
And there is the key; how do we treat others? It is not that when we are kind, honest, generous, forgiving, at peace, grateful, loving and hopeful we are less than all the people who are not. We do live better. (Not with more wealth, privileges, or comforts, but we live better in all the ways God intended us to live well.)
It is that when we are kind, honest, generous, forgiving, at peace, grateful, loving and hopeful we need not judge who is and who is not as good as us. We hope that all people are as good, and can live as well. We know that most people are not, but nothing in our lives stands or falls on us asserting how good we are. Well, actually if we assert how good we judge ourselves to be, as better than others, a lot of our kindness, honestly, forgiving attitude, being at peace, being grateful, loving and hopeful disappears like the breath of a dinosaur on a cold winter day.
When we are kind, honest, generous, forgiving, at peace, grateful, loving and hopeful we can and do treat others as better than ourselves, hoping that they might be or will be.
And no matter how kind, honest, generous, forgiving, at peace, grateful, loving and hopeful we are, we are still members of the broken and sinful human race, incapable of freeing ourselves from our sin. Only God can make us kind, honest, generous, forgiving, at peace, grateful, loving and hopeful, so we have no right to claim to be better than others. All our goodness is reckoned to us, not earned by us, by God’s kindness, honesty, generosity, forgiveness, peace, gratefulness, love and hope (hope that we might catch on someday, somehow to how ambition and deceit destroy us), and God wishes us life, and life lived well. An abundant live.
Crackers, Bread, or Crud. Those we better judge well which is which. People bad, good, better. That we get to leave up to our merciful God.
Peace, peace, to the far and the near, says the Lord; and I will heal them.
Romans 15:33
The God of peace be with all of you. Amen.
Words of Grace For Today
How Good it is to live, to live well!
Yet how many and powerful are the forces seen and unseen that would drive us from living well and from life itself.
In this piece of wilderness, which is hardly really wilderness as it is merely a lake surrounded by Crown land leased for grazing, leased for oil extraction, and private lands used and abused by hoards of intruders with noisy machines and …
and in the middle of it access is given to the public freely and without cost,
which is a bountiful wonder, especially for those too poor to be able to pay to camp in one of the many (ever fewer) campsites around the beautiful lakes in the area.
How Good it is to live, to live well!
Except …
Except here those people come who live in poverty, irresponsibly, ignorantly, destructively, to party and lose their minds in drugs, alcohol and who knows what all else.
Except here those people come who know not of respect for the land or the laws that would guide us to provide at least some care, so that their excrement and garbage litter the woods, their huge campers sit for months on end, destroying the ground under and around them, and their powerful, rugged treaded trucks grind away at the earth on the trails to and fro as they travel in and out each day.
Except here those people come who know only their own pleasure in camping within a few feet of the water and are oblivious to the law that prohibits camping anywhere within 30 metres of a body of water and apathetic to the destruction camping so close brings to the ground and and the water so that the lake will die faster, and not be a place to retreat to for future generations, and perhaps not even us in a few years.
Except here those people come who ply the water with gas engines streaming effluent and oils behind them in and on the water.
How Good it is to live, to live well!
Yet to live well is not to ‘steal’ the wonders of creation from others, present and future!
In Europe, as around the world, so many people suffer inflation to the point of struggling to remain alive. Around the globe in war zones and disaster areas, in drought, wildfire, flood, storm areas, and everywhere where people take the plenty available to all and keep it for themselves alone, people struggle to remain alive, yet alone know anything about abundance.
How Good it is to live, to live well!
Yet living well is not to ‘steal’ life from others, present and future!
Peace, we pray for peace in a world where so much un-Peace prevails.
How Good it is to live, to live well!
Yet living well is not to ‘steal’ peace from others, present and future!
How can we live, and live well, so as to bring others to respect and preserve all that God provides for us as for past generations, and for future generations? On our own we simply cannot.
Lord, you have given us bread from heaven to strengthen us.
By Grace through your Word, you enable us to live, and live well, now, as in the past, so that others will know your Word into the future, so that your Peace will prevail for all people.
The people said to Joshua, ‘The Lord our God we will serve, and him we will obey.’
John 18:37
Pilate asked him, ‘So you are a king?’ Jesus answered, ‘You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’
Words of Grace For Today
The people promise to serve God and obey him.
They break their promise over and over again.
