I, I am the Lord, and besides me there is no saviour.
John 17:3
And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent ….
Words of Grace For Today
I really like this kind of message, so common in scripture and from the lips of so many people:
Get it Right!
OR EXLE. opps
OR ESLE!
Opps again
OR ELSE!
So the demands come at us, as foolish as ever a human word can be.
So the the interpretation of God’s communications (revelations) to us are made by humans, and they miss the mark of all God’s Words.
To demand that we get it right is to demand something beyond our abilities.
Stuck in sin, Slaves to sin, unable to free ourselves, sinful by nature, human nature is flawed, Evil will have it’s ways, Boys will be Boys, Women will be manipulative and devious.
It all has many different names and endless permutations in humans history, permutations that each generation repeats many times over.
Knowing Jesus is to know God’s Grace, is to trust that God rescues us when we certainly do not deserve it (for the umpteenth Millionth Billionth Trillionth [infinite] time.)
Of course demanding of others (and maybe ourselves a little) that they get it right, is to play right out of God’s hands into the Devil’s.
Trying to be right.
Never works.
Start with humility: confessing who we are as sinners, trusting God’s mercy and grace to save us and renew life in us. Then accepting that Jesus sends us out to exercise that same mercy and grace for others.
That’s a good minute, a good start to any day, a wonderful way to be all day long, if only we could.
They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.
1 John 4:18
There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.
Words of Grace For Today
Love ought to preclude fear, but all I know from life is that love has taught me to fear greatly, especially that the love claimed is not really love at all, but rather sick manipulation that will kill if it can, and otherwise ruin anyone who trusts it faster than you can blink an eye.
Or Maybe:
Love ought to preclude fear, or maybe just drive out fear. The difference being love exists along with fear, but love moves fear out of the driver’s seat of one’s life and heart and mind and spirit. Fear is still there, love just negates it into being irrelevant. But all I know from life is that love has taught me to not worry, for love claimed may or may not be love, but love from God is sure and in that love I allow myself to be defined. That is the love that has taught me what love really is.
Adam and Eve hide from God for fear, for they know Good and Evil and they have disobeyed God. They have tried to reach beyond their own selves and have tried to be God, knowing Good and Evil. So they think they know Good and Evil, and in a small way they do. They have caught a glimpse of it. Same as I have caught an eyeful of love claimed that is really manipulation. What they have not yet learned is that God’s love is greater than all Good and Evil.
But they will.
And we will.
And in that we need not worry for tomorrow
for God loves us, even as we are caught in Evil and in Love.
…
God’s love defines not only us, but the universe through and through.
Like A Camper Left To Rot In the Field, When Junk Is All We Are, Also Then … ?
Psalm 35:18
Then I will thank you in the great congregation; in the mighty throng I will praise you.
Ephesians 5:19
… as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts,
Words of Grace For Today
“Then I will thank you …” When will we give God thanks?
Do we do this when, finally, in one of those rare moments, everything seems to be in order in the universe (or at least the small part we are aware of)?
Well, those moments are worthy of giving God thanks and praise, worthy of singing among ourselves and in our hearts.
But those moments are rare, maybe coming once a week, or even once a month or once a year. For some it seems they come once in a lifetime.
What about all the other times? The real shtako times, when the universe is dumping all the rot of garbage in our laps, all over our lives, in every path we try to walk forward on until we slip and slide, collapse and can at best cry for help? What about all the other mediocre times when nothing is good and nothing is really bad, except we just don’t really have a good reason to struggle again to try to make things better, since we’ve tried so many times in the past and nothing changes? What about all the times when we are just about to celebrate a tiny step towards better and someone stomps all over the possibility like someone stomping out a troublesome ant?
Can we really sing among ourselves and to ourselves, filled with thanks and praise for God?
Nope.
Not on our own.
Not at all, Not at all.
But …
…
but by the power of the Spirit in us, given to us by God, even in the slippery, gooey times of shtako, dumped on us by the universe, we can and do give God thanks and praise
for breath
for faith
for love
for hope
that sustains us through it all.
So also today, we sing our thanks and praise to God from our hearts.
For you bless the righteous, O Lord; you cover them with favour as with a shield.
1 John 5:18
We know that those who are born of God do not sin, but the one who was born of God protects them, and the evil one does not touch them.
Words of Grace For Today
Sometimes it just ain’t so, as Scripture seems to tell us.
The righteous are not blessed with special favours. In fact there are few if any really righteous people.
