A Reclaimed Oil Lease Is Scattered With Dead Limbs.
That’s Nothing Compared to the Chaos of Our Future.
Genesis 8:22
As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.
Luke 22:19-20
Then he took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ And he did the same with the cup after supper, saying, ‘This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.’
Words of Grace For Today
The earth will not last forever. It will collide inside the Milkyway galaxy with the Andromeda galaxy, if nothing else so disasterous occurs sooner, in about 4.5 billion years or so.
Don’t hold your breath. In a few more hundred years we humans may have made the earth unfriendly for any kind of human life, along with so many other forms of life. Many, many are already extinct, and so many in just the last few decades!
How can we explain this to our descendants, who will struggle more and more just to survive? Will we say, well we enjoyed the power oil provided for our lives, our civilization … even while we corrupted truth at every turn to get the best, the most, the greatest comforts for ourselves while other humans starved to death, died of thirst, succumbed to curable diseases?
The debt load we carry would be unbearable … were it not for Jesus’ sacrifice that we recall every time we celebrate the Eucharist.
God knew how we would be, what we would take from the earth, other life forms, and other humans. So God set it all right with God’s own sacrifice. Jesus gave himself.
And we live free!
Now if we could just get it through our heads that we ought to provide the same amount of love and care to this planet as God has shown us, we might just live as a species for the greater part of 4.5 billion years, and even then we might, through some great miracles and wondrous discoveries, travel to a safe planet in another galaxy that is not set to collide with one of it’s own kind.
…
Each day let us pray, after we have confessed our sins and begged again for forgiveness, that God will give us ears to hear, hearts to learn, and faith to know God’s Grace for our enemies (us among them.)
He loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord.
2 Corinthians 8:9
For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.
Words of Grace For Today
As a windfall is to unwieldy debts, how is an Easter sermon to our heartbreak, loss, helplessness, and struggles to live, sinners as we are?
We understand how debts can become oppressive, sucking the life and hope and joy right out of us. Yet we try to deny that we owe God and so many other people because of all our sins. We run up a debt load that is impossible to deal with. Our debts suck the life and hope and joy right out of us, even if we do not admit.
God planned for that, too.
God took all the riches of God’s own self in Jesus’ purity and sinlessness and God gave that all up. With our sins God ran Jesus into poverty so deep he would not escape it. He paid for our debts with his unjust death, and transferred the greatest riches of innocence, purity, and the best unconditional love to us.
God did this through Jesus’ death … and his resurrection. For God would not in any way stay poor. God spread the riches of all creation, all around … even to us who are such great sinners.
So we live, with hope, joy, and love enough to share with all who encounter us.
With what words could a preacher in an Easter sermon communicate such undeserved freedom to those who anticipate already that they have earned their place in God’s good graces?
What words communicate the largest windfall possible: blessed life that cannot be taken from us!? This is the same question for everyone who receives the gift of faith, not just the preacher on Easter Sunday.
Perhaps with great humility the preacher/believer must confess that there are no such words to be chosen. With “Christ is Risen!” “Christ is Risen, Indeed!” we can say great things that bespeak the wondrous mysteries of God’s love for us.
But to communicate that our sin-debts are paid once and for all time … well that is up to the Holy Spirit to give the people ears to hear, and hearts to learn, and faith to know.
…
Each day, after we have confessed our sins and begged again for forgiveness, let us pray that God will give us ears to hear, hearts to learn, and faith to know God’s Grace for our enemies (us among them, for most often we are our own worst enemies.)
I keep the Lord always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.
Hebrews 12:2
looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.
Words of Grace For Today
For us all, all too often we see God as our right hand power that enables us to succeed in the world. Our enemies should lay down and worship, if not God, then us, for the power we wield.
Except life is not like that, and God’s Word for us is not either.
Instead God deals with the reality of life … which ends in death for us all.
God frees us from our sins, and our ultimate fears of death,so that we can live.
On Easter we will say: Christ is Risen! Christ is Risen Indeed! As enthusiastic as we may have learned to proclaim this wondrous news, the power of that news is clear only when we know deep in our bones and hearts what has come before: Jesus has died. Jesus has died a terrible, torturous, unjust death.
