You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
Phew! Jesus passed the test set him by the scribe who asked, “Which commandment is first of all?” Though Jesus’ answer may have been both predictable (“Love your one God”) and surprising, (“And love your neighbor as yourself”), his insight seems to have led his questioner to an “Aha!” moment. .
Then the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that ‘he is one, and besides him there is no other’; and ‘to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,’ and ‘to love one’s neighbor as oneself,’—this is much more important than all whole burnt-offerings and sacrifices.” When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” After that no one dared to ask him any question.
The scribe’s understanding that God wants us focused on love, not on religiosity and ritual, echoes many passages in the writings of Israel’s prophets and psalms. “For you have no delight in sacrifice; if I were to give a burnt-offering, you would not be pleased,” and “The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise." says the Psalmist. “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies,”God thunders through the prophet Amos. “Even though you offer me your burnt-offerings and grain-offerings, I will not accept them...But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."
If Jesus was promoting a reform movement it was aimed at rooting out religious leaders’ distorted emphasis on rules and rituals, on a bloody – and remunerative – system of sacrificing animals to appease an angry God. Religious systems have often learned to prosper financially by sowing spiritual insecurity. Jesus’ message was, and is, “No! God is love. God has drawn near to you, with power and forgiveness and healing and restoration. The realm of God is now! The realm of God is here.” So he says to the scribe, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” He is so close to grasping the breathtaking reality of God With Us, Emmanu-el. He is so close to learning to dwell in that realm, and not in the death-dealing precincts of legalism and fear-mongering and distorted sacrifice.
How about us? Are we “close to the Kingdom of God?” Have we ingested the Good News that God is love, that God cannot but love, even the most unlovable and unworthy?
Are we ready to take on Jesus’ Love Challenge – to truly love God with all our hearts and minds, soul and strength? Are we ready to turn to our neighbors in love, and love ourselves with compassion and clarity? Whatever happens on Election Day we will have lots of opportunity to practice loving our neighbors as ourselves.
Jesus’ answer finally put a stop to the incessant challenges from religious leaders. It opened the way for much more fruitful exploration into the nature of God and love. It opens the way for us to approach the throne of grace and be soaked in love.
© Kate Heichler, 2024. 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.
10-31-24 - Love Your Neighbor
You can listen to this reflection here.
In this week’s gospel reading, we overhear a conversation between Jesus and a scribe who has asked him, “Which commandment is first of all?” His first reply is unsurprising; he quotes the Shema Yisrael and adds, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” Got it. Religious people know about loving God.
But then he adds an obscure half-verse from the book of Leviticus, and raises it to the same status as the first commandment: “The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” That was a game-changer.
This verse comes from Leviticus 19:18: You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord. Chapter 19 of Leviticus details a series of laws governing all sorts of human relationships, commercial, sexual, familial, occult – you name it. These six words barely stand out, yet Jesus elevates them to core commandment. “On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets,” he says in another gospel version of this story.
Jesus’ piercing intellect and knowledge of Scripture allowed him to strip away the thicket of words and hone in on the one commandment that enables us to keep all the others. If we could only love God with our whole being, and truly love our neighbors and ourselves, we would need no other commandments.
Why is it so hard to love our neighbors? For starters, there are too many of them. We’re overwhelmed, so we rank and sort them by all kinds of categories – how like us or not they are; how needy or resourced they are; how much or little we approve of how they conduct themselves. As soon as we start to rank and pick and choose, love is compromised. When Jesus was asked by another scribe, “Then who is my neighbor?” he answered by telling a story in which the neighbor who cared for a person in need turns out to be someone his questioner had defined out of his neighbor list.
We cannot control what our neighbors do – that can make them hard to love. In the fraught and fractured times in which we live, it is even harder to name someone as “neighbor” (let alone fellow Christian) who holds views and takes actions that we consider hateful and destructive to human life. But, as the sign that has appeared in front of many churches reads, “Jesus said, “Love your neighbor. No exceptions.” We may have to find God’s love for some neighbors and borrow that until we can find our own. There’s a place to start. Everything gets easier when we love our neighbors.
