11-1-17 - Holiness and Mercy

Today is All Saints Day, so let’s go out of sequence and talk about holiness. Holiness is not a word we hear a lot these days. People speak of “the holy,” and of “wholeness,” but holiness is not in vogue. In an age when the disadvantaged hunger for food and thirst for water, while the well-fed hunger for things and thirst for distraction, who yearns for righteousness?

Holiness is at the heart of Jesus’ prescription for disciples:
‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
‘Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Righteousness and purity of heart seem like overlapping categories, if not one and the same. Righteousness, being right, true, justified (as in a printer’s margin), means being grounded in God’s love and goodness. Purity of heart is an undivided focus on God. To thirst for righteousness is to desire integration, to be authentically ourselves, to have our inner life and our outer life cohere, to say what we mean and mean what we say. When we really yearn only for God, we are promised we will see God - and people see God in us.

Between righteousness and purity of heart on his list, Jesus places mercy, perhaps in recognition that there is no such thing as personal righteousness without engaging with other people. And as soon as we engage other people, we face the need to be merciful, as we hope they will be with us. Trying to be righteous without being merciful makes us self-righteous. Purity of heart requires compassion.

As we pray today, let’s locate in ourselves that thirst for holiness and “singleness of heart,” as the Prayer Book puts it. Let’s let that hunger fill us like an empty stomach does. Let’s ask ourselves where the flow of mercy in us might have hit a dam, and invite the Holy Spirit to help us remove those obstacles. The promise for us, as we orient ourselves to desire righteousness, mercy and purity of heart, is that we will be filled, we will receive mercy, and we will see God.

The multi-talented priest, composer and jazz-band leader Andy Barnett composed a lovely setting of the Latin American Bread Prayer. The words are simple and sink into the soul. Listen, and pray:
To all those with bread, give hunger for justice, And to all those who hunger, give bread.

To receive Water Daily by email each morning, click here.

10-31-17 - Blessed

There is only one gospel passage assigned for All Saints Day – each year, it’s the same old Beatitudes. I’ve always grumbled at this, dismissing the Beatitudes as a how-to guide (albeit, Jesus’ how-to guide...) and I’m not big on the idea of people striving for sainthood. That’s God’s to give. But it's time I got over this little prejudice and more fully explored this famous laundry list of saintly characteristics – remembering that “saint” means Christ-follower.

Jesus is speaking to his followers on a “mountain” – probably a hill, but Matthew wants to draw parallels between Moses giving the Law on Mount Sinai in the old covenant, and Jesus giving the “law” of the new covenant. (Luke, a Gentile, seems less interested in demonstrating continuity between the Jesus movement and its Jewish roots. In his Gospel, this scene takes place on a plain, on level ground – reinforcing his theme of Jesus as the great leveler, equalizer.)

Jesus has been teaching every chance he gets, but on this day he has a particular message. In the face of the hardship his followers will endure, he wants them to understand an important marker of their identity as his disciples. He wants them, above all, to know they are, blessed. This is the one word he repeats over and over.

What does it mean to be blessed? It means to stand in the light of God’s love and favor. Just as we cannot make ourselves saints, we cannot bless ourselves – we have to let it happen to us.

And God’s blessing is often counter-intuitive – the attributes Jesus associates with blessing are not what the world equates with success. Once again Jesus overturns the “logical” order of human priorities and introduces the upside-down reality of God’s realm. The people of Jesus’ day thought prosperity and health and offspring were signs of God’s blessing… Jesus says, “Look deeper.”

With what do you associate blessing? In what ways do you feel blessed or unblessed?
Might you ask the Holy Spirit to show you in what ways God sees you as blessed? I often invite us to hold other people in our mind’s eye and imagine them showered with God’s holy, healing light – that is an image of blessing. So today maybe we want to imagine ourselves in that light. And know we are blessed, no matter what we feel like on a given day.

