Water Daily

5-11-21 - Yours, Mine and Ours

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was Yours, Mine and Ours, the true story of a blended family (a widower with 10 children married a widow with 8, and they had 2 more…). I got the biggest kick out of the shenanigans in that household. (The book was made into a film with Henry Fonda and Lucille Ball in 1968, and then a more forgettable remake in 2005.) None of which has anything to do with this week’s gospel, except that the way Jesus talks to his heavenly Father about his disciples always reminds me of the title:

“I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything you have given me is from you; for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours."

This prayer for Jesus’ disciples, like his instructions to them which we explored the past two weeks, is elliptical, moving forward like a tide in overlapping waves. In this first part, it’s hard to track who belongs to whom. Jesus refers to his disciples as “those you gave me,” those entrusted to him by the Father. “They were yours, and you gave them to me…”

What if clergy more often thought of their congregants in this way – as those who belong to God, entrusted into their care for a time? And the same for the way a congregation might view its pastor. And a wife her husband; and parents their children; and teachers their students, doctors their patients, stockbrokers their clients. How different the web of human relationships would be if we all viewed the people in our lives as belonging to God first and foremost, and only secondarily and in a very limited way, to us. How much heartache might be avoided.

Regarding other people as belonging to God, we might treat them with more reverence and care. Maybe this is why Jesus was so easy sitting with lepers and outcasts, the greedy and the deranged – because he knew they were God’s precious creatures and therefore worthy of honor. He healed not to make them more acceptable; he healed because wholeness more perfectly reflected their status as God’s beloved.

Periodically I encounter the advice to “Remember you are a child of God” or words to that effect. That is a valuable spiritual practice; most of us would be kinder to ourselves if we lived it. Today, though, I invite us to turn it around. Think of a person or group or type of person in whom you find it hard to see anything good, to respect, let alone love. Call that person to mind. And then overlay this message over that picture: “Belongs to God.” How does that change the way you regard that person?

Try it every day this week. Note what feelings come up, and pray through them.

Jesus ended with a statement of mutual possessing: “All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them.” We are invited into that mutual belonging, in this gigantic blended family we call the human race, beloved beyond measure by the God who created, redeemed and sustains us. We continue to bring Jesus glory as we treat everyone around us as both ours and God’s.

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5-10-21 - Eavesdroppi

We reflect this week on the Gospel for the 7th Sunday of Easter, though many churches will hear the Gospel for Ascension Day on Sunday. You can listen to this reflection here.

Everyone knows it’s bad form to listen in on other people’s conversation. Yet that’s exactly what we’re invited to do in the gospel passage appointed for next Sunday. We are eavesdropping on Jesus’ conversation with his heavenly Father on the night he takes leave of his beloved disciples and prepares to enter into the suffering which will complete his mission in this world.

We will explore the text of this prayer, but first let's deal with a “meta-question.” How is it that we know what Jesus prayed that night? Was one of his followers listening and feverishly writing it all down as a transcript which got passed along for the forty or fifty years before John’s gospel was composed? That’s possible.

Or perhaps what was passed down was the tradition of what Jesus prayed. “And then, do you remember, after he talked to us all that while, he started to pray for us, that we would be protected and know the truth….”

It’s also possible this is a literary device used by the author of John to reiterate the themes he has been emphasizing all along. Would that make this text any less valid for us? It doesn’t have to. Remember, what we receive as Holy Scripture bears the fingerprints of many, many fallible human beings. We receive it as holy and authoritative, not as a court transcript, but as a Spirit-inspired document given authority by the early church and generations afterward.

In other words, it is holy in part because it has been regarded as holy, and because it brings life to the communities that regard it as holy. This “high priestly prayer,” as scholars call it, has given life to generations of Christ-followers, who have persevered in mission because of the promise of belonging and love and intercession encompassed in these words attributed to Jesus.

In a sense, we are always eavesdropping when we read Scripture – we overhear God’s words to other people, their stories about their encounters with God, their letters to one another about their encounters with God. But this is not meant to be a passive overhearing. We are invited to join this conversation and bring into it our own stories and doubts and connections and joys.

