Tag Archives: Grace

Grace, Love, Compassion

Create in me a clean heartLent
March 18, 2015

Scripture Reading: Psalm 51:1-12

Have mercy on me, O God,
   according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy
   blot out my transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
   and cleanse me from my sin. — Psalm 51:1-2

In many Bibles our scripture today is preceded by and introductory remark like this. To the Leader. A Psalm of David, when the prophet Nathan came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.* This introduction has been there for a long time but scholars really do not know if it were with the original or not. It certainly adds to the flavor of the Psalm when it is considered in the light of the infamous story of David, King of Israel, taking the wife of one of his soldiers and then ordering the soldier to be placed clearly in harm’s way so that he would be killed. Of course David got caught. I wonder if he would have ever repented had his sins not been called out by Nathan. It is no wonder David felt dirty.

While based on David’s sin, the Psalm is really about the nature of God’s love. In these two verses, God is described as one with steadfast love, for which we might use the words unconditional love today, and abundant mercy, which we might call compassion. Later in the Psalm we read of God’s gracious love. But most importantly the Psalm talks about recovery, a return to wholeness from brokenness, we call that restorative justice.

I think I am sometimes a very strange person, but for some reason when I worked as a waitress in high school and college, one of the things I enjoyed most was clearing the table of all the dirty dishes and dropped crumbs and then resetting it with clean flatware and table linens, making it ready for the next customer. When we mess up in life, life still goes on. We must learn from our mistakes and continue the work God called us to do. We can only do that when we shed ourselves of the sin that corrodes our souls changing us and causing us to turn away from God.

Prayer: Lord, convict me of my sins of omission and commission and forgive me of them turning me around so that I might once more know your grace, your unconditional love, and your compassion. Amen.

The New Interpreter’s Bible: A commentary in Twelve Volumes, Volume IV Abingdon Press, Nashville, 1996, page 883
All scriptures are quoted from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition, copyright 1989, 1995, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of American. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

A Player not Just a Fan

unconditional loveLent March 13, 2015

Scripture Reading: Ephesians 2:1-10 and [God] raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life. — Ephesians 2:1-10

We did nothing to deserve the love of God and there is nothing we can do to earn it. God is love. All people are God’s chosen people. The concept that God loves us unconditionally is very hard to grasp in a society that is dominated by competition. We were, however, not created for competition with each other, but to do good works together as the Body of Christ. I do not question that part of being made in the image of God is the desire to improve our skills, increase our productivity as individuals and in teams. It seems to me that the most outstanding athletes are the ones who constantly strive to beat their own best.

What I, at times, and others of us might find, if we really examine our lives, is that we are fans rather than players in the Kingdom of God. God calls us to be players. Those who take the field as members of the Body of Christ must be well schooled in the ways of Christ, must practice them at every opportunity, must find our niche and hone it to what Paul calls perfection.  We must be ready to participate at a moment’s notice whether we are on the first team or warming the bench. And we must enable all our fellow players to do the same thing. We are called to be one in Christ.

Our ability to be the best that we can be starts with our accepting the gift of grace that is the unconditional love of God. We need nothing more to make us each whole. Wholeness enables oneness.

Prayer: Draw us in the Spirit’s tether,  for when humbly in your name  two or three are met together,  you are in the midst of them.  Alleluia! Alleluia!  Touch we now your garment’s hem.* Amen.

 *First verse of hymn, Draw Us in the Spirits Tether by Percy Dearmer
All scriptures are quoted from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition, copyright 1989, 1995, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of American. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

That Which Enslaves Us

Credit-Card-SlaveryLent March 3, 2015

Scripture Reading: Exodus 20:1-17 Then God spoke all these words:  I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.  You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments. — Exodus 20:1-6

It is interesting that the first commandant relates God’s salvation of the Israelites from slavery to worship of other gods. Israel’s salvation from Egyptian slavery, as far as I can tell, was an act of pure grace on God’s part. God heard the people’s cries and God responded. In relation to Egypt, there are none of the stories about Israel’s sinning and being taken into exile that followed in later stories. No claim that the slavery was the result of any specific misdeeds.  Yet the Bible reminds the children of Israel many, many times of God’s saving the Israelites from their enslavement in Egypt and in most of those instances, I think, the Israelites had lost faith or took it for granted and were placing their trust in lesser gods.

Lent is a great time for us to dust off our faith that may have been stored in an honored place but left there for all practical purposes unattended.  What lesser gods are we serving? Most of us do not have little effigies to which we bow, but we do have other gods: the quest for power at any cost, the desire to control other people’s lives, greed in all its manifestation, addictions certainly to drugs and alcohol but to things also, and the need to be better than other people played out in self-righteousness.

Just as God groomed Moses and sent him to lead the Israelites out of slavery, God sent his son to bring us salvation, also a gift of pure grace. I know it is hard to take in our tit for tat world that such a thing could happen. It requires us to grasp an entirely new way of being. It demands our full commitment, our very lives. It is the way to God’s abundant life in Christ.

Prayer: God of Justice and Mercy, grant us the strength and courage to accept your gift of grace and may our receiving it be reflected in our lives. Amen.

All scriptures are quoted from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition, copyright 1989, 1995, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of American. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Grace

Living in the Spirit
June 19, 2014

 Scripture Reading: Romans 6:1-11 

What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin go on living in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.  – Romans 6:1-4

Paul had quite a challenge bringing the gentiles into the Body of Christ. Coming from a markedly different culture than the Jewish one, they worshipped many different gods or none at all. Their lifestyles among other things included eating foods that were taboo for Jews as well as worshipping various effigies. Paul had to walk a fine line with them and the Jews who had become followers of Christ who still found meaning from their culture related to their Jewish faith. Paul had to help them all identify what was culture and what was sin, what was of God and what was not.

Our scripture today deals with another of those challenges, I call it fuzzy logic. If God’s love and forgiveness were somehow tied in with grace then the more we sin the more grace we would receive, right? These Roman Christian were having a hard time understanding that God’s grace is a gift freely given with no strings attached. In actuality the gift of grace frees us from the bounds of sin allowing us to develop habits of loving ourselves and others that we could never have done without grace.

We still struggle with this issue today. We sometimes even have the need to prove ourselves more righteous than another because we cannot accept that God’s grace and love have no strings for us or for anyone else. We are never closer to God because we perceive that someone else is further from God than we are. On the contrary we are actually turning our backs on God anytime we turn our backs on another. Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.—Matthew 25:45

Prayer: God of Grace, create in me a clean heart and a right spirit so that I may love more fully. Amen.

All scriptures are quoted from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition, copyright 1989, 1995, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of American. Used by permission. All rights reserved.