As followers of Christ, we are blessed to be a blessing. We are one of the ways God is blessing the world. And we’re a whole lot more effective when we’re in touch with our blessedness. The next time someone says to you, “God bless you,” whether or not you’ve sneezed, say, “I'll take it!”

To receive Water Daily by email each morning, click here.

10-30-17 - Saints Alive

Next Sunday has a normal set of passages in sequence with what we’ve been reading. It is also the Sunday after All Saints Day, which has different readings that will be heard in many churches. It is the gospel for All Saints Day that I will focus on those this week.

Let’s start by defining what is a saint. Or, more properly, who is a saint. There is a reason we call it "All Saints" – it reminds us that all who follow Christ as Lord are saints of God. “Saints” was the term used in the early church for Christ followers; Paul would write a letter to “the saints who are in Corinth,” or “the saints in Philippi.” Saints were those called out and set aside, consecrated, made holy to the Lord, the way we use special consecrated vessels for holy rituals.

It does not mean “a really good person” or “holier than thou.” In fact, true saints are humble enough to be quite aware of their faults and weaknesses. Our doctrine of saints recognizes that saints are made, not born. We are made holy by being united with Christ, not through our own attributes. Many of our best known saints, like St. Augustine or St. Francis of Assisi, had quite rakish pasts before the Holy Spirit got hold of them. Some, like St. Teresa of Avila, were quick of wit and sharp of tongue. Some were martyrs, some monastics, some simple, some highly educated. Saints come in all shapes and sizes.

What kind of saint are you? When are you most aware of having been made holy? Another way to ask that is, when are you most aware of the Holy Spirit working through you?

If you want to become more aware of your sainthood, that’s a prayer I believe God is always pleased to answer, “Make me more holy, Lord.” If you pray that prayer today, ask the Spirit to show you all the ways you already reflect God’s holiness and love. Saints are a work in progress.

The Holy Spirit’s presence always leaves a residue, I think. Thus we become tinged with the holy, and if we keep inviting the Spirit to dwell in, with and through us, that tinge of holiness grows stronger and thicker until the holiness is more obvious than the mere humanity. And then, lo and behold, someone is liable to say of you, “S/He is such a saint!”

To receive Water Daily by email each morning, click here.

10-27-17 - The Perfect Hanger

“On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets,” Jesus said about the commandments he considered the greatest – to love God with all our heart, soul and mind, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

I can be quite literal, so I’m visualizing an actual hanger, on which hangs the fullness of God’s revelation, perfected in Christ. This hanger, like many in our closets, has three sides. The widest, bottom stabilizing rod is our love for God. The two angled sides, which rest on the base and join together at the top, are our love for neighbor and for ourselves – which, as we have observed this week, are interdependent.

If we can manage to fully engage our love for God, neighbor and self, and give each of these loves equal energy, I believe our lives will be more centered and fulfilling. We will find ourselves thriving in the light of God, putting more and more of our life-blood into the enterprise of love. That is what we are here for, what Jesus came to make possible for us.

How might we orient ourselves into a more conscious, daily engagement with loving God, neighbor and self? We could take the hangers in our closet as a daily reminder. When you take out clothing in the morning, remember: “Oh yeah, my biggest job today is to love God, my neighbor and myself.” And when you put your clothes away in the evening (we all hang up our clothes every night, right?) review how well you remembered. Gradually this can become second nature, and we’ll see the fruit of it in our lives.

And when it becomes second nature to more and more people, we start to see the fruits in the world around us. That world is frightening me quite a lot these days – yet I am constantly called back to John’s reminder that, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” The absolutely best action we can take is to love actively and consciously, and increase our capacity for love every single day.

Paul wrote to the Colossians: Therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience… And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. 

We have a closet full of hangers, with all the holy clothing we need. And what supports these hangers? The perfect love of God, which can bear all the weight we need it to. God’s love enables us to love.