God also speaks to us directly through prayer, through proclamation, through encounters that we realize are “God-moments.” If the records we leave in our journals and testimonies last a fraction of the time these stories did, we might find they’ve been smoothed out and edited a bit too. I hope you are leaving a record of God’s dealings with you. That is precious and holy writ, if not Holy Scripture.

We believe, by faith, that the pages of Scripture are not merely human documents, though we needed human beings to record and preserve them. We believe these are God-breathed words of life. It doesn't matter whether these are the exact words Jesus prayed. The Holy Spirit was with him when he prayed. The Spirit was with those who remembered it. The Spirit was with those who eventually wrote it down, and those who saved it, and those who wove it into the record we now call the New Testament.

And the Holy Spirit is with us as we encounter it and ask God to bring it to life for us. This week, as we explore this prayer, let’s keep asking where we find ourselves in these ancient words. The Holy Spirit with us - that’s what makes this holy for us.

5-7-21 - Chosen

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.

Most people like to be chosen. Whether it’s for a team in grade school, a dance in high school, a job, an award, a date, it makes us feel good to be seen and selected, as long as the attention is positive. But being chosen is passive – we can’t ensure we’ll be picked, as hard as we might try to be the best candidate.

That makes some people more comfortable being the chooser. Choosing puts us in control. Freedom of choice is a huge value in American life. (So don’t say “we only serve Pepsi” when I want a Diet Coke!) We champion the right to choose our jobs, spouses, healthcare and reproduction, even gender. Freedom to choose is a core value for all human life and interaction.

Jesus’ disciples thought they chose to follow him. He didn’t compel them – he came along and said, “Follow me.” They made that choice, often at great cost to their families. So imagine their surprise to hear Jesus say that’s not the way it happened:
“You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name.”

Did Jesus really choose this motley crew of hard-headed, occasionally thick-headed men and women? Maybe Jesus has different criteria for leadership than we do. Maybe this mixed up group was just exactly who he wanted to graduate as his first team of apostles. And maybe he has chosen us for the same reason, because he believes that we too are gifted and lovable, capable of bearing fruit, abundant fruit that will endure.

Do you feel chosen by God to be a follower of Jesus Christ? Or did it feel like something you chose, or someone else chose for you? There has to be an element of response on our part; we’re not puppets. Often it is the realization of being chosen that elicits a response in us. That’s how it works when two people are courting. And this relationship with Jesus is more love story than hiring process.

How do you respond to being chosen by God? Does it affect the way you live your faith?
How does knowing God’s desire for us is fruitfulness affect the way you live your faith?

The fruitfulness and the chosen-ness go together. We cannot make ourselves fruitful any more than we can get ourselves chosen. When we let in the mystery of how precious we are to God, the wonder that God would choose us to participate in God’s great mission of reclaiming, restoring and renewing all of creation to wholeness in Christ – that knowledge of our chosen-ness generates a desire in us to bear fruit in that mission, the fruit of lives transformed and hearts opened.

Our hearts become opened by the awareness of Love, and then we bear the fruit of Love into the lives around us, as God's transforming power works through us. That's what Jesus promised. That is how we see fruit that will last.

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5-6-21 - No Longer Servants

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.

There are promotions – and then there are status upgrades. Jesus' followers got one of those his last evening among them. He told them what it means to abide in his love, live by his rules, love one another with the kind of love they received from him. He said, “You are my friends if you do what I command you.”

In a culture in which people attached themselves to a spiritual master whom they served and revered, followed and learned from, this language of friendship might have sounded jarring. So Jesus explained, “I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.”

Being someone’s servant and being their friend are very different. Servanthood can be easier – you have no responsibility to strategize, plan, or achieve the grand vision. You need only fulfill the tasks assigned you with all the skill and commitment you can muster, anticipating needs as appropriate. And then collect your paycheck and take your assigned time off. There is a simplicity to contractual, hierarchical relationships.

Friendship, with its mutuality and intimacy, is much messier; covenantal, not contractual, with commitment to nurturing and growing the friendship. Friends are responsible for one another in a way that a supervisor and servant are not. Friends are recipients of each other’s joys and worries and confidences. This is what Jesus highlights; he says he has entrusted his followers with everything he has heard from God the Father. That must have been daunting to hear.

Yet it must also have been exhilarating to be told they were no longer servants, but friends. If we work for someone we respect and admire, it’s a rush to be elevated from employee to friend. There is more freedom and collegiality, along with more responsibility.