This verse includes another challenge: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Ah – there’s a deeper reason we can find it hard to love our neighbors. It’s hard to love ourselves, especially if the world or family or an inner sense of shame or unworthiness tell us that’s ridiculous. But God says, “I love you, I made you, I delight in you.” Are we not to love what God loves? We may have to find God’s love for ourselves and borrow that until we can find our own. And when we love ourselves, with compassion and clarity about all that’s lovable in us and all that is not, we are better able to love our neighbors the same way.
Sigh! As my friend Peter says, “If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.” Maybe we make it harder than it has to be. Anything God calls us to, God equips us for. Maybe we can stop trying to do this loving on our own, and let God’s love flow through us – to ourselves, to our neighbors and back to God.
© Kate Heichler, 2024. 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.
In this week’s gospel reading, we overhear a conversation between Jesus and a scribe who has asked him, “Which commandment is first of all?” His first reply is unsurprising; he quotes the Shema Yisrael and adds, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” Got it. Religious people know about loving God.
But then he adds an obscure half-verse from the book of Leviticus, and raises it to the same status as the first commandment: “The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” That was a game-changer.
This verse comes from Leviticus 19:18: You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord. Chapter 19 of Leviticus details a series of laws governing all sorts of human relationships, commercial, sexual, familial, occult – you name it. These six words barely stand out, yet Jesus elevates them to core commandment. “On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets,” he says in another gospel version of this story.
Jesus’ piercing intellect and knowledge of Scripture allowed him to strip away the thicket of words and hone in on the one commandment that enables us to keep all the others. If we could only love God with our whole being, and truly love our neighbors and ourselves, we would need no other commandments.
Why is it so hard to love our neighbors? For starters, there are too many of them. We’re overwhelmed, so we rank and sort them by all kinds of categories – how like us or not they are; how needy or resourced they are; how much or little we approve of how they conduct themselves. As soon as we start to rank and pick and choose, love is compromised. When Jesus was asked by another scribe, “Then who is my neighbor?” he answered by telling a story in which the neighbor who cared for a person in need turns out to be someone his questioner had defined out of his neighbor list.
We cannot control what our neighbors do – that can make them hard to love. In the fraught and fractured times in which we live, it is even harder to name someone as “neighbor” (let alone fellow Christian) who holds views and takes actions that we consider hateful and destructive to human life. But, as the sign that has appeared in front of many churches reads, “Jesus said, “Love your neighbor. No exceptions.” We may have to find God’s love for some neighbors and borrow that until we can find our own. There’s a place to start. Everything gets easier when we love our neighbors.
This verse includes another challenge: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Ah – there’s a deeper reason we can find it hard to love our neighbors. It’s hard to love ourselves, especially if the world or family or an inner sense of shame or unworthiness tell us that’s ridiculous. But God says, “I love you, I made you, I delight in you.” Are we not to love what God loves? We may have to find God’s love for ourselves and borrow that until we can find our own. And when we love ourselves, with compassion and clarity about all that’s lovable in us and all that is not, we are better able to love our neighbors the same way.
Sigh! As my friend Peter says, “If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.” Maybe we make it harder than it has to be. Anything God calls us to, God equips us for. Maybe we can stop trying to do this loving on our own, and let God’s love flow through us – to ourselves, to our neighbors and back to God.
© Kate Heichler, 2024. 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.
10-30-24 - The One-Ness of God
You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
When Jesus is asked, “Which commandment is first of all?,” he doesn’t have to reach far for an answer. The Shema Yisrael would have been on his lips and in his heart from his earliest youth. The Shema is considered the most important part of a Jewish prayer service, and observant Jews recite it at least twice each day as a mitzvah, or commandment. Traditionally the Shema form a Jew’s last words, and many children are taught to say it at bedtime.