10-26-17 - Loving Yourself

I remember the evening in my twenties, at a Wednesday eucharist, when I realized that I would never be happy – and maybe not able to truly love another – until I learned to love myself. Some decades later, I’m still working on it.

Many people have a hard time with the notion of loving themselves. There is a self-suppressing strain in Western culture, and the Christian church hasn’t always presented Jesus’ teachings about self-denial in the most wholesome way. We often equate loving self with selfishness, self-centeredness, self-involvement. And yet, right here at the center of Jesus' greatest commandment, is the order to love ourselves as we love our neighbors.

If this is no challenge for you, great; you have a wonderful gift of grace and equilibrium to share with the world. If loving yourself does not come naturally, here are some ideas to help us move into this way of living. First, see yourself as a child of God, created in love, for love. If you ask the Spirit to give you a glimpse of how God sees you, you may have a revelation of your belovedness. If you want a scriptural reminder of chosen-ness, try the first chapter of Ephesians.

When we are reminded whose we are, it opens the way to better discovering who we are. So a next step is to look at our wounds and faults with compassion instead of judgment. What prejudices have we been turning on ourselves, perhaps more harshly than we'd apply to our neighbors? If we are given to self-criticism, let’s offer it the way we would correct a small child, not by crushing her spirit, but calling her to her better self.

Then we might move beyond accepting our “shadow sides” to actually celebrating our gifts and strengths. What are your best qualities? What is delightful about you? What do other people love in you? What do you love? And what kind of a future do you desire for this special and beloved creature of God. What do you want in your life? What do you want to do/see/experience/taste/ give/receive?

Loving our selves and loving our neighbors need to go hand in hand, for fundamental to the whole exercise is the understanding that we are equal in God’s sight, no better, no worse, no more important or less, no more or less worthy of regard and honor and dignity and love.

When we fully comprehend that, loving God with our whole heart and mind and soul will be a piece of cake; we’ll simply be recognizing the inherent beauty of God’s creation, and acknowledging that God does flawless work. You are Exhibit A.

10-25-17 - Loving Neighbor

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself." Jesus called this the second core of the Law: Love God with all your being, and your neighbor as yourself.

This commandment can tempt us to to start asking, “Then who is my neighbor?” Another lawyer of Jesus’ day asked him just that question. Jesus answered with the story of the Good Samaritan, one conclusion of which is that the neighbor who cares for us can be someone we don’t like or trust very much. Our neighbor can be anyone, and is everyone.

Today I'm less interested in that question than In the second part of the verse – “as yourself.” Jesus (and the compilers of the law codes in Leviticus) links love for self and love for other in a way that merits deeper exploration. What does it mean to love my neighbor as I love myself? Since we don’t always love ourselves very well, we don’t always love our neighbors well either. If we are very critical of ourselves, we’ll extend that tendency to other people. That is one way of loving our neighbors as ourselves – but not very life-giving.

How else do we love ourselves? Most of us are protective of our safety – maybe loving our neighbors as ourselves means we’re equally concerned about theirs. And most of us are wired to be sure we have enough to eat and a sheltered place to live… a godly love for neighbor would include wanting the same for them. Yikes - this is a lot! Is it just too much to love our neighbors as ourselves? Too hard?

God doesn't call us to anything his Spirit can’t equip us to handle. We just have to let the Spirit rewire the faulty coding we get from this world, the message that says put yourself and your own kind first, don’t trust the Other. But can we ever love our neighbor enough to feed everybody in the world? Well, we know there is enough food; it’s just not distributed very equitably. So maybe loving our neighbor as ourselves motivates us to work on that challenge, or on housing, or security. Maybe we keep less for ourselves so our neighbor has more.

Ultimately, this neighbor-loving business grows one at a time. When we go global in our thinking, we can end up paralyzed or discouraged. But one neighbor today? Maybe one you hadn’t planned on loving? Maybe start simply by praying for that person to be blessed? That we can do…

In prayer today think first of yourself. Try to imagine for a moment how God sees you. Love what you see, or at least trust in God’s love for you.

