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.
But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain God, much less this house that I have built!
John 1:18
No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.
Words of Grace For Today
Finding the meaning of life is an unending challenge every day of every life, unless …
unless one fools oneself.
That usually ends badly for that person and many around them, sometimes nations and continents and even the whole world.
Now if we could only meet God, talk with God, and have God tells us what our lives are supposed to be like, to what end God created us, and what the purpose of our lives actually is, then …
Then life would be peachy, right?
Not really.
God did send the Law, the Prophets, and then Jesus to teach us all that and more about God and what God intends for us.
But we so easily hijack and pervert to our own ends all God’s efforts to communicate with us. That’s corrupt human nature. It leaves many puking out any idea that God actually exists, or talking at all about God is helpful. Perverse ideas about God are more destructive than almost anything else people can come up with, after all!
So many people have tried to contain God inside their own buildings, their own ideas of God subjugating others to their own whims.
God planned for all that, and in each generation God sends us saints, saints who see and hear the saints from previous generations, and who share with us God’s purpose for us.
The purpose of life is not that hard to see and know and live by: to love one another as oneself, and even to love one’s enemies, and to give God all praise and credit for the goodness and beauty that permeates all of life.
Living that out each day is the challenge of each day. Light work, it is, also for this day.
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!
He sustained him in a desert land, in a howling wilderness waste; he shielded him, cared for him, guarded him as the apple of his eye.
Or perhaps better pro-nouned:
God sustained the people in a desert land, in a howling wilderness waste; God shielded them, cared for them, guarded them as the apple of her eye.
1 John 4:16
So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.
Words of Grace For Today
Led out of slavery, across the land of a hostile despot, pursued by well trained, deadly soldiers, saved by a miracle crossing the Red Sea into the wilderness, and then?
What good is it to be freed from slavery only to end up in the wilderness to die of thirst, or hunger, or empty hearts and souls unable to imagine God’s grace?
So God sustains, shields, cares for, and guards the people in the barren howling wasteland. God sustains, shields, cares for, and guards the people with love, for there is nothing so powerful.
Seeking to establish a democracy leaders of the country (politician, banker, and publisher) arrive at the White House for a week of consultations. The brilliant writer leads them to craft a wonderful constitution. The President ‘interferes’ by bringing two of the greatest minds into the room with them. The greatest minds are from opposite parties and from opposite ends of the spectrum of thought, especially about how a democracy should function … except for one basic foundation.
Stymied by the constant arguing that prevents any consensus about what should and should not be included in the new constitution, the writer finally seeks out the President to silence the arguing. They only have one day left to finalize their document!
The President advises the writer that the goal is not a constitution, written and sealed for adoption. The goal is to teach by example, and in that example reach into the leaders’ hearts, minds, and souls to show them that the foundation of democracy is not any written document or anything else, except for the willingness to listen with respect to one’s opponents. If this small group of leaders learn to respect that one foundational principle, not in writing, but in their hearts, minds and souls, then they will teach others by example back home. With that principle they will be able, not easily, but successfully, to write and adopt … and the hardest part … and to follow the constitution with respect for all opinions honestly presented for consideration. (From West Wing)
Our foundational principle for life is not merely for the worst of all forms of government, (except all the others). Our principle for life is what God gives us, love. Living that love, trusting that love, listening to each other with that love, these are the things that Jesus does for us setting an example, so that we may live, trust, listen with love for others, so that they may learn to live, trust, and listen with love. With this miracle, for it can only happen by miracle transforming our hearts in spite of ourselves, God brings us through every barren wilderness to the Promised Land.
Today we get to live out the love that God has for us.
That’s Light work, spreading God’s miracles with abandon across the landscapes of all creation. Ready or not God already has sent us.
For I know their works and their thoughts, and I am coming to gather all nations and tongues; and they shall come and shall see my glory,
2 Corinthians 4:6
For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness’, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
Words of Grace For Today
There are three ways (maybe among many others) that we take to deal with darkness in and around us:
1) we shine a light into it to change it.
2) we wallow in the darkness as if it were all we have or could have.
3) we deny the darkness and bruise our shines over and over again until we die, having bled out from our open shine wounds we cannot see in the darkness and refuse to acknowledge, for fear we will have to admit we are in the darkness, or worse: that we are the darkness.
