Kindness

I read over the texts of today and finally land on Isaiah 54: 1-10.  Isaiah 40-66 is a description of the promises of God to his people following the exile.  It describes to me the nature of God as I have experienced God in my life.

But My kindness shall not depart from you,
Nor shall My covenant of peace be removed,”
Says the LORD, who has mercy on you.

The prophet is telling the children of Israel about Yahweh who is kind, merciful and in an enduring relationship with them - a covenant of peace. As I read this today, I think how much my life has been about trying to help people to experience the presence of our God of kindness, mercy and peace.  That is what I want worship to be about, and sermons and retreats and spiritual direction.  

The exile is one of the major themes of the Bible and it is a good one.  In the original story of exile, after Israel was defeated by the Babylonians, the righteous remnant were sent to live in Babylon.  Someone called it the "clash of kingdoms" as they live in a culture that was so different from theirs. They were strangers in a strange land trying to live out their faith in a very different environment.

As I try to prepare for this Advent I am aware of that as well today.  The materialism and the consumerism of the Christmas season can certainly get in the way of worshiping the baby born in a stable and following his way of peace and kindness and mercy.  I remember reading years ago a commentator suggest that preaching against consumerism during Christmas was like spitting into the wind.  

I also despair of the way some people's faith and description of God and Jesus leans into judgment and without mercy. Every year fewer and fewer people identify as Christians as the message of love and grace gets distorted.

All of this is to say that this season is a time to reflect on the nature of God and the gift and message of the birth of Jesus.  It is all about a love that is born again into the humblest of places and a love that wants to come again and be born in us.  It is about kindness, mercy and an everlasting covenant relationship that God wants to have with us.

So today I put in this blog one of my favorite prayers/ poems that describes what is essential in my relationship with God - love.  That has to be the center of it all. 

Let Your God Love You (by Edwina Gateley)

Be silent.
Be still.
Alone.
Empty
Before your God.
Say nothing.
Ask nothing.
Be silent.
Be still.
Let your God look upon you.
That is all.
God knows.
God understands.
God loves you
With an enormous love,
And only wants
To look upon you
With that love.
Quiet.
Still.
Be.

Let your God—
Love you.

Deliverance

The Psalm for this day is one of my favorites - Psalm 124.  It is a Psalm of Ascent.  Eugene Peterson wrote a book about the Psalms of Ascent and I picture people walking (up) to Jerusalem and speaking these words aloud as they walked.  With the words within them because they were so familiar.  Kind of like I know some Beatles songs and my daughter Kacey knows Taylor Swift's.  The words live in us and are a touchstone.  Here is the Psalm:

If it had not been the Lord who was on our side

    —let Israel now say—

 if it had not been the Lord who was on our side,

    when our enemies attacked us,

 then they would have swallowed us up alive,

    when their anger was kindled against us;

 then the flood would have swept us away;

    the torrent would have gone over us;

 then over us would have gone

    the raging waters.

6 Blessed be the Lord, who has not given us as prey to their teeth.

7 We have escaped like a bird from the snare of the hunters;

the snare is broken, and we have escaped.

Our help is in the name of the Lord,

who made heaven and earth.

It is about remembering the deliverance that the children of Israel received from Egypt.  The images are graphic - enemies attacking, a flood sweeping over, a bird caught in a trap.  Can I remember such a time in my life?  Yes, there have been times of great challenge in my 73 years when I felt caught in a trap (maybe of my own making) or attacked by others.  And yes,  - in retrospect - God did protect and guide me through it all.  Often through the prayers and help and kindness of people along the way. I can easily say   I know about deliverance. 

At the same time I am very aware that there are people who are experiencing this right now.  I cannot imagine the suffering of those in the Ukraine right now, or those trapped in the grip of addiction, or people who have no home and no income and no family. 

So, part of Advent meditation is remembering our own deliverance but also having the awareness of the multitudes who are in places of poverty and oppression right now.  Today is "Giving Tuesday" after the feasting of Thanksgiving and the material purchasing  of black Friday. small business Saturday and Cyber Monday. 

 I will give today - to some of my favorite causes.  But my prayer  is for a deeper awareness of the needs around me and the way that God is calling me to be generous  this season.  I know this sounds preachy but really I am always talking to myself in this blog.  I am into the Christmas spirit and  i know that the circle of care needs to be wider than just my family and friends.

Here is a wonderful Prayer by Marion Wright Edelman

God did not call us to succeed

God did not call us to succeed,

God called us to serve.

God did not call us to win,

God called us to work.

God did not call us to live long,

God called us to live for Him.

God did not call us to be happy,

God called us to be hopeful.

God did not call us to fame,

God called us to faith.

God did not call us to seek power,

God called us to seek peace.

God did not call us to loot the earth and each other,

God called us to love our earth and each other.

O God take our tiny acorns of service and turn them into towering oak trees of hope.

Patient waiting

I look over the texts of this day and the evening Psalm is the one that grabs me today.  Psalm 40 begins like this:

 ¹   I waited patiently for the LORD;
          he inclined to me and heard my cry.
²   He drew me up from the desolate pit,
          out of the miry bog,
     and set my feet upon a rock,
          making my steps secure.
³   He put a new song in my mouth,
          a song of praise to our God.
     Many will see and fear,
          and put their trust in the LORD.

