Why can’t we admit: all of these things make us sick? The vivid constellation of our violence, crippling imbalance, dominance we carve out and serve. Here, let me make it clear: we can choose to do better. We can choose to do better starting today.
This sleeping, this fidgeting, this tuning in and out of worship, this longing, this loving, this holding, this noticing, it’s all worship. It’s all prayer.
This is the one month a year where we are told to look inside, to beg forgiveness for things we haven’t even noticed.
Part of Jesus’s message that we should follow him is to allow the spirit of God to rest on us too. That is why whenever two or more of us get together the spirit of God is there with us. No sacrifice needed, no priest or bishop, and no temple either. Really, all that can go away.
Bless that little boy. I don’t know his name or really anything about him, but it seemed that Jesus was shining from him. There was a sense of peace, innocence, joy, and hope about him. I wish I could shield that little child from what he’s going to learn, as he grows older, of people’s inhumanity to others and how hatred fuels the fires that produce violence. But then, maybe he’s the hope of tomorrow, one of the teens who isn’t afraid to speak up and speak out.
Where is God asking you to keep bailing, yet at the same time trust God’s paying attention to the storm?
God holds our hearts in times of incubating beginnings like the earth holds seed in its dark embrace. Who knows when and how understanding quickens? We don’t see it until the stalks push up into the day.
Some dismiss these young people for their youth, much as Jesus was as well. Yet they are the same age as many of the leaders of the American Revolution were, the same age as the Marquis de Lafayette and James Monroe were in 1776.
Lord of Light, Come. Open my hands to embrace the lonely. Open my hands to bring food to a neighbor. Open my hands to receive words of forgiveness.
Yes, Peter, you see that I am the Christ/Messiah, but you don’t understand what that means. It doesn’t mean turn away from a hard choice, even death on the Cross, if it is my Father’s will.