Water Daily

10-30-23 - Saints Alive

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

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.We will focus on the gospel for All Saints Day 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.

“Saint” 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, I believe God is always pleased to help you with that. “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. Thus we become tinged with the holy, and as 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, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for All Saints Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.

10-27-23 - The Perfect Hanger

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

“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.

The literal side of me visualizes 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, the 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 and mutually reinforcing; if one side breaks the hanger goes haywire.

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 loving 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 rod, the perfect love of God, which can bear all the weight we need it to. God’s love enables us to love.

To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for next Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.

10-26-23 - Loving Ourselves

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

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

Some people have a hard time with the notion of loving self. There is a self-suppressing strain in Western culture, and the Christian church has not always presented Jesus’ teachings about self-denial in a very wholesome way. We can 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. Loving ourselves well is true humility.

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 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 how chosen and precious you are to God, try the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the 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. Notice when your internal monologue toward yourself is harsh (“That was dumb,” “You idiot!”) and stop and redirect yourself to more affirming language.

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 must go hand in hand, for fundamental to the whole exercise is the understanding that we are equal in God’s sight. No one is better, or worse, more important or less, 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 are simply recognizing the inherent beauty of God’s creation, and acknowledging that God does flawless work. You are Exhibit A.

10-25-23 - Loving Neighbor

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

“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 ask, “Then who is my neighbor?” A 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, or take poor care of ourselves, we’ll extend that tendency to other people. That is one way of loving our neighbors as ourselves – but not a very life-giving way.

How else do we love ourselves? Most of us are protective of our security – maybe loving our neighbors as ourselves means we’re equally concerned about theirs. 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 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 neighbor 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 will be doing for all of eternity.

10-24-23 - Loving God

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

"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 consider 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? Taking a walk the other day, I found myself praying, “Jesus, I love you,” and then wondering what I meant by that, how much need and anxiety is wrapped in that statement? 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 dipping in occasionally from the sidelines? How about you?

I am not a scholar of ancient languages, and don’t know the nuances of the Hebrew word Jesus was saying, 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. The Greek word used here for both loving God and neighbor has the root "agape" - a love that incorporates the divine, that is selfless and affirming. It is not the same as erotic or filial love, how we think of loving our parents or children or lovers or friends. It incorporates the unconditional love of God for us. It would seem that to fully love God we must first fully recognize our need for God's unconditional love for us. Then we might be able to love self and neighbor unconditionally.

How do we begin? How about with these three components, heart, spirit and mind? In prayer today, come into a quiet, centered place, and speak simply and honestly to God about where you 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 some time on what’s in your heart. When I think about mine, I envision a mixed landscape of joy and fear with pockets of despair. What do you see? Can you offer it to God in love, no matter what it looks like?

Then let’s offer our soul or spirit, perhaps asking the Holy Spirit to give us a picture 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 your being, no separation, no shadow? 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.

10-23-23 - Love and Law

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

Another week, another test. For the past few weeks our Gospel passages have chronicled one long game of “gotcha” between Jesus and the religious leaders, them trying to catch him saying the wrong thing, him neatly sidestepping their loaded questions. In last week’s test, he prevailed yet again, but another set of examiners was waiting in the wings. This week we see the Pharisees get back in the game – and since they were legal specialists, they asked Jesus a question about the Torah, the Law.

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 out 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 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. We need that reminder all the more these days, when there is so much fear and conflict felt and expressed and acted upon. 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.

10-20-23 - Patriots' Day

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

Every once in a while, Patriot’s Day – a Massachusetts 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, April 15th is 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 should 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 governmental chaos and corruption, paying taxes can be something to celebrate. I hate paying speeding tickets, but 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 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.

*Members of my congregations can do so here - La Plata or Wayside. Anyone else is welcome too!