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.
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!
Praise the Lord, all you nations! Extol him, all you peoples!
Acts of the Apostles 2:11
[On Pentecost people of many nations Cretans and Arabs gathered to hear the disciples said:]in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.
Words of Grace For Today
While jealous, and greedy, and wilful peoples of all generations have claimed that God loved them and hated their neighbours (today we call it xenophobia which results is so many disastrous deeds done to others even xenocide) God has a different message, over and over delivered in many and various ways. God loves, works through, and claims all kinds of people,
especially sinners.
So, while many would like to say they just do not understand God calling them to embrace their neighbours and enemies with love, but rather that God favours them and them alone among the many peoples, God speaks clearly so that every person can hear the Good News proclaimed in their own language.
Of course that often takes lots of work on the part of translators and other dedicated people who wish to share the Good News with all peoples.
Today will we be those who exclude others, with all sorts of twists of logic that somehow we are better and better enough compared to others to have received God’s favour when others have not?
Or
Will we be the ones to welcome with open arms all kinds of people, especially the sinners, whom we have to acknowledge we are definitely counted among.
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!
Why should the nations say, ‘Where is their God?’ Our God is in the heavens; he does whatever he pleases.
Acts of the Apostles 17:30
While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent.
Words of Grace For Today
A sensitive, and creative pastor came to visit on his rounds, first Sheila and then Roxy that seventh day. He started, as always, by reading the 23rd Psalm to each woman. He went on to explain that God worked in mysterious ways for all of us. God knows we all sin. God calls us to repent, and God knows we may or may not repent, but all of us will return to sin.
And God planned for that, too.
So God always offers us a new beginning, a beginning without the burden of our sins of the past, without the burden of others’ sins, with an assurance of God’s blessings, not because we earn them, but simply because God so chooses to be gracious to us, especially when we do not deserve anything good!
As the women in turn started to tell him the barest of details about their situation he realized they had much in common yet they were so different. So he arranged for the women to share a room when they were moved out of the ICU that afternoon.
After they were both moved into the room, monitors still hooked up to each, both now able to talk and move slowly, the torrent of conversation, anger, grace, and love started to flow between the women, and eventually their few guests, long abandoned family and friends.
So much for obeying God’s commandments in order to be blessed or disobeying to be cursed.
God planned for that, too.
For us? Yes, for us, too!
Our days, whether we obey or disobey God, whether we humbly repent or remain stubborn and proud, will be determined by what God chooses for us. And God chooses that we will be so blessed without rhyme or reasons.
With Great Effort and Big Machines (and cruel words)
We Destroy and Destory,
Doch God Saves All Creation
and Us In It
With A Word.
Psalms 33:9
For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm.
Matthew 8:8
The centurion answered, ‘Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; but only speak the word, and my servant will be healed.
Words of Grace For Today
It’s cold again this morning. Not the coldest, but enough that one needs take care before one goes outside, care to dress warm enough, not to leave any skin exposed, even a piece of one’s face that cannot be warmed quickly.
When crises rise up in our path, blocking our way forward, it is perhaps not so heart wrenching as to watch one’s daughter fall ill and no doctor’s efforts can save her. It may be worse, as war or earthquake or rising oceans, or other people rip us out of our lives and leave us with nothing more than the clothes on our bodies, if that.
Baptized in water and word, born of the Spirit from above, we can find our way to God’s promises, for when God speaks it is so.
So God created the world.
So Jesus cures us of our every ill.
So it is.
But when we cannot find our way back to God’s promises, and we flounder in waters too deep, cold, and wild for us to survive in, then what?
Then God accompanies us into the deep, cold, and wild, and finds us with a Word holy and simple: I love you!
And that is more than anything else in all the universe.
For no matter what happens to us, God welcomes us home … with a Word.
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 …
On the wretched marred surface and depths of our lives, God works miracles for us with forgiveness, making us precious, just as the golden sunset turns glazed, rutted, treacherous ice into a wonder to behold.
Psalms 51:13
Then I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will return to you.
Luke 18:13
But the tax-collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”
Words of Grace For Today
It’s hard to be that tax collector, so out of character, beyond anyone’s expectations, actually humbly, desperately begging God for mercy.
Yet that is God’s intention for each and all of us, to be the outsiders, the ones done in, the ones rejected … and yet for us to be the ones most blessed by God’s mercy. The deeper the hole we get ourselves into, the greater God’s mercy for us is an obvious demonstration of God’s grace for all people to take note of!
Starting there, recognizing the hole of sin we’ve dug ourselves into, each day, each worship service, each moment allows us to humbly and desperately beg for and accept
God’s strength in weakness,
Christ’ sacrifice on the cross to give us new life,
and to meet other people’s sins with that same humble forgiveness fuelled by God’s mercy for us and for them.
Our teaching and inspiring is not about bringing people to be good, or better or less bad. That is the work of the Holy Spirit, which is evident all around us and in us … if we take notice.
Our teaching and inspiring others is only to teach all people of God’s ways, God’s ways of mercy, forgiveness, and renewed life for even the most wretched of sinners.
That will keep us more than busy this day, and each day gives us breath.