That’s what Holy Week is all about. It reminds us of the reality that Jesus addresses with his death and resurrection.
Make no mistake there have been plenty of deaths recently. Among them:
Five siblings, their spouses and children and friends gather to bury the siblings’ parents killed in an accident. An earthquake rocks the mountain overlooking the cemetery and buries them all. A tank runs over an orphan soldier crushing the breath out of him forever. An addict dies alone and helpless poisoned by xylazine cut into his drugs. An old man dies forgotten in his soiled bed. Two women are stoned to death by a crowd of self-righteous zealots.
And then this Friday we remember also that Jesus was falsely accused as many before and since, was strung up and left to die on a cross.
Anyone who is paying even a little bit of attention knows the searing sadness, and profound sorrow of death. That’s life on earth. We get used to such news.
God planned for that, too.
God lets us dive into the familiar of death, and then jars us out of our comfort zones with Jesus’ resurrection,
Turning our worlds all topsy-turvy, back upright,
Where only God is in control, and we live and breathe only as God gives us these gifts … to share.
Our Justice can be as perverted as the crimes committed.
God’s Justice is perfect based on truth.
Jeremiah 31:13
Then shall the young women rejoice in the dance, and the young men and the old shall be merry. I will turn their mourning into joy, I will comfort them, and give them gladness for sorrow.
Matthew 5:4
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Words of Grace For Today
Listening to the great jazz music from the soundtrack to the movie Chicago reminded me how that movie portrays how perverted the justice system is.
Most devastating is the song of the many inmates in jail, all woman, all telling tales of how they just had to kill the man they were with. They just had no other choice. They had it coming.
While widows normally grieve the death of their husbands, these women had their supposed sorrow turned into joy. They were glad to be rid of their men. One man just chewed his food too loudly. One was caught in an affair. One was just too slow. One looked the wrong way.
God did not provide this ‘escape’ from real sorrow for these women, nor the thousands like them that exist in real life. When you meet a woman like this, who grieves not a bit for her dead husband (as she says to the children, “we are survivors”) one knows one has met the work of the devil that disconnects a person from the real world and sets them loose to destroy others without feeling a thing. Psychopath, sociopath, or borderline personality disordered … it matters not the ‘proper’ designation we give them, they are sick and the devil uses them well, all too well.
God would rescue even them, were there a way we too would rejoice.
God’s work recounted in the passages above is not about these women. God’s work is the real and very desperately needed rescuing of so many people who experience real sorrow, grief, and mourning. This is what God does. God turns the impossibly dark days of mourning (in which no light can penetrate, or so it surely seems) into days of rejoicing and celebrating and hope.
These are the things we celebrate, too, along with those who come back into the light from the darkness.
These are the things we celebrate, today …
with a smile, a peel of laughter, and a heartfelt thanks lifted to God
But when the Israelites cried out to the Lord, the Lord raised up a deliverer for the Israelites, who delivered them, Othniel son of Kenaz, Caleb’s younger brother.
Luke 1:68
Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has looked favourably on his people and redeemed them.
Words of Grace For Today
God delivers us
mostly from ourselves
as the agents of evil that permeates all our lives
in surprising and oft denied ways so that we may too easily think all is coming up roses
when in reality the things we do stink more than the sewage pipe from the city dwellers before the first treatment plant.
Which is to say, collectively we make quite a stinking mess of the world.
Lately we see how the world comes back on us and all life, trying to stop us from destroying everything. Wild climate change storms and events that threaten all life on earth.
What are we thinking
other than only for ourselves, the future be damned.
Well it is. The future is quite damned by what we do and fail to do.
We need a saviour, not so simply as a warrior to defeat the enemy soldiers attacking us to rule over us and make us slaves.
No, this saviour needs to save us from ourselves. From our greed, avarice, and wilfulness that leaves us willing to destroy others (and ourselves and all our futures) just so that today (and a few of our tomorrows) may be ours to ‘enjoy’ in comfort.
Ahh! What was God thinking when God created us so capable of such destruction and evil …
if not
that God also created us capable of equally such great love, care, respect, and goodness.