The heart of this prayer, drawn from Deuteronomy 6:4-9, 11:13-21 and Numbers 15:37-41 (thank you, Wikipedia…) is “Hear, O Israel: the LORD is our God, the LORD is one.” “Lord” is rendered as the tetragrammaton, the four-character symbol that spells what we transliterate as “Jahweh.” This emphasis on God’s nature as one Almighty God, not many lesser gods, caused some trouble for early Christian theologians when they were driven, in reckoning with other things Jesus says, to affirm God’s three-ness as well as God’s one-ness.
But Jesus doesn’t stop with affirming who God is. He commands us to love this Lord our God with every fiber of our being, breaking it down: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” I don’t know if we’re capable of doing anything with a whole heart and mind, let alone soul and strength. How might we go about living into this seemingly impossible command?
Let’s start with love. Do we love God? How can we love someone we can’t see or touch, who has ultimate power over life and death, whose ways are utter mystery, who blesses us yet allows us so much pain and suffering? So much of our interaction with God is rooted in asking for provision or protection, healing or forgiveness – the relationship feels too one-sided, too contractual, to be truly loving. Yet I have known moments when my heart was so filled with blessing – on a gorgeous day, in a wonderful encounter, when a ministry is firing on all cylinders – that I have said to God, to Jesus, to the Spirit, “I love you.”
If love is a choice, not a feeling, we can cultivate that awareness of loving God at moments when it hasn’t hit us in a blinding rush. We can learn it, as we learn to fully love a spouse once the flush of in-love-ness has abated. We can make some time and space in prayer and say with intention:
“God, I love you with my whole heart.” And pause; reflect on that. What else does our heart love?
Then, “God I love you with my whole soul.” Pause, reflect – can we control our soul?
Then, “God, I love you with my whole mind.” Pause, reflect – what does that mean? How might we bring our whole mind into the act of loving God?
Then, God, I love you with my whole strength.” Pause, reflect – Our whole strength is a lot of strength.
God is one, and God is love. When we love God we are simply responding to love that surrounds and supports us like water. Learning to live into this commandment will make us better at loving everyone. And ourselves.
© Kate Heichler, 2024. 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.
When Jesus is asked, “Which commandment is first of all?,” he doesn’t have to reach far for an answer. The Shema Yisrael would have been on his lips and in his heart from his earliest youth. The Shema is considered the most important part of a Jewish prayer service, and observant Jews recite it at least twice each day as a mitzvah, or commandment. Traditionally the Shema form a Jew’s last words, and many children are taught to say it at bedtime.
The heart of this prayer, drawn from Deuteronomy 6:4-9, 11:13-21 and Numbers 15:37-41 (thank you, Wikipedia…) is “Hear, O Israel: the LORD is our God, the LORD is one.” “Lord” is rendered as the tetragrammaton, the four-character symbol that spells what we transliterate as “Jahweh.” This emphasis on God’s nature as one Almighty God, not many lesser gods, caused some trouble for early Christian theologians when they were driven, in reckoning with other things Jesus says, to affirm God’s three-ness as well as God’s one-ness.
But Jesus doesn’t stop with affirming who God is. He commands us to love this Lord our God with every fiber of our being, breaking it down: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” I don’t know if we’re capable of doing anything with a whole heart and mind, let alone soul and strength. How might we go about living into this seemingly impossible command?
Let’s start with love. Do we love God? How can we love someone we can’t see or touch, who has ultimate power over life and death, whose ways are utter mystery, who blesses us yet allows us so much pain and suffering? So much of our interaction with God is rooted in asking for provision or protection, healing or forgiveness – the relationship feels too one-sided, too contractual, to be truly loving. Yet I have known moments when my heart was so filled with blessing – on a gorgeous day, in a wonderful encounter, when a ministry is firing on all cylinders – that I have said to God, to Jesus, to the Spirit, “I love you.”
If love is a choice, not a feeling, we can cultivate that awareness of loving God at moments when it hasn’t hit us in a blinding rush. We can learn it, as we learn to fully love a spouse once the flush of in-love-ness has abated. We can make some time and space in prayer and say with intention:
“God, I love you with my whole heart.” And pause; reflect on that. What else does our heart love?