And then imagine someone who is your neighbor. If you’re feeling adventurous, ask God, “Who is the neighbor you want me to love today?” Who knows whose face is going to come up in your mind’s eye! Sit with the image. Ask how you’re being called to love that person.

In a world where we often assume scarcity, neighbors are one thing we’ll never run out of. And learning to love them is a challenge for our whole lifetime. We may as well get good at it, because I have a feeling that is exactly what we’re going to be doing for all of eternity.

10-24-17 - Loving God

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” So reads what Jesus calls the first and greatest commandment. We might call this the goal of the life of faith, to love God fully, without reservation, with all of our being.

This kicks up all kinds of questions in me:  Do I love anyone or anything with all of my heart? Do you?
In an age when our attentions are ever more fragmented, what would it feel like to focus all our heart, all our spirit, even all our mind on one thing, one person, one God?

Do I even love God at all? Loving God presupposes a relationship. I consider this the richest promise of the Christian life, that Jesus has enabled true relationship with the Living God. In Ephesians we read that through Christ we “have access to the Father in one Spirit.” (Eph 2:18) So I ask, am I fully engaged in that relationship, or looking on from the sidelines? How about you?

I am not a Hebrew scholar and don’t know the nuances of the word translated here as “love.” The English language has a limited vocabulary for love – we use one word to cover an array of different kinds. The Greeks used at least four. I suspect this word contains shades of reverence and awe, even fear, and not simply “love” the way we think of loving our parents or children or lovers or friends. How do we name the love of a creature for its creator, of an estranged child for her reconciling parent, of a broken one for his healer? It would seem that to fully love God we must first fully recognize our need for God's unconditional love for us.

How do we begin? How about with these three components, heart, soul and mind. In prayer today, we can come into a quiet, centered place, and speak simply and honestly to God about where we are with loving God. Good relationships are based on honesty and authenticity. We don’t have to pretend to feel more than we do, or less.

Assuming we want to love God more fully, let’s offer our heart – and spend a little time on what’s in your heart. When I think about mine, I envision a mixed landscape of joy and desolation. 

What do you see? Can you offer it to God in love, no matter what it looks like?

Then let’s offer our soul, perhaps asking the Holy Spirit to give us an image of our soul. What do you see or discern? Can you offer your spirit to be infused with the Holy Spirit?

Then let’s offer our minds… perhaps even more cluttered than our hearts. What would it feel like to focus your mind on loving God, even for a few moments?

What might it feel like to love with all the fullness of our being, no separation, no shadow? I confess it scarcely seems possible in this world. But I do know that the more we love God this way, the better we will be able to love ourselves – and others.

10-23-17 - Love and Law

Another week, another test. For the past few Sundays our appointed Gospel passages have chronicled one long game of “gotcha” between Jesus and the religious leaders, them trying to catch him saying the wrong thing, and him neatly sidestepping their loaded questions. In last week’s test, he prevailed yet again – but it turns out that was only against one set of examiners, the Sadducees. This week we see the Pharisees get back in the game – and since they were legal specialists, they asked Jesus a question about the Law. Any religious teacher worth his salt should know his Torah.

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”

Easy A. Jesus answers with the best known of all commandments:
He said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment.”

No surprises here. This is indeed the most basic command, where Israel’s relationship with God begins. Jesus might have checked the box and moved on – but he wasn’t finished. He went on to cite a much less known commandment and put it on a par with the first: 

“And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

What’s this? An obscure half-verse from Leviticus is up there with loving God? Yes, Jesus says - “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

He isn’t making this up – he is quoting the Law as given by Moses. Nonetheless, in combining these two commandments Jesus presents a radical new way of seeing God and justice. It’s not enough to love God – we have to live that love by the way we love our neighbors and even ourselves.