Praise the Lord, all you nations! Extol him, all you peoples!
Acts of the Apostles 2:11
[On Pentecost people of many nations Cretans and Arabs gathered to hear the disciples said:]in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.
Words of Grace For Today
While jealous, and greedy, and wilful peoples of all generations have claimed that God loved them and hated their neighbours (today we call it xenophobia which results is so many disastrous deeds done to others even xenocide) God has a different message, over and over delivered in many and various ways. God loves, works through, and claims all kinds of people,
especially sinners.
So, while many would like to say they just do not understand God calling them to embrace their neighbours and enemies with love, but rather that God favours them and them alone among the many peoples, God speaks clearly so that every person can hear the Good News proclaimed in their own language.
Of course that often takes lots of work on the part of translators and other dedicated people who wish to share the Good News with all peoples.
Today will we be those who exclude others, with all sorts of twists of logic that somehow we are better and better enough compared to others to have received God’s favour when others have not?
Or
Will we be the ones to welcome with open arms all kinds of people, especially the sinners, whom we have to acknowledge we are definitely counted among.
Let Mount Zion be glad, let the towns of Judah rejoice because of your judgments.
Matthew 10:7
As you go, proclaim the good news, “The kingdom of heaven has come near.”
Words of Grace For Today
God’s judgments are good news for those whom God does not condemn. Since God turns right-side-up the world’s upside-down way of living to gain for one’s self at others’ expense, those who have ‘succeeded’ and found a life of privilege, power, and comfort for themselves will be condemned. They will lose all their privilege, power, and comfort – indeed all their life – for eternity when God judges them. Those who the ‘succeeders’ have put down, cast out, and sucked the life out of, those people will gain a place in God’s Kingdom for eternity. They will live forever as God’s own children.
If Zion and the towns of Judah are to rejoice because of God’s judgments, then it must be that they have suffered while others have sucked life out of them.
God’s judgments are good news. But they are not good news for everyone!
Proclaiming that the Kingdom of God is near, may indeed be good news, but those who do not recognize their own terrible sins will be caught, and for them it’s not good news.
The thing that is terrible is that many people who suck life out of others know full well what God’s judgment against them will be. They also know full well that anyone proclaiming that the Kingdom of God is come near is not proclaiming any good news for them.
Watch out proclaimers of ‘good news’ for the privileged, powerful, and comfortable will do everything possible to stop the proclamation. Taking life is a regular venture for them.
Who could have guessed that proclaiming good news to all people would put one’s life at such risk?
Anyone who reads the Gospel,
and gives God thanks for the saints who have gone before us.
Today: more proclaiming the good news is our task, ready of not!
We All Throw Shadows In the Brilliance of Christ’s Light!
What Effect Does Our Shadow Have On Others?
Proverbs 16:32
One who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and one whose temper is controlled than one who captures a city.
Matthew 5:9
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
Words of Grace For Today
The basic human attitude when we allow ourselves to become wholly unsure of ourselves or anxious is to become angry. Well not in one step without options. We can count to 10 or 90, breathe, and subvert the panic. We can learn to acknowledge hurt, even hurt when we know the source as another human, and then divert our impetus to anger in more constructive, less destructive (to others and ourselves) attitudes.
We can learn, guided by the Holy Spirit and the saints, to be peacemakers for ourselves, turning what could become anger and escalating internal and external conflict, into a peaceful manner of living with all the hurts, disappointments, attacks, and great losses that life and other people will throw at us.
As we learn this, and practice it, for no one is ever perfect in maintaining even one’s own peace, then we can reach out to others caught in anger, anxiety, pain, loss and others attacked by other people; we can, by God’s Grace alone, guide them to find peace with themselves and with all life offers, both good and bad.
The world needs peace, as desperately now as ever.
How will we hang on to truth and share peace this day, even with our enemies?
The command has been carried out that Jonadab son of Rechab gave to his descendants to drink no wine; and they drink none to this day, for they have obeyed their ancestor’s command. But I myself have spoken to you persistently, and you have not obeyed me.
Luke 11:28
But he said, ‘Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it!’