Then, “God I love you with my whole soul.” Pause, reflect – can we control our soul?
Then, “God, I love you with my whole mind.” Pause, reflect – what does that mean? How might we bring our whole mind into the act of loving God?
Then, God, I love you with my whole strength.” Pause, reflect – Our whole strength is a lot of strength.
God is one, and God is love. When we love God we are simply responding to love that surrounds and supports us like water. Learning to live into this commandment will make us better at loving everyone. And ourselves.
© Kate Heichler, 2024. 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.
10-29-24 - Focusing on God
You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
On the face of it, the question this scribe asks Jesus seems silly: “Which commandment is the first of all?” All the commandments are important; is one more so than another? But if you’ve devoted your life to God’s law, and keeping the commandments is the measure of pleasing God, maybe knowing you can keep the most important ensures your fidelity to the rest.
And in fact, not everyone would give the same answer that Jesus did. Many would say, “Oh, the most important is ‘thou shalt not kill,’” or “Thou shalt not steal.” Certainly the preoccupation with sexual sin among many American Christians would move “thou shalt not commit adultery” into the top spot. But Jesus says the Number One commandment has to do not with how we regard other people, but how we regard God. “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord your God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’”
This is the Shema Yisrael, “Hear, O Israel: the LORD is our God, the LORD is one.” This is how we are to live a life of righteousness and holiness, not by focusing on our behavior, but by making God our focus, acknowledging who God is, and loving God with our whole selves.
How easy it is to take our focus off of God and let the life around us, this world and its people, consume our attention. As soon as we do that, we start to focus on behavior, not devotion. When we start with moral behavior, we become more distant from God, trying to please God or walking away from what we feel are impossible demands. When we make God our focus and cultivate our love for God, godly behavior flows from us.
To focus on God, on loving God, puts us in a place of Grace. To focus on moral behavior puts us in the space of Law. That is not a life-giving place to dwell, as Paul articulated so powerfully in Galatians and Romans.
What spiritual practices might we put into place to help us cultivate a God-focused life? Certainly one strategy is having a pattern of daily prayer, or frequent stops throughout the day to return our gaze God-ward. Another is to become mindful when we’re in the grip of a negative emotion – anxiety or anger, despair or envy. Chances are our focus has become consumed by something or someone not-God. Awareness of our emotional state can remind us to pray about the issue troubling us and invite God’s grace to cover it, and us.
One day we will live fully in the presence of God, of love beyond our comprehension. All will be love. We prepare ourselves for that day by cultivating our awareness of God’s presence here and now, and learning to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength.
© Kate Heichler, 2024. 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.
On the face of it, the question this scribe asks Jesus seems silly: “Which commandment is the first of all?” All the commandments are important; is one more so than another? But if you’ve devoted your life to God’s law, and keeping the commandments is the measure of pleasing God, maybe knowing you can keep the most important ensures your fidelity to the rest.
And in fact, not everyone would give the same answer that Jesus did. Many would say, “Oh, the most important is ‘thou shalt not kill,’” or “Thou shalt not steal.” Certainly the preoccupation with sexual sin among many American Christians would move “thou shalt not commit adultery” into the top spot. But Jesus says the Number One commandment has to do not with how we regard other people, but how we regard God. “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord your God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’”
This is the Shema Yisrael, “Hear, O Israel: the LORD is our God, the LORD is one.” This is how we are to live a life of righteousness and holiness, not by focusing on our behavior, but by making God our focus, acknowledging who God is, and loving God with our whole selves.
How easy it is to take our focus off of God and let the life around us, this world and its people, consume our attention. As soon as we do that, we start to focus on behavior, not devotion. When we start with moral behavior, we become more distant from God, trying to please God or walking away from what we feel are impossible demands. When we make God our focus and cultivate our love for God, godly behavior flows from us.