Good thing the covenant God made with Abraham and with them is one sided: God makes it, God keeps it.
We just get to trust it, and return to trusting it when we decide (so often) not to trust God.
Pilate knows power. Jesus is to him an usurper, and a poor one at that, for he’s gotten himself caught by the ‘real’ power, and his life is in Pilate’s hands.
Well, not really!
Jesus is the real power, that holds the universe together since the beginning of time and before, even as the Webb Telescope gives us spectacular photos that reach back in time closer, closer to the beginning of time.
Jesus is the power, the king, the master of all people and of the universe, who bends down to serve us, to demonstrate how real power is exercised, that is with mercy and love.
What would history be like if all people exercised that kind of power?
What would our days be like if we exercised that kind of power?
Francis of Assissi, Clare, Abbess of San Damiano, Dominic, Florence Nightingale, Clara Maass, and a host of so many others show us what life can be like when we exercise that kind of power!
Live on today! Listen to the truth and to Jesus’ voice. Exercise your God given power … to serve others.
But the path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day.
1 John 3:2
Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.
Words of Grace For Today
The path …
I’m not so sure anyone really knows what any ‘path’ looks like, until they have travelled it and since no human can travel the path of righteousness (righteousness is reckoned to us by God, as a gift, unearned, untraveled, perhaps hoped for).
We wish we could. We pretend we have. We write about it as if we have. We try to inspire others to choose to travel the path that we have not travelled.
We should instead inspire people to trust God to reckon righteousness to us, and to be alert to the path that God provides for us. Though we do not travel it, God hauls us on that path in spite of us and our constant rebelling, and false, arrogant claims that we, oh yes, we have and do travel the path of righteousness. That is like most of our human powered efforts: it’s bunk. Or as the writer of Ecclesiastes said, it’s all vanity.
Theologians and writers who claim to know how we will be like Jesus, and what Jesus will be like upon his return speak that same language of over-exuberance at least and often pure arrogance and goal of controlling other people, even though they can control so little of themselves and their own life.
Humility is our beginning point, our mid-point, and our reality all the way to the end. The only thing we can ‘boast’ of is God’s good work in us, and in all creation.
Like the sun rising, with the most beautiful light, until it rises clear of the horizon and burns heat and energy down on the day-lit-earth. From that we have learned to create solar electricity. And from that energy plants through photosynthesis live and thrive … unless and until the heat and energy from the sun becomes too much and they wilt, burned out of life by the very energy that gave them life.
So it is for us. We need the sun to live, vitamin D being the least of it. Until the sun becomes too hot, too intense, too powerful an energy that it burns life up around us, and us with it.
Today it will burn hot in the meadow, with a forecast 30⁰ it will climb to at least 35⁰ and likely 40⁰ or more as the heat gets trapped in the meadow.
Thankfully the evening comes and cools it right off, usually 5⁰ cooler than elsewhere. A regenerating time, not just for sleep but recovery from the intense heat.
What do people do without that relief? They suffer. They die.
What do people do without the energy (Love) of God entering their lives with the great relief from the evils of the world to revive them (Grace). They suffer. They die.
We pray that today God will exercise Love and Grace abundantly for us and make us clearly aware of God’s work for us, as clear as the noonday sun, with relief from the cool water of life in the shade of the tall and healthy tree canopy, where so many of God’s creatures know to find relief from the heat.
But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you; what I have vowed I will pay. Deliverance belongs to the Lord!
1 John 2:17
And the world and its desire are passing away, but those who do the will of God live for ever.
Words of Grace For Today
From the belly of the fish Jonah cries to God and promises ‘what I have vowed I will pay.’
Then the rest of the story of Jonah’s previous resistance to God’s call to enter Nineveh with God’s call to repentance or face destruction. God has planned a great calamity for Nineveh’s near future.
Then the people turn from their evil ways and God changed his mind.
Now that’s something one does not experience every day, as a city that takes 3 days to walk across turns from it’s evil ways, the king ordering everyone to fast and don sackcloth and cry mightily to God and turn from their evil ways. And rarer yet is that the people obey their king, not just in appearances but so that God knows they have turned away.
The real wonder is being able to watch God change his mind.
That gives us hope for the world today.
We are not in the belly of a fish, having resisted God’s call to proclaim the coming end for our city. We are in the belly of angry planet whose environment is imploding in on itself because of our arrogant abuse of the planet’s resources, all for greed and luxury.