Words of Grace For Today
God speaks.
Some obey, others not.
Well, some try to obey, and everyone fails. That’s human nature.
From CBC Ideas: About 2,500 years ago, Thucydides travelled ancient Greece, gathering stories about a brutal war that plunged the ancient world into chaos. He set high standards for accuracy, objectivity and thoroughness in his reporting.
His observations, so different compared to the ‘histories’ told as legends and myths, biased towards the speaker-author’s loyalties, are worth hearing any time, and surely today as ‘fake news’ and ‘spin’ and destorying of so many people polarize the populous into camps deaf-to-the-heart to each other.
First would be the horror that he saw every human would descend to preemptively commit murder and destruction against an ‘enemy’, even if it were a previously good neighbour or child or parent. When law is laid waste by corruption from within or out right destruction leaving all sense of security spinning in the wind for every person, then every person is easily capable of the worst atrocities. For 27.5 years the Peloponnesian War pitted not only Sparta and Athens against each other, but they drew every city-state into the fray. 27.5 years of horror and in the end the result was the destruction of every city.
That’s the result of humans ‘not obeying’.
That’s the result of ‘fake news’ and polarized citizens.
That’s the result of little and big lies accepted and created by Courts as facts, for it corrupts all of society’s trust in the law to maintain order, especially the trust of those who benefit from the corruption of the law by the Courts.
That’s the result of every little lie told out of greed, avarice, covetousness, hatred, fear, and revenge.
Where are today’s Thucydides, tellers of accurate, objective, and thorough stories reporting real events, and us little people dedicated to truth at all costs?
What will we be today?
Truth seekers and tellers?
Or
Spinners and corrupters of truth?
Blessed are those who God helps to find and to hold on to the truth, one day at a time.
Those who live at earth’s farthest bounds are awed by your signs; you make the gateways of the morning and the evening shout for joy.
Luke 1:69-75
He has raised up a mighty saviour for us in the house of his servant David, as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old, that we would be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us. Thus he has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors, and has remembered his holy covenant, the oath that he swore to our ancestor Abraham, to grant us that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies, might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.
Words of Grace For Today
Sotorus sat to copy his father’s (Peter’s) journal entry, which really was copied from Peter’s father, Isaac, and Isaac’s sister, Galilea, about Sotorus’ great-grandparents, Doug and Dawn, from the old digital disk to his paper journal with great care.
First he wrote:
“20 June 2299: All the digital records are disappearing into thin air. Though no one knows why for sure everyone suspects it has something to do with those deadly latency rifles used to end the last war on earth. Loaded with specific human traits, the charge would sit for years, even decades, before going off when it’s target came within 10 metres. Now two decades later so many people had been killed, even after the war, and the accumulation of the residue from billions of charges seemed to spread and wipe out not only their targets, but all nearby digital storage in the bio-memory chips used in everything for the last 90 years. So copying what we have as records of the past onto paper is the only way to preserve them at all.
“Albert Einstein was correct in many ways when he said, ‘I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.’
“While explorers like my grandparents were off to Andromeda, those remaining on earth had reduced it to a thinly populated wasteland. No one had the energy or means to fight.”
What Sotorus could not know was the will to fight would return in 1450 years.
Sotorus’ journal entry continued with Peter’s entries from 3 October 2264:
“This from Isaac’s (my father’s) journal of 21 March 2246:
“This is about the day in November 2213 when my grandfather and grandmother, Doug and Dawn, and a stranger, made a quick and desperately simple decision that saved my life and the life of my sister, Galilea.
“This is what I knew about my grandparents decision to leave earth. Doug and Dawn had studied the beginnings of the universe all through university and wrote separate but related PhD dissertations on the doomed first expedition to Mars in 2029 compared to the more recent successful unmanned expedition to Andromeda’s closest star with planets in 2183. It was a no-brainer then when they were offered the opportunity to travel on the first peopled expedition to what people were calling the ‘Andromeda Earth’. In 2210 they packed their few possessions into storage and reported to train for intergalactic travel certificates. In 2113 they launched from earth to the moon, and two days later from there to Andromeda’s ‘third planet from the sun’.