To focus on God, on loving God, puts us in a place of Grace. To focus on moral behavior puts us in the space of Law. That is not a life-giving place to dwell, as Paul articulated so powerfully in Galatians and Romans.
What spiritual practices might we put into place to help us cultivate a God-focused life? Certainly one strategy is having a pattern of daily prayer, or frequent stops throughout the day to return our gaze God-ward. Another is to become mindful when we’re in the grip of a negative emotion – anxiety or anger, despair or envy. Chances are our focus has become consumed by something or someone not-God. Awareness of our emotional state can remind us to pray about the issue troubling us and invite God’s grace to cover it, and us.
One day we will live fully in the presence of God, of love beyond our comprehension. All will be love. We prepare ourselves for that day by cultivating our awareness of God’s presence here and now, and learning to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength.
© Kate Heichler, 2024. 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.
10-28-24 - For the Sake of Argument
You can listen to this reflection here.
Next Sunday’s gospel story opens right in the middle of an argument. Jesus has just successfully fielded a bunch of ground balls and pop flies (getting in my baseball metaphors right in time for the World Series…) from Pharisees, Herodians and Sadducees about taxes, marriage and the afterlife. That seems to have emboldened a scribe loitering nearby to test Jesus with his own quiz: One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked him, “Which commandment is the first of all?”
Lest we think this merely a contentious culture, let’s remember that argument and disputation were how ancient Jewish leaders sought to mine the truth, the Torah. Scripture was not blindly authoritative in the way some today see it; it was full of nuggets to be pored over, turned this way and that, approached from different angles, chewed on and digested. That process involved arguments and counter-arguments, comparison to other scriptures, imaginative retellings (midrash) that teased out other possible interpretations, and arguments and counter-arguments to those interpretations. Interpretations by known and respected teachers might outweigh those of lesser lights, and the ones that came to dominate were those agreed with by the most people. Those with the most "likes” and “shares" stood out.
All these questions lobbed at Jesus that we might see at as entrapment and interrogation may also have been a sign of grudging respect, as leaders evaluated his wisdom and how it stacked up to others. Yet Jesus played by different rules. Often, instead of giving an interpretation directly, he’d turn the question back on the interrogators. At other times he gave a definitive answer with an authority uncommon in this system of constant questioning and reinterpretation. In the passage we examine this week he will answer straight out, but combine a foundational passage of scripture with one that was little known, giving them equal value. Jesus made his own rules.
What questions do you have for Jesus? In imaginative prayer today, pretend you are that scribe, overhearing his conversations and daring to approach him with a really good question yourself. Where are you? What does Jesus look like in this scene? What do you ask him? What does he answer?
Sometimes we get answers to our hard questions, and sometimes we have to wait, maybe a really long time. But Jesus never seemed to mind the questions, and as one who invites us into the kind of relationship in which no topic is off limits, he welcomes our coming near with our own. That’s the most important thing that scribe did – he came near and asked. We can too.
© Kate Heichler, 2024. 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.
Next Sunday’s gospel story opens right in the middle of an argument. Jesus has just successfully fielded a bunch of ground balls and pop flies (getting in my baseball metaphors right in time for the World Series…) from Pharisees, Herodians and Sadducees about taxes, marriage and the afterlife. That seems to have emboldened a scribe loitering nearby to test Jesus with his own quiz: One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked him, “Which commandment is the first of all?”
Lest we think this merely a contentious culture, let’s remember that argument and disputation were how ancient Jewish leaders sought to mine the truth, the Torah. Scripture was not blindly authoritative in the way some today see it; it was full of nuggets to be pored over, turned this way and that, approached from different angles, chewed on and digested. That process involved arguments and counter-arguments, comparison to other scriptures, imaginative retellings (midrash) that teased out other possible interpretations, and arguments and counter-arguments to those interpretations. Interpretations by known and respected teachers might outweigh those of lesser lights, and the ones that came to dominate were those agreed with by the most people. Those with the most "likes” and “shares" stood out.