What do we do, though, when we do not have a light, and we know the darkness too well to either deny it or be willing to wallow in it?
We trust that God will bring the light that we cannot find, shine it in the darkness and in our darkness, and as painful and disgusting as it may be to see what up until then festered in the dark, God also brings forgiveness, renewal, and a mission for us: to share the light with everyone caught in darkness.
Surely the Lord your God has blessed you in all your undertakings; he knows your going through this great wilderness. These forty years the Lord your God has been with you; you have lacked nothing.’
Luke 22:35
He said to them, ‘When I sent you out without a purse, bag, or sandals, did you lack anything?’ They said, ‘No, not a thing.’
Words of Grace For Today
If we live life in order to have more money and a full purse,
If we live life in order to have the best bag of everything,
If we live life in order to have the best footwear,
… If we live life in order to have things, power, status, …
Then …
Well then we will always not have enough and we will lack for what we think we need.
This is the way of the world, and it brings more destruction, disease, and destorying to others and to oneself, always more, but not goodness, always evil running others and oneself closer and closer to meaningless and death. If you want an eye-full of that watch Succession, the HBO series, or simply open your eyes to see how so many people live in the world around us.
This is not a fun way to live, no matter if people party hard and seem to be enjoying themselves. In truth this kind of living can only be pursued if one hides from one’s self, one’s real self.
God created us not to take from the world and claim it all to be ours. God created us to receive enough and share everything we have with others.
Jesus sends the disciples out with everything they need: kind hearts and a message of God’s love for all people! They lack for nothing.
God leads Moses who leads the people into the freedom of the wilderness, out of slavery, and though they barely have enough to survive, and it’s touch and go more than a few times, they always have enough … as long as they remember that God has led them and accompanied them all their years, even their ‘40’ (which is a symbol for ‘lots and lots – more than enough to count’).
Today we live in circumstances that outwardly do not appear to be wilderness: there are roads, vehicles, cities, barns and houses in farm yards, and industrial sites of many, many kinds. We call it civilization, but no matter what it looks like from the outside, if we do not have hearts ready to share God’s Word of Grace, all this is mere cover and running, running hard in the barbaric wilderness of humans bent on destroying, making ill, and destorying one another.
What will our day be like today, if not another blessed journey with God walking with us? Breathe. Give Thanks. We lack for nothing.
You, O Lord, will protect us; you will guard us from this generation for ever.
John 6:63
It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.
Words of Grace For Today
The world is in trouble. Grave trouble. Dark trouble.
We are all going to die.
That’s just how it is.
Knowing that God walks with us and protects us gives us the spirit to move into all that trouble, bringing blessings, peace, and joy.
Harmon wakes cold in the winter and too warm in the summer. His insulated tarp tent is a collection of 2 years of collecting other people’s junk. His greatest boon was when a foreman at a construction site let him pick through the scraps before it was shovelled into the dumpster for disposal. He landed 5 insulated tarps in rough shape, and he came back later to get the few metal 2×4’s and five 2×6’s the foreman let him put to the side because he could barely carry the tarps. Even then he couldn’t manage the 2×6’s so the foreman tossed it all in the back of his pickup truck and had a young worker deliver it and Harmon back to his campsite in the river valley or as near as they could drive. The young man helped carry it all in, he said under orders from the foreman.
It was a tough life, Harmon knew. But it was so much better than living with his uncle up north. There he woke to getting hit before breakfast for he never knew what. His uncle served the same for lunch, supper, and before bedtime. It was better than what his friends managed in the tent city downtown, where the only thing between them and the elements and thieves was a thin piece of tent and their sleeping bags. Though they had ready access to water, showers, supplies and clothes. Twice a week Harmon hiked up the river a mile or so and then across and up into downtown for a shower and supplies, and food, sometimes even a hot meal. Otherwise he was content to collect scrap wood for a fire, read books he got from a helpful woman at the library (they were going to be tossed out anyway), write and draw. It wasn’t much, but along with helping serve meals on Sundays at ‘his’ church, he kept his spirits up.
We are all going to die. That’s 100% death rate for us. But before then there is life. Best to keep it in perspective.
Paul writes that the body is nothing, but Harmon knew that you needed to care for the body or the mind and soul had no chance at all. And you needed to care for your mind and soul or your body had no chance at all either.
