Monday, October 24, 2022
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Gravity never has a bad day
You were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light. Delight in the law of the Lord. Meditate on his law day and night.
Yesterday Pastor Matt talked through James 4, with its martial metaphors and powerful insistence that we choose Yahweh or the World. Our idols clamor to be king, but there is no room in the throne room for them. Because of what God is and what God does, only God deserves the name, the title, the position. But I forget this over and over, every day.
Gravity pulls me down, and gravity never has a bad day.
On every level – personal, local, national, global – the temporal will always find conflict with the eternal. Our egos are heavy, hard, insistent, and blind. The Jesuits call us to find God in all things. Grace Covenant’s mantra says almost the same thing. Over decades, the church’s mission has become to “help as many of us as possible to become like Christ in all of life.”
But in the church, like everywhere, gravity pulls us down, and gravity never has a bad day. Each of us is acutely aware of what we need to keep us comfortable and safe. And when we don’t get it, or think we will lose it, we fight back. We might think we’re justified, and sometimes we are. Otherwise, we are fighting against God without even knowing it. God knows what we need much better than we do.
Our prayers should not be shopping lists. God is not a vending machine. Matt reminded me of what happens when a vending machine doesn’t produce what I want. I kick it! When I kick out at God, I’m kicking myself more. In the shins, in the gut.
When I pray, just who is praying anyway?
Our God is not a stingy God,
waiting, resisting and doling out graces
only if we pray hard enough,
long enough, use the right words
or spill enough of our hearts, souls and tears.
Our God is not like this at all.
Rather our God is wooing us,
seeking persistently, patiently, lovingly
our consent that grace become efficacious,
for our permission for the miracles
large and small to become real.
Such a delusion to imagine that we
could ever pray to God,
a being somehow separate, even distant,
from us
when actually all prayer originates in God,
God’s Spirit prays in us always
and separation from God is, well … nonsense.
And so my prayer has become silent,
listening to the unformed words God
speaks through my spirit,
and my response is to say yes,
giving consent,
to love. – Clarence Heller
This is God, not that we loved him but that he loved us (1 John 4).
Be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us. You were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light.
(Ephesians 4, Psalm 1, John 17, Luke 13)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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