All these questions lobbed at Jesus that we might see at as entrapment and interrogation may also have been a sign of grudging respect, as leaders evaluated his wisdom and how it stacked up to others. Yet Jesus played by different rules. Often, instead of giving an interpretation directly, he’d turn the question back on the interrogators. At other times he gave a definitive answer with an authority uncommon in this system of constant questioning and reinterpretation. In the passage we examine this week he will answer straight out, but combine a foundational passage of scripture with one that was little known, giving them equal value. Jesus made his own rules.
What questions do you have for Jesus? In imaginative prayer today, pretend you are that scribe, overhearing his conversations and daring to approach him with a really good question yourself. Where are you? What does Jesus look like in this scene? What do you ask him? What does he answer?
Sometimes we get answers to our hard questions, and sometimes we have to wait, maybe a really long time. But Jesus never seemed to mind the questions, and as one who invites us into the kind of relationship in which no topic is off limits, he welcomes our coming near with our own. That’s the most important thing that scribe did – he came near and asked. We can too.
© Kate Heichler, 2024. 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.
10-25-24 - The New, New Story
You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
Stories function in interesting ways for many people. While we generally love a new story, something we haven’t encountered before, we are also very attached to the stories we already know. “I love to tell the story,” goes the old-time gospel hymn, “The old, old story of Jesus and his love.”
Yet that “old, old story” is ever becoming new in our lives. In order to really accept healing and freedom and renewal, we need to be able to believe a different narrative than the one that has defined our lives so far, a different story than the one the world or our parents or our society has told us. We are often bound by what we have experienced as “normal.” Jesus’ gift is to show us the new normal, to show us what we can be.
Bartimaeus believed this story he had heard about Jesus, and it gave him power to walk out of his old story into the new. The blind man said to him, "My teacher, let me see again.’" Jesus said to him, "Go; your faith has made you well." Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.
That meant giving up a certain kind of identity, a certain degree of security. Walking into our new stories always does. That’s why we often stay stuck in situations that are less than what God might have for us.
What old stories have defined you for too long? One way to get at that question is with this one: What are you pretending not to know?
Stories function in interesting ways for many people. While we generally love a new story, something we haven’t encountered before, we are also very attached to the stories we already know. “I love to tell the story,” goes the old-time gospel hymn, “The old, old story of Jesus and his love.”
Yet that “old, old story” is ever becoming new in our lives. In order to really accept healing and freedom and renewal, we need to be able to believe a different narrative than the one that has defined our lives so far, a different story than the one the world or our parents or our society has told us. We are often bound by what we have experienced as “normal.” Jesus’ gift is to show us the new normal, to show us what we can be.
Bartimaeus believed this story he had heard about Jesus, and it gave him power to walk out of his old story into the new. The blind man said to him, "My teacher, let me see again.’" Jesus said to him, "Go; your faith has made you well." Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.
That meant giving up a certain kind of identity, a certain degree of security. Walking into our new stories always does. That’s why we often stay stuck in situations that are less than what God might have for us.
What old stories have defined you for too long? One way to get at that question is with this one: What are you pretending not to know?
What new story is calling you? Maybe it’s a vocation stirring in you, to use your time and gifts in some way other than how you have been doing. Maybe it’s a different place, a new person to love, a rediscovery of yourself. What is trying to be born in you?
Bartimaeus left his roadside and followed Jesus – right into Jerusalem, where Jesus was at first lauded and soon after condemned to a brutal death. That new story might not have been at all what Bartimaeus hoped for – and maybe it was more. For he got to witness firsthand the greatest love story the world has ever known. And he got to be around when that perfect man who had poured himself out for us, even to death, rose from the grave to usher all of us into the New, New Story God is writing. And that story, like God’s mercies, is new every morning, as we allow it to claim us.
© Kate Heichler, 2024. 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.
Bartimaeus left his roadside and followed Jesus – right into Jerusalem, where Jesus was at first lauded and soon after condemned to a brutal death. That new story might not have been at all what Bartimaeus hoped for – and maybe it was more. For he got to witness firsthand the greatest love story the world has ever known. And he got to be around when that perfect man who had poured himself out for us, even to death, rose from the grave to usher all of us into the New, New Story God is writing. And that story, like God’s mercies, is new every morning, as we allow it to claim us.