What do you wake to each morning? How many running feet of floor or square feet of space is yours to roam? How many hours does it take to provide all that for yourself? Do you provide for others? Do you find time to volunteer? Do you see, hear, know, or remember the homeless, the poor, the ones Jesus came to live among?
Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am in distress; my eye wastes away from grief, my soul and body also.
Ephesians 1:18
so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints,
Words of Grace For Today
The greatest distress that any human can face (since it covers for so many lesser distresses as well) is to not be,
to not be seen,
to not be heard,
to not be known,
to not be remembered,
to not be loved,
to not be anything at all.
…
God promises to protect us from the evil that would make this be for us.
God sees us.
God hears us.
God knows us.
God remembers us.
God loves us.
And God makes sure we are something to God, and
that many other people
see, hear, know, remember, and love us.
And God sends us out to see, hear, know, remember, and love all people,
so not one person need cry
Lord, see me, hear me, know me, remember me, love me.
Makes for a full day every day, and a full life lived,
when we work so that all people are seen, heard, known, remembered, and …
The king said to Daniel, ‘Truly, your God is God of gods and Lord of kings and a revealer of mysteries, for you have been able to reveal this mystery!’
Acts of the Apostles 26:27-28
‘King Agrippa, do you believe the prophets? I know that you believe.’ Agrippa said to Paul, ‘Are you so quickly persuading me to become a Christian?’
Words of Grace For Today
King Agrippa had a question for Paul. Mine is not that important but I’ve asked and not even gotten to the meat of the question yet: what is it about that skunk smell everywhere, anyway? It’s not really a question or a mystery that needs a seer to explain it is it? Not like Daniel revealing the mystery of God’s power to save him from the lions, … or?
There was only one other time I had to deal with such a strong smell as that day when the skunk decided stepping into the squirrel trap would be it’s last step.
That was when I was building a house for our family of four to live in and a skunk decided to come for a visit. It had encountered a porcupine. I’m not sure what the porcupine suffered in the exchange, but this poor skunk had a snoot and chest full of quills. It was not doing well. It fell into the trench I was laying water lines, in to bring the well water from the old house up 200 yards to the new house. For hours as dusk approached this stinking thing wandered up and down the trench with the pipes already laid into it. That meant I could not shoot or attack the skunk while it was down there. I had to keep working. So while it wandered up and down that trench I’d work in the trench where it was not, getting the final things in place for the pipe including finishing a junction. So it wandered. I worked. Finally I was ready to fill the trench with the backhoe, and wonderfully it wandered out by itself. As it continued up the hill our youngest son followed it, feeling sorry for it. Finally our son came back. All was good. The trench was half filled in. And then the skunk came back following our son, and it wandered right back into the trench down to the end near the old homestead house with it’s leaky roof, mice galore, and barely any insulation which kept the old oil furnace working hard in the winter and the fans futilely spinning in the summer to keep it cool enough to live in.
I finally stoned the poor creature. Not with pot, but with two large rocks, carefully dropped so as not to damage the plastic pipes I’d so carefully laid. The pipes and the skunk got buried as I finished filling in the trench with the backhoe. A respectable burial as any for a stinking skunk. And then, on went the work on the new house.
That strong, terrible, debilitating skunk smell hung around outside our kitchen and bedroom windows in the old house and the construction site for more than a week. And for a month there remained a hint of it that we only noticed when we came back from being away in town or flying pipeline patrol, which was my income back then.
So when I opened the Starbucks coffee and more than a hint of that same smell wafted at me, it made me stop and wonder:
What is it with this skunk smell anyway?
Is it a deterrent as the skunks use it? Maybe a good warning for those smoking pot? Maybe for us all around the world who drink coffee, all those 2.5 billion cups each day!?
Or is it a stimulant, great in coffee in tiny doses, but nearly lethal in large doses like in some pot or in skunks’ defence systems?
What is it with this skunk smell anyway?
Can’t be all that good, can it?
Yet, I’m having a cup or two of that coffee this morning.
And I count it as a good start to any day, as do billions the earth over, not that that makes it right, eh?
What will we do with it otherwise anyway, the coffee and more importantly, each day that is a gift from God? That seems a bit of a mystery each morning, that gets answered by the time we fortunately lay down to sleep at night.
