So Little Certainty
Wednesday, May 21, 2025
God Alone is Strong, Giving Us Strength to Be Gracious to All.
All That We Enjoy
Can Go Up In Smoke So Easily.
Destruction is Easier and Faster
than Building Goodness.
Zephaniah 3:16-17
On that day it shall be said to Jerusalem: Do not fear, O Zion; do not let your hands grow weak. The Lord, your God, is in your midst, a warrior who gives victory; he will rejoice over you with gladness, he will renew you in his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.
.
Jude 1:22
And have mercy on some who are wavering.
…
Words of Grace for Today –
…
These days of uncertainty remind us how little can be guaranteed, no matter how much it seems they have been ours as long as memory serves.
Many have fought, suffered, and died. Others have survived, remembered, and work diligently. Many more have committed their lives to serving, according to God’s Will. Yet the majority just take it for granted.
8 May ZDF broadcast the Worship Service for the 80th anniversary of the end of WWII in Europe, a memorial for the day of being liberated. While Asia did not see the end of the war until August in 1945, Germany remembers, with thanks, with endless guilt at having started the war and all its destruction, for it did not just break out into war. It was begun. Even more Germany remembers the efforts made to rebuild for decades after hostilities ceased. And they give thanks for the prosperity and peace that Europe has enjoyed since.
The violence, destruction, and death in Ukraine, just 100s of km east, remind them that the lack of war is not ever guaranteed.
But Peace is more than just the lack of the violence, conflict, and destruction of war. Peace, in this world, is also to have institutions that honour all people, space and opportunity to worship as one chooses, and a social contract (an unspoken contract between people) that all are free to speak one’s mind, but no one is free to harm others, not even with words. Where the balance between the needs of the community and the needs of individuals is respected, upheld, and understood to be fragile. Where justice is striven for earnestly by all. And where peace, and all that makes it, is understood to be fragile, never guaranteed, and always requiring that we work to give it to the next generations each decade, knowing it requires great sacrifice to rebuild it decade after decade, year after year, day after day, and that begins with each of us.
Here in Canada, as the US has rewritten the world order these past few months, when rising global powers continue to grow in strength and threat, when fragments of extremists and war-minded groups, militia, and failed states continue to create chaos in our world, we must remain vigilant, and continually strive for those things that make for peace in our nation, in our province, in our communities, and in our homes. Ignorance and apathy, fake news and heated rhetoric, extreme ‘solutions’ and the status quo can have no place in our lives if peace is to continue here for us. If we are to avoid the complete loss of prosperity that we have enjoyed more or less for the past many decades.
But Jesus and his followers remind us that this kind of peace, peace that we must work for every day, is not the kind of peace God offers us. God offers us a more powerful, more life-changing, more effective kind of peace. It is the peace that the Holy Spirit gives us, and teaches us to share with all people.
The Peace that God gives us enables us to work for peace in the world, the kind that brings prosperity and possibilities to all.
