Do not remember the sins of my youth or my transgressions; according to your steadfast love remember me, for your goodness’ sake, O Lord!
John 3:7
Do not be astonished that I said to you, “You must be born from above.”
Words of Grace For Today
One of the most difficult things in life is to accept that we will be forgotten, and worse, that we will forget other people and events, both good and bad.
Truth disappears when we cannot remember.
And only truth provides a guide through the weeds that lie ahead.
So we pray:
God, remember … Remember me. Remember us.
But then we realize that much of what we have been is not something we would have anyone remember, least of all God.
Yet, God alone remembers everything about everyone.
God remembers everything, including the things that make for nightmares as our subconscious lifts up issues and conflicts and problems and failures and shame into our dreams, dreams that haunt us, and dreams that supposedly will free us from our past we would forget.
So we pray: God, remember … Remember me. Remember us. Remember not our sins, sins of our youth and sins of our middle age, and sins of our present old age.
Instead God, please we beg of you, remember us according to your steadfast love and mercy.
And in God remembering us thus, we are born from above, in the record of all time for all time for all people and for God remembered as if we were without sin.
And to be remembered so is a gift most precious
for it allows us to set aside our fear of being forgotten, or remembered as sinful as we are.
Instead we are freed
also this day
to live out God’s steadfast love and mercy for others,
The Lord loves those who hate evil; he guards the lives of his faithful; he rescues them from the hand of the wicked.
Matthew 6:24
No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.
Words of Grace For Today
No one can serve two masters! Really!
Ask any of the many double agents. Hardly ever does a life of a spy turn out well, even less so for double agents. It’s just hard to keep up with all the lies, and keep them all straight! Especially when you have to keep two completely separate sets of lies (and many subsets) straight.
One might call that the life of a politician, or a diplomate, or bishop, or dirty cop but that would be to simplify their ‘complicated’ lives.
The reality is today pretty much anyone who makes a decent wage or salary and who owns or rents a home is actually owned by their financial obligations, their possessions. That is their possessions posses them.
The challenge is to image a life where one is not obligated financially, without being so wealthy that one has never or never will again face debt problems, just money problems. Harder is to actually find a way into such a kind of life, and then to live it.
What would it, what could it, possibly look like, this life of serving God, and not money?
Enough saints have left wealth and entered poverty, but as it was said of Gandhi, one who lived in poverty, ‘it takes an awful lot of money to keep Gandhi in poverty.’
Thankfully our serving God is not that for which we are rewarded God’s grace, favour, and love. God chooses us, forgives us sinners (again and again and again when we certainly do not deserve it; that’s grace), bestows on us all sorts of favours (blessings and gifts of the Holy Spirit, some even have a monetary value to them at times), and loves us steadfastly and faithfully without end.
So we start another day, sinners still, God-made saints, thankful for God’s awesome works for us; giving God thanks and praise (even as we struggle to balance our expenses and income.)
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.
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.
… 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
Between the vestibule and the altar let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep. Let them say, ‘Spare your people, O Lord, and do not make your heritage a mockery, a byword among the nations. Why should it be said among the peoples, “Where is their God?” ’
Titus 2:14
Christ it is who gave himself for us that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good deeds.
Words of Grace For Today
‘There’s enough sugar in that bowl to power a train from here to Toronto.’
That could be said of a lot of breakfast bowls.
It won’t make it true.
But it could be said, given how much sugar is packed into cereals these days.
It is as if the cereal companies and us eating them are trying to make our worlds a little sweeter … any way we can
even if it makes us foolish and fat, over-feeding our frenzy for sweetness.
These efforts of our may well be sublimated attempts on our part to make up for our inability to set ourselves right with God and God’s creation.
The only answer for that un-rightness is in God’s own work to reach us, so Jesus, the Christ, is born, teaches and reaches out to us hoi-poloi, heals us of every ill, equips us with unimaginable gifts, and sends us out to share those with other people, others of the masses of hurting humanity, so desperately trying to set themselves right with
…
well, many don’t even know what with.
The ‘priests can cry in between vestibules and the altars’ all they are won’t. Such are their efforts.
The people will none the less cry “Where is their God?”
For it is all too easy to let God’s works go unnoticed, if we are on the train to ‘making the world sweet’ for ourselves.
We do not need to share more ‘sweetness’ with others.
We can share God’s gifts that heal our every ill, give us renewed life, and set us on a mission like no other.
It’s not Mission Impossible, though sometimes it is a mission unimaginable, like reaching out with kindness to the very enemies who would do us in.
Eating cereal for breakfast with berries is simple. Cutting the grass may be needed. Sharing God’s gifts … well that’s out of this world and sometimes seems crazier than anything else we’ve seen or heard of
unless we read of the saints, who have done it all before.