 

"I waited patiently for the Lord."  I only wish that were true.  So often my waiting - for healing, for peace, for guidance is anything but patient.  However as I get older, I at least wait with the confidence that God is here, "inclining" to me and listening for my cry.  Listening for the cry of all of us.  One of my favorite verses in the Bible is from the book of Exodus when the writer tells us that God heard the people - the enslaved people - "Groaning."  I like and trust this idea of a listening God.

So on this first Monday of the first week of Advent maybe the awareness  to start this season with is this:  God is LISTENING.  God is present and inclining Godself to me.  And then there is the obvious question - are you - am I - speaking, expressing myself, praying?

True confession - it is easier to write about praying, to talk about praying, to read about praying - than to pray.  To sit in the silence - perhaps with my journal - and open myself to the reality of God's loving presence. To sit and wait long enough to uncover the places within my life, my soul, our world in which we are acquainted with the desolate pit and the miry bog.  

In our lives we live with both joy and sorrow, abundance and poverty , consolation and desolation. Gratitude is a wonderful practice for everyone, AND so is getting in touch with the places of sorrow, poverty and desolation that we also carry.  It is the awareness of darkness for which we need the light during this season.

So, my intention for this time is to be a woman of prayer for the one who is waiting patiently.

Here is such a prayer by Walter Brueggemann

“Advent Prayer
In our secret yearnings
we wait for your coming,
and in our grinding despair
we doubt that you will.
And in this privileged place
we are surrounded by witnesses who yearn more than do we
and by those who despair more deeply than do we.
Look upon your church and its pastors
in this season of hope
which runs so quickly to fatigue
and in this season of yearning
which becomes so easily quarrelsome.
Give us the grace and the impatience
to wait for your coming to the bottom of our toes,
to the edges of our fingertips.
We do not want our several worlds to end.
Come in your power
and come in your weakness
in any case
and make all things new.
Amen.”

 

Advent Begins

Today is the first Sunday in the holy season of Advent.  And I want to embrace it this year.

Nineteen years ago I began my call to Karl Road Christian Church on the first Sunday of Advent.  That was by design because it was the start of the new year in that peculiar life of the calendar of the church.  It was the beginning of 11 years of leading worship, Bible studies,  and retreats.  It was the beginning of my last full time call to ministry.

Four years ago I distinctly remember sitting in front of the Christmas Tree  at 1812 White Pine Court pondering the message of Advent.  Chuck was in the bedroom room following his surgery in the beginning of November.  I did not know what the future was going to bring, but my Advent prayer was for living with the awareness of the presence of God in the darkness.  The light in the dark time.  I was held and loved through those difficult days and Chuck left me on Christmas eve.  And God was with me through years of grief and truly brought healing to a broken heart.

And now I sit at a computer  in Galena, Ohio. I am not longer serving as a pastor and my house in Columbus was sold last week.  I am living with and engaged to John Anderson . And the Advent message of this day is HOPE This is the first Sunday of the season and the theme for this week is HOPE.  I have always been a woman of hope and over the years I have learned that hope comes through a life of reflection and expectation. 

I begin this day reading the scriptures of the day and am struck by some of the words and images:

Lift up your heads, O Gates!   and be lifted up O ancient doors!  That the King of Glory may come in

Psalm 24:7

Let everything that breathes praise the Lord!

Psalm 150:6

...with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day.  The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you....."

2 Peter 3:8,9

"Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour."

Matthew 25:13

It seems to me that the message of this day is WAIT.  And in your waiting look up, praise God, trust God and look for God.  In everything. 

 This Advent I am definitely experiencing new beginnings and a brand new life in a new place with a new partner.  We are not young, so that the miracle of our love is tempered by the reality of aging bodies and minds. Like everyone, we move into an unknown future - but the blessing is that we go together. 

My prayer for myself and for all of us is that WE might be faithful - which I believe means - open, aware, alive, humble, vulnerable, alert and with HOPE.  We celebrate this season that God gave us Jesus so that we might know - intimately - God's presence, God's love and God's call upon our lives.  No matter what stage of life.

May it be so. 

Here is an Advent Prayer by Ted Loder

God of all seasons and senses,
grant us the sense of your timing
to submit gracefully and rejoice quietly in the turn of the seasons.

In this season of short days and long nights, of grey and white and cold,
teach us the lessons of endings;
children growing, friends leaving, loved ones dying, grieving over,
grudges over, blaming over, excuses over.

O God, grant us a sense of your timing.

In this season of short days and long nights, of grey and white and cold,
teach us the lessons of beginnings;
that such waitings and endings may be the starting place,
a planting of seeds which bring to birth what is ready to be born—
something right and just and different, a new song,
a deeper relationship, a fuller love—
in the fullness of your time.

O God, grant us the sense of your timing.

A New Poem

It is not new - it is only new to me.  It is by Mary Oliver and it speaks to me.

As I get older, there are new things to worry about - like my health, my memory, my future.  I keep learning and relearning the same thing - 

³⁴ “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.

I Worried
Mary Oliver

I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not how shall
I correct it?
Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?
Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows
can do it and I am, well,
hopeless.
Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,
am I going to get rheumatism,
lockjaw, dementia?
Finally, I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.