We’ll unpack these different kinds of love throughout this week. Today let’s explore this linkage Jesus makes.
Do you associate loving yourself with loving God? Do you connect God and neighbor? 

Do you feel the most love for God, for your neighbor, or for yourself?
How might the way we love our neighbor increase our love for ourselves? 

How might the way we love ourselves – or not – connect to our ability to love God?

Sit with these questions in prayer today, as a kind of diagnostic on your "love life." Talk to God about it, notice where your energy increases.

It’s good to know where we excel in love and where we can grow, for in the realm of God, love is all and all is Love.

10-20-17 - Patriot's Day

Every once in a while, Patriot’s Day – a New England holiday falling on the third Monday of April – coincides with Tax Day. One year when that happened I thought, "Wow - New Englanders really have it right, honoring the day we file our taxes as the most patriotic day of the year." Turns out it marks some military victories, but for my money, I call April 15th the day on which all Americans are invited to celebrate their patriotism. There is nothing more patriotic than investing your resources (mandated or not…) in the future you desire for your country.

When did we allow the national conversation about taxes to become so negative? Public service and tax-paying used to be marks of a good citizen. Taxes are the way a healthy society funds the services, infrastructure and systems of justice that allow its citizens to thrive. Though they can be an instrument of oppression, under fair laws in an open society, taxes are a shared good; it can feel good to participate.

In Jesus’ time perhaps paying taxes to Caesar, the head of the often brutal Roman Empire, might not have been such a happy thing. But for us, who have a great deal of control over our destinies, despite some chaos and corruption, paying taxes can be something to celebrate. I hate paying speeding tickets, but sometimes I remind myself they’ll fund some county program that is needed, and get over it.

What does this have to do with our spiritual lives, which after all is why we read Water Daily? Opening up our view of taxes is yet another way to help us release our grip on the money we think is ours. If we can see taxes as an investment in the future of the wider community, perhaps we can more freely share our resources in the community of faith, to fund the ministries through which God is working transformation. Can we loosen our grip and pledge big this season?

Yesterday we spoke about having dual citizenship In this life. We are residents of this world with all the responsibilities and joys of being members of societies. And we are citizens of the heavenly realm, that already/not yet space of inbreaking power amidst our heart-breaking powerlessness. As long as we’re here, we are invited to invest the gifts God has given us – money, time, privilege and talent – in both realms.

We can love our country and invest in its people and future, AND love our God and look forward to our eternal future. When we open our hands to give, it’s amazing how quickly they are filled.

10-19-17 - Church and State

Can institutional religion and institutional government co-exist in harmony when their aims are often so divergent? The Pharisees, in their sly interrogation of Jesus, implied that support for the state (admittedly, in this case a brutal occupying force…) was incompatible with support for God. 

“Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?’

Jesus refused to indulge that duality – he seemed profoundly disinterested in engaging the question. After all, from the point of view of eternity, support for both the civil state and the church are temporal. Jesus is interested not so much in where we give our money as in how we give our hearts.

As human beings, we are both political and spiritual. So our societies necessarily contain both such structures, with different goals and ways of operating. Religious and civic life exist in essential, overlapping, but basically distinct realms. When those realms live in creative tension, somewhat equally balanced in power and influence, human societies do alright. We go off the rails when either becomes too dominant - especially, I'm sorry to say, when it's religion that tries to run the show. (Such is the power of Margaret Atwood’s 1986 novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” enjoying new life as an award-winning television series, warning a new era about the incompatibility of theocracy and democracy.)

This week we are exploring how best to live in the tension of our dual citizenship, how to reflect the values of heaven on earth, and hold up the needs of earth before the power of heaven. How do you feel called to live that dual citizenship, bringing your spiritual self into the public square? 

When do we challenge secular values with gospel values? 

How and when might we invite the power of the Holy Spirit to work through us for secular goods?