“Eleven months after their three month long trip to A-Earth, as they called their destination planet, they and the other 45 mission specialists, had established the core of a settlement. The rich air and moderate gravity among the most interesting lush and vibrant plant and animal life forms seemed almost a paradise. They had hardly had time to consider more than their work studying the evolution of the plant and animal life that seemed to ‘teem up’ from the planet each day. Yet in those years they had also had us two children.
“I had not kept a journal but Galilea had. Her journal is lost, but I remember it pretty clearly, because we sat and read it often in her last year, as she suffered dementia, common among the most brilliant minds in their later years.
“Isaac was a spunky athletic 6 year old and his sister, that’s me, Galilea (Peter added, that’s my aunt), well I was not yet 2 but I was up and running, reading and writing already.
“This morning, an hour before sunrise, in the dark and bitter cold, the alarm had sounded. Everyone was told they needed to report to the spaceship, refurbished, refuelled and resupplied, and waiting for such an emergency these last four years. The Aearth’s crust had buckled up into a new mountain range on the far side of the planet and we had maybe 6 hours before the air would be poisonous. ‘Bring no more than 150 lbs with you!’ Everyone knew the fuel was not as combustible as the fuel they had used to lift off from earth so weight was indeed a problem.
“Our dad, Doug, called us children, from our studies in the ‘backyard’ near the river, started packing a small backpack, while Mom and us children fretted and argued about which things we could bring: a photo of our house, a rock from the riverbed that glowed at night, our computers and studies and papers, a favourite game made of wood and rocks, and my teddy bear. Finally Doug put his foot down and said we had just enough time to get to the spaceship, or we’d be left behind. With no more thoughts we grabbed only what was packed and headed off.
“At the spacepad, we registered and weighed our bags. We could have tossed in another 20 lbs. The security guard looked at us, checked off Mom and Dad’s names, Doug and Dawn. Then he looked at us children, Isaac and Galilea. He asked our parents if they had weighed us? No! Did they have to? Of course! So back to the scale we went. Together Isaac and I weighed 159 lbs. We all tossed our bags aside and, with the guard telling us we were out of time- others were waiting and time was tight, we two children stripped off our clothes until the scale stood at 154.
“The next person in line (we didn’t even know her or find out her name later) saw the chaos and offered to give up 10 lbs if the guard would let us children take our clothes along. A nod from the guard, a quick ‘thank you! thank you!’ and off we went through the gate to the loading queue as the woman behind us started tossing out big books from her case.
“Later Galilea wrote in her journal:
“Today, I’m not sure of the date, it’s been so confusing, we left a whole crowd of explorers and their children on another planet in the Andromeda galaxy, at a planet everyone called ‘Andromeda’s other third planet from the sun.’
Sotorus, grandson of Galilea, continued his paper journal below the above entry:
“Today is the last day of this millennium, 2299. It’s a day of freezing fog. We heard from many that those who lived at Aearth’s farthest bounds were awed by God’s wondrous signs all around them. They affirmed, and we can certainly affirm now as well, that God has shown to us all the mercy promised to our ancestors, to grant us that we, being rescued, might serve God without fear, in holiness and righteousness before God all our days.
“We can be thankful, that though the years have not been easy since the last big war, we (my two sisters, my three cousins, and I) are alive because Isaac and Galilea did not weigh more than 10 lbs too much, and an anonymous woman sacrificed her precious books for our grandpa’s and his sister’s lives.”
Sotorus could not know then, but his journal would be only one of a dozen that would survive the next 1500 years of ‘sticks and stones’. Without it no one would remember Doug and Dawn, Isaac and Galilea, Peter, or Sotorus. Nor would anyone remember that people had migrated to Andromeda and back, or that half the explorers had chosen to stay at another inhabitable planet in one of Andromeda’s star systems.
…
What will we weigh to take with us today?
What out of our past given to us by our ancestors?
What of our baggage and sins and horrible mistakes?
What of our joys and hope and dreams?
What of our lives?
From the Saints?
Of our spirits?
Of our love?
…
What we choose will give or take life to more people than we can imagine, in ways only God can show us!