Jonah had it kind of unpleasant in the slime in the fishes belly, acidic slime at that, slowly eating at him. The clock ticking.
We sit in luxury and comfort, those of us who control the destruction underway, while others (billions) sit in discomfort and despair as their world fails or rebels around them with floods, droughts, destructive storms, wildfires, earthquakes, heat waves and deepening cold snaps … and melting ice that has been ice for millennia.
The desire of this world, to live in comfort no matter the cost to others is passing away, becoming impossible, backlashing on all the people, not just those in control, those having chosen this path for us all.
The only desire that will remain is the desire to serve God, and follow God’s will. May we be quick about it, or at least quick enough, as Jonah eventually was, that we may be saved.
The words of their mouths are mischief and deceit; they have ceased to act wisely and do good. They plot mischief while on their beds; they are set on a way that is not good; they do not reject evil.
Luke 17:15-16
Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. He prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan.
Words of Grace For Today
Fools are too easy to find. People with mouths filled only with mischief and deceit are around every corner, if that far away. Actions of wisdom and goodness have long since faded from our landscape. The worries of the night when sleep evades them are filled with scheming how to do even more devious and evil deeds to try to achieve their own place in life. Evil is at their finger tips, pouring from the hearts and minds as readily as if they were the Devil himself.
Then … when one was about to drop dead from despair at the preponderance of evil all around with at least the hope that Jesus has prepared a room for us forever there … a stranger, a foreigner, a believer in other things, comes along, cured by Jesus, healed back to the fullness of life abundant and giving God thanks like we all ought to each day.
Which will we live out this day: out of the overwhelming deceit and evil that pours forth so freely from so many,
or
from the thanks and joy of one healed by Jesus’ Word?
We are, when we take care to look in a mirror of truth and wisdom, as much the producers of evil as any other.
We are, when we take care to look in a mirror of truth and wisdom, as much healed and capable of giving God thanks as any stranger.
So which will we embrace to start this day? And again throughout the day? And as we lay ourselves to rest for the coming night?
Give thanks to the Lord, call on his name; make known his deeds among the nations; proclaim that his name is exalted.
Revelation 14:6-7
Then I saw another angel flying in mid-heaven, with an eternal gospel to proclaim to those who live on the earth—to every nation and tribe and language and people. He said in a loud voice, ‘Fear God and give him glory, for the hour of his judgment has come; and worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water.’
Words of Grace For Today
It’s one of those nearly perfect mornings. After weeks of too much heat, it’s cooled off, and then this night brings quiet rains, fog lifting after sunrise, drips of the past rain everywhere off the camp and then leaves, and a quiet-stillness broken only by a few birds singing. A small sparrow hunts in the meadow grass, a robin listens and hops and listens and pecks out a worm and flies away to share the morning food.
A morning survey places in wait the pieces of a project that will be a huge step forward in security blocking possible CO out and capturing heat to warm the water hose so that water can run during the coldest days. A fire resistant, air tight membrane will arrive to move everything to the next steps. With tape measure in hand the next posts for a new wind-snow shield for preparing fire wood are measured out from the wood available. Plans move forward a step for work for today. Mouse traps are gathered readied to be baited and set out to ensure the mice of the meadow stay in the meadow and out of the camp.
Water is set to boil for coffee and washing, not in the camper where I will write and work today, which will help keep it cool through the day. The sun is already intense. The thermometer in the sun registers 24⁰ even though it’s a good 10⁰ cooler in the shade.
The wine (grape juice, since I cannot afford wine) and bread (crackers, since I can afford those, sort of) are set ready and the day begins:
With thanks for all that keeps me alive, the daily bread and the wonders of this place, and the amazing works of God walk with me each day.
With a petition for a young man suffering so much pain from small accumulative injuries from skate boarding that he can barely move.
With a petition for all the men who are abused, that God would make his presence obvious to them with kindness and love, giving them courage and protection, and a view to reality beyond their abusers.
With a petition of thanks that I am alive in spite of so many people’s unwarranted efforts to kill me.
The Eucharist celebrated, in Luther’s language, and the morning meal that sustains my body: creamy, smooth, sweet and bitter, cool and hot; all signs of the breadth of life that God intends for us each.