Sometimes in the church we can act more like polite admirers, or pack mules struggling up a hill than as independent, respected, friends of the Living God. Is it easier to think we work for Jesus rather than with him? Jesus didn't ask us to work for him. He wants us working with him, filled with his Spirit, not checking off tasks and having him sign off on our time-sheets. He has entrusted us with the honor and responsibility - and joy - of being his friends.

Have we accepted? Do we hang out in prayer with him as a friend? Do we go out, healing and transforming people with him, sitting with sinners, challenging oppressors, loving the loveless?

How do we move and talk, sit and listen as friends of the Risen and Anointed One? Figuring that out - that's the work of ministry.

5-5-21 - Love One Another

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.

Jesus set a pretty high bar for friendship. On his last night in human life, he told his followers, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

I don’t know many people likely to be asked to lay down their lives for friends, though some under persecution or threat of war are faced with such choices. The highest sacrifice asked of most of us is that we lay aside our prerogatives, preferences, convenience for our friends.

But Jesus knew what was ahead – for him, and for his friends. The persecution unleashed after Jesus' arrest, crucifixion and resurrection would eventually claim the lives of most of those with him at that momentous Last Supper. Before they could offer that kind of sacrifice, though, they would have to be willing to truly love each other. Jesus had said that keeping his commandments would enable them to abide in his love. “You are my friends if you do what I command you.” Now he spells out the heart of that mandatum novum. “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”

"But we do love each other," they may have thought. They had spent three years in close quarters and sometimes no quarters at all. But the gospels tell us how much squabbling and jockeying went on among these disciples. And no matter what affection they may have felt, Jesus was now upping the stakes: they were to love each other as he loved them. His was a love that laid down everything to draw near them, that bore their misjudgments and inability to grasp the ways of the Kingdom he was trying to inculcate in them. His was a love that would ultimately lead to sacrificial death, and then an empty grave and new life eternally.

These men and women were to be the agents of sharing that new life with the world. They couldn’t do that if they didn’t love each other as Jesus had loved them. And so he commanded them to love, even unto death.

We are the beneficiaries of their love. The legacy they left, the Church, even with all the strains and dysfunction common to human institutions, became an incubator from which sacrificial love can pour out in God’s mission. That kind of love is asked of us if we are to be part of God’s mission to reclaim, restore, and renew all things to wholeness.

How do we love like that? We begin by allowing Jesus to love us like that, truly taking in the depth and breadth of his love, not only “back then” but now, forever and always. Those moments in which we grasp the extent of God’s love for us, deserved or not, help form us as vessels of that love for others. We can also ask Jesus to show us his love for people we find it a challenge to love. His vision can help us love people when it’s difficult to get past what we see and hear in them.

The church of Jesus Christ is increasingly divided among factions and peoples who find it nearly impossible to "love one another as he has loved us." This saps the power of our proclamation. So we have ample opportunity to practice loving those who interpret the Good News in ways that radically diverge from our ways of seeing, who seem to us to miss the whole point of Jesus’ grace and love. That's who we are commanded to love. Yikes!

Yet if we can find a way to love one another across the barriers that separate us… I do believe the world might finally know that Love of which we are stewards.

5-4-21 - Joy

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.

Joy is an elusive state of being. We cannot achieve it, we can only receive it. We can't acquire joy by striving, or by talking about it. I’ve tried. Yet joy is something Jesus wants his followers to possess: "I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.”

Joy defies easy definition. It is not the same as happiness or contentment, though it shares attributes with those conditions. It goes deeper, a way of being and seeing that comes from our core and gives us a sense of “alrightness” no matter what our circumstances. It takes deep faith, decisive faith to believe that “all things shall be well” in the face of so much evidence to the contrary. The evidence God provides, of resurrection life triumphing over evil and degradation, disease and death, can seem flimsy in the face of what our natural senses tell us. Those who possess joy are able to proclaim life in the face of death, not denying the reality of pain and evil, yet living in the "already" of Christ’s victory over these ills.

Joy cannot be acquired or fabricated, but it can be cultivated. We can expand our capacity to receive Christ's joy. We can take the kernel that is there in us, which we are promised as a gift of the Spirit, and help it to grow. How do we cultivate and increase our capacity for joy?