And all people seem to get the same challenges and shafts, enough to send us to the grave happy to escape this mess.
Except the wealthy, powerful, and privileged seem to get away with ‘blessings’ that are really not theirs to have, stealing the necessities of life from others so that they can live in comfort and privilege they certainly do not deserve, unless evil rewards them so!
Except …
Yes, this is the first EXCEPT:
We do not make ourselves righteous. Only God can do that, and God did do that, in our baptisms, as promised through the life, teaching, healing, death and resurrection of God’s son, Jesus, the Christ.
So the righteous do get special favours, not that we’ve earned them, but that God has chosen us and chosen to favour us, even though we do not deserve anything but death.
As for the evil one touching us … well, we remain sinners and therein the evil one gets us each day, also.
So we live blessed and captured by the evil one, both at the same time, all the time, fully so both.
No wonder life never seems simple, except
except when God has us see clearly, God’s grace, God’s love, God’s mercy, and God’s will for us … to share all the blessings we have with others.
Sharing all we have with others is the foremost special favour God shows us.
Amid the Smoke and Fog, Beyond the Weeds One Sees Two Loons,
and
By Faith
One Can Trust That Their Chick Is With Them,
Safe,
Growing,
Beautiful.
Isaiah 25:9
It will be said on that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us. This is the Lord for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.
Hebrews 11:1
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
Words of Grace For Today
Waiting.
Waiting for.
Waiting for something important, or something scheduled, or something freeing.
Waiting is something we all do, if not by sitting still, breathing slowly, anticipating but not moving, then by moving to something else that will take us time, but in the back of our mind we wait for ….
What is it?
The next pay-cheque, so we can pay our bills, or buy something so that something that has broken can be fixed or replaced, or
The crops to grow, so they can be harvested, or
Other people to complete their work, so that we can start or resume ours, or
The neighbour’s music to stop, so that we can get back to sleep, or
The tyranny (by whomever of whatever kind among the so many different kinds that are worked against people) will end, or
The impossible: that real guilt will go away, or grief will turn to joy, or loss into gain, or that we will see again or hear again or move again, or that we will love again, or that we can forgive again, or that we can breathe again, or that we can remember again, or dream again, or sleep at all again, or
That the devil (attacking us in so many ways, also through our enemies who would do us in) will leave us and we will be free to live, laugh, and love, again.
And
That God will save us.
For that day we wait.
Wait.
Wait,
but not so patiently sometimes, many times.
Only faith interrupts our waiting; for by faith we know not only that God will save us, but that God has saved us already,
… it was the duty of the trumpeters and singers to make themselves heard in unison in praise and thanksgiving to the Lord, and when the song was raised, with trumpets and cymbals and other musical instruments, in praise to the Lord, ‘For he is good, for his steadfast love endures for ever’, the house, the house of the Lord, was filled with a cloud, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord filled the house of God.
Revelation 21:2-23
And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb.
Words of Grace For Today
The dull-drums of ho-hum life are never more persistent then when problems overwhelm us and we see no progress towards improvement. We have no hope, so we struggle to make ourselves get out of bed. We struggle to get on with any task at all. Getting to work is necessary but we barely make it. Getting home is an insurmountable chore, day after day. Especially if we have no home! Finding a reason to sleep is beyond us.
Not every life is this way. Not every day is this way for most of us.
And then God
Then God shows up in awesome splendour!
Then God shows up in awesome splendour and astounds us!
The trumpets and cymbals may play, but God out plays them all, with stars dancing, winds singing, and creatures humming along.
And the light show prickles our skins and pierces our hearts with colours we’d forgotten if ever we’d seen them.
1976: Performing on the uneven bars at the Summer Olympics in Montreal, 14-year-old Romanian Nadia Comaneci scores the first perfect 10 in Olympic gymnastics history.”
Well, that begs the question for us, or at least for me:
Who am I?
After all I am perfect at nothing!
I am not even perfect at being a terribly good sinner.
Sometimes I even do something good, by mistake.
What is life all about anyway, if I (and I would guess most of us are the same even if we don’t admit it) am less than perfect in every way.
I mean it’s one thing to be a master of a trade. And another thing to be master of none and jack of all. It’s yet another thing to be perfectly bad at everything.
It is no wonder then that humans in droves head off into the bizarre and unimaginable to be someone of note.
