Perspective – Page 21

Creation

Melting Away

Wednesday, April 12, 2023

Spring Melt is A’coming.

Will we melt away,

or melt greed and violence away

with kindness?

Isaiah 45:12

I made the earth, and created humankind upon it; it was my hands that stretched out the heavens, and I commanded all their host.

James 1:17

Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.

Words of Grace For Today

While God made earth in six days and rested on the seventh (as the song goes), and God in that time created all life on earth including us humans, it’s taken us about 200 years to run the earth from sustainable into the ground so that the future looks bleak indeed, bleak indeed.

The only thing to do, since we cannot take on the ‘repair job’ needed by ourselves if in any way at all, is to be kind, even kinder, merciful and compassionate, so that others become that as well.

Life without kindness, mercy, and compassion is always a competition to get more, a greed race to the bottom of hell. While we can hardly engender enough kindness, mercy, and compassion to change how humanity as a whole engages in life now or in the next 200 years (if we have that much time left), we can create small pockets of kindness, mercy, and compassion with our families and friends, and if we are lucky to move about in society, we may also create a wake of kindness, mercy, and compassion wherever we go.

For that God created the earth and us humans on it.

These acts are not of our own doing. We can rise to the occasion day after day only when God works through us, spreading light into us and through us to the earth and life on it around us.

Shine … Shine this day … Shine this day with kindness, mercy, and compassion.

(Why not? It’s a whole lot more rewarding than greed’s death race!)

Walking

With

Tuesday, April 11, 2023

Walking, Running, Crawling: God is Right There With Us.

Psalms 91:9-10

Because you have made the Lord your refuge, the Most High your dwelling-place, no evil shall befall you, no scourge come near your tent.

2 Corinthians 1:5

For just as the sufferings of Christ are abundant for us, so also our consolation is abundant through Christ.

Words of Grace For Today

It is a very, very tempting take on the world: If we do the right things for God, like make God our refuge, then nothing bad will happen to us, like scourge in our tents and evil falling on our heads.

But God does not work that way, nor did God create to make it so. All that because – therefore agency-consequence is taken from the daily doings of providing for our survival. If you do not hunt, kill, and eat, well you will go hungry. Unless of course you’re a vegetarian at least for a while. Trouble is we take that because therefore thinking into our relationships and come up with If I do this, then you must do that! And we call that love. Which is nothing like love at all. It is coercion, plain and simple coercion that demotes the other from being a full person in order to elevate one’s self to something more. Which is pure bull and foolishness.

God protects us from evil by walking with us right into it … and back out again.

So we suffer, rarely as much as Jesus, but we suffer greatly, God with us, too. The strength we have is what God provides. And the consolation is as powerful as any love can be, for it is divine love for us poor creatures.

That’s the kind of love we can aspire to give to others on this good planet: walking with, suffering with, consoling with love so powerful it ‘moves mountains.’

Easter

Resurrection

Celebration of Life,

Again.

Sunday, April 9, 2023

And There IS Life, and Light, And Hope … Again!

Psalms 3:6

I am not afraid of tens of thousands of people who have set themselves against me all around.

Mark 16:9-10

And all that had been commanded them they told briefly to those around Peter. And afterwards Jesus himself sent out through them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.
Now after he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons. She went out and told those who had been with him, while they were mourning and weeping.

Words of Grace For Today

Only when we understand the darkness that God suffered by dying on the cross, and the darkness that permeated all creation, pushing, shoving, and sucking everything toward uncreation,

can we then truly celebrate

that Jesus is Risen, indeed!

And we can live, and laugh, and pray thanks, and dance, and hope, and reach towards others

with the same grace God has extended to us, through Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross,

offering them life, laughter, prayers of thanks, dancing, hoping and community so precious.

We can but overflow with prayers of joy and thanksgiving, for all of creation can live again.

As Long As

The Earth Endures

Thursday, April 6, 2023

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.)

Great Mystery

The Greatest Of All!

Wednesday, April 5, 2023

What Word Do We Have

That Will Bring Light

Into the Deepest Darkness?

Psalms 33:5

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.)

Looking

For Jesus

Monday, April 3, 2023

We Build Houses,

Even For Fishing With Jesus For People.

God Has Other Plans

For Us.

Psalms 16:8

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.

REAL

Joy from Real Sorrow

Sunday, April 2, 2023

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

who walks beside us through all our dark days

…

bringing us into the light.

Fool’s Day?

You Bet!

Saturday, April 1, 2023

Finding Our Fools’ Paths … Daily.

First Samuel 12:22

For the Lord will not cast away his people, for his great name’s sake, because it has pleased the Lord to make you a people for himself.

2 Timothy 2:13

if we are faithless, he remains faithful — for he cannot deny himself.

Words of Grace For Today

One might say to the passages today that since God is most powerful and therefore God can do anything, including deny himself, and through history God certainly did cast away God’s people in many and various ways …

…

April Fool’s!

….

And that is no small April Fool’s joke on us.

It goes to the heart and foundation of life and faith and hope.

If it is all an April Fool’s joke on us, what is left?

Breathe.

Notice that God walks with us, right in step with us, carrying us when we falter, suffering with us when we suffer and rejoicing when we rejoice.

The heart and foundation of our life and faith and hope does not depend on us or the scripture getting it right all the time.

In fact, God created us knowing full well that we would get it oh so terribly wrong all too often.

Today it is enough that God works a few miracles through us for others, so that others may live knowing God’s blessings are also for them.

Watch

and be amazed.

And don’t forget to breathe.

God created us so that we work best when we breathe.

…

And scripture got it right: God is pleased to create a people for God’s self, that people includes all people of all time. In that God is always faithful, by choice.

What a choice, eh?!

Considering all the fools who get it so wrong, what a choice!

Delivered

From Our Enemies (Mostly Us)

Friday, March 31, 2023

Our Paths Are Never Without The Shadows of

…

our own evils.

Judges 3:9

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.

Today, which will we choose to live out?

Whatever

Cup we are given

Thursday, March 30, 2023

No Matter the Beauty,

or Ugly Evil,

God Is With Us

In Every Season.

Ecclesiastes 3:1

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.

Luke 18:31

Then he took the twelve aside and said to them, ‘See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished.’

Words of Grace For Today

Have a great day!

So we wish others, and wish for ourselves.

But

the world does not always comply with our wishes.

Some days are not great.

In fact some days are some of the worst in our lives, even the worst days in history!

While we may wish for easy, comfortable, luxurious even, days that we can slide through without any great challenges, life is not that way.

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.

And that means, come what may, it is all going to eventually come our way, too, the good and the evil.

How can we prepare?

For the greatest evil there simply is no preparation that would be sufficient.

We can at best lean on God to accompany us, whatever comes our way.

To take even the bitterest cup with sure hands, knowing that even death cannot conquer us, for Christ is for us, is with us, and will always welcome us home, even in death.

Today may be a normal day, or a great day, or a day that astounds us with amazing things. Or it may be the flip of that, and astound us with the amazing destructive power of evil.

May it be, that we are led to trust God’s presence with us, whatever it may be.