This is a morning to stand in awe at God’s wondrous works, evident in nature, in the wilderness, and in God’s sustaining life on planet earth despite our sustained attacks on it. We excuse ourselves saying it is progress, it is profit, it is energy, it is growth, it is a global economy. Still the attack is relentless and the planet becomes more angry, more wild, more extreme even beyond our own abilities to survive it’s wrath.
Are we to fear God?
Definitely, or we are patent fools!
In other words we would be airheads, birdbrains, blockheads, or dodos, dolts, donkeys, dopes, dorks, dumbbells, dummies, dunces, fatheads, ganders, goons, idiots, ignorami, imbeciles, know-nothings, knuckleheads, morons, numbskulls, pinheads, schlubs, schlumps, schnooks, stocks, featherbrains, scatterbrains, butts, dupes, laughingstocks, mockeries, monkeys, chumps, losers, schlemiels, crackbrains, crackpots, cranks, kooks, oddballs, screwballs, weirdos …
That should give at least an idea of who we would be.
If we only fear God, then we would be patent fools and … (same list.)
For God did not create all the wonders of the universe to create us who would fear our creator. God created the universe and holds it’s rhythm and rhyme together with divine love, so that we creatures could also participate in planting, growing, and producing love in every corner of this small planet earth.
To this end God created and gave to us such mornings as this!
To this end God created and gave to us such mornings as this, that in loving creation and creatures we might at least momentarily be the progenitors of wisdom, a counterpoint to our usual foolishness. As we fear and love God, God gifts us with the ability to be seers, mentors, and teachers who spread God’s steadfast love in kindness, listening, and healing.
From all these good works of God in us springs up in and among us the one thing that gives us breath: faith, hope and love.
[I know we usually count those three things, though here they constitute one. It’s math like Luther’s and the Trinity.]
What happened to your morning and the wonders that hold the universe together? Did you see God again? Right there … to be feared and loved?
God is in the midst of the city; it shall not be moved; God will help it when the morning dawns. The nations are in an uproar, the kingdoms totter; he utters his voice, the earth melts.
Revelation 21:3
And 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
God, almighty, melts the earth with a word, if God chooses.
God, almighty, melts our hard hearts and thick heads, if God chooses.
God dwells with us, and goes well with us, if God chooses.
God watches as kingdoms (and our small worlds) totter and fall, as hearts shrivel up and harden against all that attacks them and everything else as well, and as minds close down to consider only what fits so easily with a preconceived and shrunken concept of reality (though it may indeed be so far from reality.)
God is right there with us, and because God chooses, God does not abandon us to our tottering, hardening, closed down limits to life.
God strengthens our tottering worlds (oh in so many ways the world around us totters and falls into ashes and dust) so that they stand, not on our strength, but on God’s strength.
God melts the hardening of our hearts so that we can love again, so that they provide life for us and for all those we encounter.
God lifts the lids on our minds to let in the fresh air of hope so that we can see again beyond the horizons that were so close, so that we can see our neighbours’ needs and our abundance.
With that abundance, which God gives us and renews constantly, God showers the world around us with security for this day and all our days to come, security in God’s presence; God showers every heart around us with love, life-giving love; God showers our minds with curiosity and hope so that our horizons are beyond even our imaginations capabilities,
Because God so chooses, and choose again as each new morning dawns.
I hereby command you: Be strong and courageous; do not be frightened or dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.
2 Corinthians 12:10
Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.
Words of Grace For Today
Joshua’s words are a great example why military leaders are not great inspirational speakers: he can command all he likes, but deciding to be strong and courageous, not frightened or dismayed is a whole lot short of actually being, doing, speaking, thinking that way.
The gap is what most humans have trouble with. Filling the gap between deciding to be courageous and being courageous with commands does not work, not at all. In fact I’m not sure if I know one thing that does work.
Paul’s approach is confusing and maybe inspiring. It’s just saying when you are weak you are strong doesn’t say a lot. The rest of Paul’s writing fills it in better. When Paul is weak, his witness to Christ’s strength is most obvious, and in what Christ does for him Paul is strong. Borrowed strength as it were.
Joshua may not give great motivational speeches, but his ending or stated cause for our being courageous carries the day, the year, the millennium and really all time for all life: God is with us.
We can be courageous, not because we are strong, but because Christ is strong, and that strength never wavers. Christ is always with us so we can endure many hardships … and still live joyful lives.
This is a day to thank God, and dance on with a good life … good because God dances with us..