© Kate Heichler, 2024. 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.
10-24-24 - What Do You Want?
You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
What a beautiful question: “What do you want me to do for you?” How often does someone ask us that? Take a moment and think about it. What would you answer if someone stood before you and said, “What do you want me to do for you?”
I can think of a billion things, mostly having to do with stress and anxiety. Inspire my congregations. Increase my metabolism. Send me an IT person. Let my country be at peace.
What if the person standing before you asking that could move heaven and earth? That’s what Bartimaeus experienced in this week’s story: And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.” So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. Then Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man said to him, ‘My teacher, let me see again.”
On one level, it seems ridiculous for Jesus to ask – isn’t it obvious a blind man wants to see? Yet Jesus did Bartimaeus the honor of asking him to speak his desire. He didn’t assume, he didn’t impose. He asked, inviting relationship.
Jesus gives us the same honor, and the same freedom. Yes, God knows what we need, better than we do. And God wants us to ask, just as we want our children to ask for what they desire. Prayer is not about getting what we want; prayer is about drawing closer in relationship to the God who loves us. As we can ask in freedom, God responds in freedom.
It’s not like a genie granting three wishes; we don’t always understand the response. Just as we don’t give our children things that would harm them, we sometimes seem to experience a “no” from God. Presumably, had Bartimaeus said, “I want you to smite those who harass me,” Jesus would not have complied. We can be sure, though, that we worship a God who desires wholeness for us in body, mind and spirit.
I have preached on this story in nursing homes, to people in wheelchairs. That tested my faith: “What do you want me to do for you?” Still I went about praying for God’s healing love to be released in each one as I shared communion. I don’t know why I didn't see quickened limbs and straightened spines; I believe Jesus’ power is undiminished and his presence real. But I can’t know what healing did take place.
It's not always instant. Yet I will proclaim God’s goodness and love, and speaking what I would like her to do for me, and for this hurting, beautiful world.
© Kate Heichler, 2024. 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.
What a beautiful question: “What do you want me to do for you?” How often does someone ask us that? Take a moment and think about it. What would you answer if someone stood before you and said, “What do you want me to do for you?”
I can think of a billion things, mostly having to do with stress and anxiety. Inspire my congregations. Increase my metabolism. Send me an IT person. Let my country be at peace.
What if the person standing before you asking that could move heaven and earth? That’s what Bartimaeus experienced in this week’s story: And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.” So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. Then Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man said to him, ‘My teacher, let me see again.”
On one level, it seems ridiculous for Jesus to ask – isn’t it obvious a blind man wants to see? Yet Jesus did Bartimaeus the honor of asking him to speak his desire. He didn’t assume, he didn’t impose. He asked, inviting relationship.
Jesus gives us the same honor, and the same freedom. Yes, God knows what we need, better than we do. And God wants us to ask, just as we want our children to ask for what they desire. Prayer is not about getting what we want; prayer is about drawing closer in relationship to the God who loves us. As we can ask in freedom, God responds in freedom.
It’s not like a genie granting three wishes; we don’t always understand the response. Just as we don’t give our children things that would harm them, we sometimes seem to experience a “no” from God. Presumably, had Bartimaeus said, “I want you to smite those who harass me,” Jesus would not have complied. We can be sure, though, that we worship a God who desires wholeness for us in body, mind and spirit.
I have preached on this story in nursing homes, to people in wheelchairs. That tested my faith: “What do you want me to do for you?” Still I went about praying for God’s healing love to be released in each one as I shared communion. I don’t know why I didn't see quickened limbs and straightened spines; I believe Jesus’ power is undiminished and his presence real. But I can’t know what healing did take place.
It's not always instant. Yet I will proclaim God’s goodness and love, and speaking what I would like her to do for me, and for this hurting, beautiful world.
© Kate Heichler, 2024. 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.
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