This also from CBC’s Morning Brief Newsletter, the ‘good news’ on 18 July:
“Of the more than 40,000 achievements in the Guinness World Record database, some are obvious — tallest woman, fastest marathon or most pull-ups. Others, like the one Bobby Dubeau says he’s accomplished, are less so. While he’s still awaiting the official certification, Dubeau says he’s become the fastest person to catch a game at every Canadian Football League stadium. The Delta, B.C., man says he saw a game at all nine home fields in 15 days.”
That effort to be unique and noticed is at least not destructive. So many humans strive toward something that requires they take something from others: wealth, power, fame, just to name a few of the things we greedy humans stick it to others in order to have more than our fair share.
The same CBC newsletter the lead story reports once again: minimum wage will not pay the rent in most any city in Canada. The government of Canada got out of the business of providing affordable housing to the most vulnerable in society back in the 1980s and 1990s. The cost was too much (but the rich kept getting richer and the poor poorer.) Now the cost of providing the basics for a homeless person are greater than providing housing and supports for them to stay in the housing. But the poor still are left on the brink of becoming homeless, and that’s a lot of children going to school without and parents who are stressed beyond reason. Still the homeless cannot be provided for, the costs are too great?! But interest rates keep rising, making housing costs climb and climb and climb beyond reach for more and more people.
We are not perfect at providing housing for people, at providing a livable society for a huge swath of our citizens, residents, and guest workers.
Perhaps the one thing we are perfect at is taking the most we can from the poorest.
Yet, with a good number of people working to help others, to find housing, to find food for each day, to find work, to find community and connection, I guess we are not even perfect at screwing the poor.
Thanks be to God, who is our refuge and our salvation. May our faith make us well, as a society, for right now, as always, we are quite sick.
But we are not perfectly sick, and that’s only thanks to God’s work through many hearts, minds, and hands of the sinner-saints … like us, like me.
Remember your congregation, which you acquired long ago, which you redeemed to be the tribe of your heritage. Remember Mount Zion, where you came to dwell.
Matthew 18:20
Jesus said, For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.
Words of Grace For Today
We often pray to God to do something for us, to remember us, when things are ‘going straight to hell in a hand basket’ and we find ourselves ‘up a creek without a paddle.’
Most often there are things we ought to be doing to help our own situation and the situation of the other 8 billion people on earth, or a good number of them that we can make a difference for.
Instead we do little to nothing and pray. Not that prayer is a bad thing; rather it is a quite good thing indeed! But prayer without action is just laziness of heart, mind, and hand.
Praying to God when we feel abandoned is exceptionally good. Praying that God remember us misses the point all together. God never forgets us. We forget God. I suppose it’s terrifying to realize that in the worst situations we get ourselves into (or put others in or others put us in) God certainly is remembering us, and letting all that is bad happen to us, to smarten us up, or to (and I think this is the best explanation) allow us freewill: free to choose to love God, Creation and all Creatures; AND free to not love God, Creation and all Creatures, especially those 2 legged humans that seem so hard to deal with … and then suffer the consequences of our choosing to not-love what God has given us.
It’s easier to fool ourselves into thinking that God has abandoned us.
But God has not. God is here all the time, remembering us and all other people always.
God always offers us mercy, steadfast love, and hope.
So let’s hope we come up with some good ideas on how to FIX the MESS before the earth eliminates us as the fix.
… he will swallow up death for ever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken.
John 16:20
Jesus said: Very truly, I tell you, you will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice; you will have pain, but your pain will turn into joy.
Words of Grace For Today
In the movie Collateral Beauty, the father cannot face the pain of having lost his daughter, so he goes into withdrawal from life, a living death.
He cannot say anything about his daughter, not even her name, the disease that killed her or her age at her death. Nothing. For anything is already too much to bear.
Death is that thing that robs us of …
of everything,
everything that holds life together.
It is, therefore, quite the promise that God will swallow up death forever, that our tears of grief will be wiped away, and our pain will be turned into joy.
When death has taken life and breathing itself right out of us, these are promises we cannot trust, not at all, not at all.
And then God does something, not centre stage,
but off in the wings,
off some place we have to look to see
or we will miss it.
That’s the collateral beauty that God sends our way, not to rob us of our grief and the healing that can come, and the strength from healing,
but rather to start us on our healing path,
a path that takes
forever.
And then
finally
we are home
and
we
get
to
see
beauty
and
breathe in
joy.
In the end the father comes to see his daughter’s face dancing with him and say his daughter’s name, Olivia, GBM (a rare form of cancer) and that she was six.
Those things are not life, but facing death’s reality, …
well that allows us to begin to live ever so slightly