We start with the spiritual practice of gratitude. Gratitude waters the seeds of joy in us. Calling to mind God’s gifts to us, unexpected blessings, all the times things do work out against the odds, or in spite of them, creates an atmosphere in us in which joy can grow and flourish. Similarly, compassion for ourselves and others nurtures a climate in which joy can thrive.

We can also flex our “joy muscles.” We must decide to be people of joy, apart from how we feel on a given day or hour. If we accept that joy is a gift of the Spirit, and we accept that Jesus names it as a mark of Christ-followers, we can commit ourselves to letting it grow in us. So often we let anxiety or grief take root in us, sometimes so deeply we can’t imagine life without them. What if we allow God to plant the seed of joy that deep in us, to gradually uproot and replace those life-squashing states of being?

What is your relationship to joy? Is it familiar to you, or rare? Some of us didn’t learn joy growing up, or have had it suppressed by circumstances. We need to make space for it now, as a choice and a decision.

If we accept that God has already planted the seed of joy in us, then we water it and weed around it and make sure it gets plenty of sunlight. We water it with gratitude and compassion and generosity. We weed away the cares and preoccupations that threaten to choke our joy – worry, envy, competitiveness, greed, gluttony – the usual suspects. And we give it plenty of exposure to the light of the Son in prayer and worship and mission.

Jesus told his followers he wanted their joy to be complete. Not just a little – the whole deal. We can feel and show forth joy in times of trial and sadness, stress and adversity. The world has had year of unimaginable loss. We can invite joy to spring up in the midst of our grief. Sometimes, like the light cast by a beacon on a stormy night, joy is most visible in the dark.

5-3-21 - Love and Commandments

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.

Here are two things I don’t like to mix: love and commandments. Since when is keeping commandments a sign of love? What happened to flowers and chocolate? Oh, it starts out okay; Jesus tells his followers, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.”

That I get - the love which we have received is what we give to others; love is something we can abide in, hang out with. That sounds beautiful and comforting and profound and unconditional. But Jesus isn’t finished: “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.”

I know the psalms talk about how “the law of the Lord" is sweet like honey, but I think of commandments as “should” and love as “want to” and never the twain shall meet. This verse makes it sound as if God’s love is not unconditional, but highly contingent upon our ability to obey. Since I prize unconditional love above all theological concepts, and think obedience usually ends in failure, disappointment and self-condemnation, I react negatively to this word.

What if we change the “if” to an “as?” Jesus is not saying, “If you keep my commandments, I will keep loving you.” He says, “As you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love.” There is no change to the love in which we are invited to abide, only to our capacity for experiencing that love. Keeping Jesus’ commandments, he is saying, makes us better able to swim in the love of God flowing to, through and around us at all times. It puts us in the “head space” and “heart space” to receive – and give – the love of God.

Jesus made visible God’s love for humanity. He lived it, taught it, demonstrated it, and finally died and rose again to complete it here on earth. He says it was his fidelity to God’s commandments that made him able to manifest God’s love. Similarly, our fidelity to his commandments enables us to show forth his love in this world. We need only recall times when we’ve been in the grip of attitudes or behaviors that were outside of God’s will to know how easily our ability to love can become compromised.

Could it be that God’s commandments are not about our ability to “be good,” but intended rather to enable us to be Love? Perhaps I think of commandments as more guilt-inducing than loving because trying to live into God’s commands without the power of God’s love at work in us is an uphill climb. With God’s love flowing through us, it becomes more like riding a bike with plenty of gears, so we can keep a steady pace no matter what the terrain.

Where are you experiencing a lot of love in your life, from God or other people, or from yourself toward others? Where is it a little choked off? Are there adjustments you can make to the way you are thinking, acting, loving, to become more Christ-like?

It’s a chicken-and-egg thing. We can’t fully live into God’s commands without God’s love in us, and we can’t fully abide in God’s love without living the way God commands us. As we increase in each area, the other increases too – the more we abide in God’s love, the easier it is to live God’s way, until we discover that living God’s way opens us to more love than we could ever imagine. Now that's Good News!

To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Next Sunday’s readings are here. Water Daily is now a podcast! Look for it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, and please subscribe.