It's easy to get disgusted with government. We can instead wield the spiritual power we've been given as well as our civic freedoms, being engaged citizens and prayer warriors.
The healthiest way for church and state to mingle might just be in us.

10-18-17 - God and Government

Did God ordain governments? Some see governments as purveyors of chaos and corruption, when their very purpose is to prevent those things, to secure a safe and equitable society in which all citizens might thrive. We know too many cases where government works against the values we hold, though it is also society’s chief agent of justice.

There are passages in scripture that read as though God very much works through political systems and leaders, even ones outside the people of Israel (read up on the Cyrus passages in Isaiah…). St. Paul, writing in Romans 13, seems to feel that no ruler on earth can exercise power without God’s authority – which makes me wonder what he thinks about all the corrupt and oppressive rulers, of which his day saw as many as ours. Jesus, in the passage we are exploring this week, seems to take governments as a given, not saying where they fit in God’s plan. As he tells Pilate under interrogation, “My kingdom is not of this world.”

I believe that government is a natural human phenomenon, as is institutional religion. Human beings have to organize around power, supplies and spirituality, and organizations soon take on a life and culture of their own. Like the human beings of which they are comprised, they exist on a spectrum between good and evil, helpful and self-serving, visionary and banal. Government, in a functioning democracy, is us, and we are it. We don’t get to call it a “them.”

So where does that leave us as people of faith? Perhaps it leaves us with a call to be agents of healthier government and a more life-bringing body politic. In the months since our last election rhetoric has grown more and more polarized and shrill, though the urgency of justice often seems to call for turning up the volume. Many Christians have sought to find an appropriate place as promoters of equality and resisters of evil. What if Christ followers participated primarily as peacemakers, not trying to convince the irrational, but refraining from demonizing, holding up the values of justice and equity and freedom?

Sound like a pipe dream? We have at our hands the power that transforms world. Surely we can pray for our governments and those who claim a desire to lead us.

I don’t know if God ordains governments. I do believe God will work through anyone who asks. Let’s ask.

10-17-17 - Giving With God

Then Jesus said to them, ‘Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’

Sounds simple, right? Give to God the things that are God’s. But what belongs to God? Doesn’t the emperor also belong to God? And if everything belongs to God – why does God need our gifts? Our pledges? Our offerings?

Maybe God doesn’t need anything from us. Maybe we need to give, because things get squirrely when we don’t, and because we are transformed when we do.

It is tempting to see the two kinds of “giving” that Jesus talks about here as similar, parallel tracks. We owe the government our taxes to pay for the goods and services we need governments to render. We owe God our “dues” to pay for… what? Clergy and church buildings? Charity?

Once we equate giving our money and resources for God’s mission to “taxes” or “dues,” it becomes an obligation, a contractual exchange. That is not what giving is intended to be for Christians. We are not called to give to God. We are called to give in relationship with God, to give because it is the best way we know to reciprocate in gratitude for all that we’ve received, to join into the celebration of blessing.

If our giving is stunted, it may be that we are not all that grateful, not feeling very blessed. We give because it sets us free, opens us up, changes our hearts. We give because we love seeing what happens for others when we do.

Where does giving bring you the most joy? Where do you feel the least willing?
Both answers offer ground for prayer – and action. Maybe we are being invited to give additionally in both categories. Maybe we want to strengthen our gratitude muscles.

We are to give as God has given us – and in Christ, God gave us everything. I was reminded recently that the great U2 song, “With or Without You” is not about a human relationship, but the struggle to exist in faith and intimacy with the God you cannot see. (The “she” in U2 songs often refers to the Holy Spirit or to grace…)
See the stone set in your eyes / See the thorn twist in your side. (A Pauline reference.)
I can’t live, with or without you,” Bono sings.

And then comes the repeated refrain which applies to both God, and to us in relationship with the God whose essential nature it is to give, a nature we gradually take on:
And you give, and you give, and you give yourself away.

And we never run out.