Prayer on a Day of Rest

Today is my day of rest and thanksgiving.
Lord I am thankful that you have given me life so abundantly full of good things and wonderful, loving people.
I am thankful that I am able to take a day of rest and meditation with you, and I am thankful for the epic music maelstrom which I will enjoy tonight.
I am thankful for the coffee I will now go get at a great local (non-franchised) coffee shop, whose owner has shared with me the full history of his establishment's coffee process - from fair trade organic farm to my hot little hand :)
Thankful for the park in which I will walk with said coffee in a thanksgiving-offering-up-and-gratitudinal mannar :)
I am thankful for pools to swim in and hot tubs to get sore muscle knots out.
I am thankful for my magic bullet breakfast and the wonderful little mother who insisted on getting me a magic bullet in the summer of 2011, and whose generous care makes my music maelstrom possible tonight.
I am thankful for the medical consult I had with my sister and please help get her car back on the road soon God, so she can resume being the little housecall making doctor whom her patients so love.
I am thankful for warm, safe shelter, a bed smothered in blankets and comforters, hot food, and on-demand running hot and cold water.
I am thankful for the snow that will soon come and make this place new over and over again, and for the leaves flying around, collecting in corners, history pages of the season passed.
I am thankful for the best placement ever, with kind loving pastors who encourage, uplift and smile, and with loving members who bring pickles and deviled eggs and three kinds of mustard to go with ham and scalloped potatoes to students on a cold, stressful, end of term night - love so caringly expressed in food so thoughtfully prepared.
I am thankful to live in a city which provides out of the cold sites, and recognizes, at least at the grassroots levels, the realities of mental health issues and addictions do not mean people should be left to die. Let these grassroots grow God, to become strong trees that uphold the weak and the vulnerable in our region.
I am thankful for the House of Friendship.
I am thankful for having choices and encountering challenges which help me to feel the Holy Spirit close at hand.
I am thankful for my colleagues from school and even for Wilson! I am thankful for my teachers who are patient with my enthusiasm and my frustration.
I am thankful for pomegranates, bright red inside, and chocolate, and coffee, and love and thai food.
I am thankful for mountains and oceans and rivers and trees and rocks and sweat lodges and elders and small children and hope in all things.
I am thankful that I have so many things to be thankful for :) and that I know I will spend the rest of today thinking about some of those thanksgivingable things.
Thanks be to you God, for your love and grace and womb-like mercy in Christ have made me who I am and brought me into this day.
Amen.

1

My Pet Ego.

I have a little pet. It is not one I am proud of. It's name is Ego. I often try to kill the lil bugger, but it refuses to die. Ok, truth be told I have a schizophrenic relationship with it - sometimes I try to kill it, at other times I water it and pet it and love it and hug it and put it on a pedestal (and just about call it George!) ... 
This pet feeds on success, affirmation and tries to eat lo

ve. When it eats the love, I don't get the love that is meant to come to me ... instead Ego grows and grows and takes over the whole premises of my being and before you know it I can't fit through the door sideways (no matter how much time I'm spending with Handsome).
God, I would like to ask that you adopt this pet. Do with it whatever you like. It is like a little coal which is capable of setting all of me on a destructive fire when fanned by winds of acknowledgement. God, to you directly, via expresspost, goes ALL the glory. And if you could take Ego too, that'd be a good thing. I got enough stress in my life without taking care of such a pet.
Amen.

Sandy-fied Prayers ...

The wind whips
The branches break
The leaves swirl in disorder
Nature tells us the reality we fight daily
We are not in charge
We are not in control. 

Holy, enter into this chaos.
Shelter us in your embrace.
Wipe our tears 

Hear our frustrations
Receive our wailing onto yourself
Receive us:
Whipped, broken, in disorder
Trying to fight human realities daily
Trying to wrestle, take charge, take control
When in fact, only you can make order.

Trust and Faith.
Faith: ta pway li ta moo win ik
Faith: The thought of the truth

Hold tonight to the thought of the truth.
Thanks be to God.

Amen.

(Moose Cree & translation thanks to Norm Wesley)

________________________________________________

A prayer for the start of the week:

It seems like it might be a very overfull week, with many things to do, and many storms waiting to whip everything into confusion.
God you can make order out of this chaos, and you can make time when it feels like there is not enough. Please do these in our lives this week - and help us make it through this week.
Strengthen us, especially in reaching out to you - from whom all power and strength flow.
Amen.

Balance & Thanksgiving.

I walked in a beautiful fall forest today for hours, tall maples gently shed their leaves on a ground already carpeted with golds and oranges and reds. Vibrant green moss and undergrowth, parched through a dry summer, sought to get a little oxygen out into the world before winter comes ... and I am thankful for this be

autiful creation which remains in small corners and pockets here and there.

We do live in a world that has a lot of shitty things happening, going on, not going on right and so forth. This is very true. ,

We also live in a world with beautiful sunrises and sunsets every single day, with air that is still breathable, and (if you're reading this) electricity and potable water. We live in a world with mountains (and amazing hostels in the mountains) and seas and rivers and trees, and if we take time to appreciate these with friends and strangers, we have people and memories to remind us of these beautiful aspects of creation.

In Canada we enjoy considerable comfort, freedom and security - and can have medical tests done for very little personal cost due to public health care which still exceeds most in the world. (Even though sometimes the tests themselves can be a little rough on us - we have them - and they are free).

I sat on rocks in this stand of bush which people pay good money to have "imported" onto their front lawns, in order to have "authentic rocks" - and there they were in nature in the bush just hanging around for free offering a place to sit :)

Today I just want to say I am happy to be alive, to be a human being on planet earth, with good and loving friends who listen to me, text me, check up on me, hug me and feed me amazing coconut-curry-root-vegetable soup on a cold fall evening after a long walk, nacho dip and whole grain scoopy tostitos, and bring me chocolates, and duvets and jars of honey - just because they can - these are small but deliciously lovely things (and no I am not *eating* the duvet).

Today I want to say I am happy for the psychic and divine connections which make me receive an embrace from a friend in a dream, a friend I have not spoken to in ages, but a friend who gave me exactly the perspective I needed when I texted him out of the blue - a perspective from his spirit to mine, without going to seminary or having any fancy theological education - who was able to remind me about God and grace and empathy and love and what it means to be a leader, what it means to be human. A friend who could explain darkness and light to me in terms I could understand when I felt so deeply the dark.

Today I am happy for returning to my home congregation to hear an elder preside and sing with such humility and joy that my very heart was lifted, and elder whose words of institution said how Christ's body was broken for the remission of our sins, and an elder whose words "all are welcome" come from so deep a place it just made my heart smile on its insidemost parts. I am happy to be communed by those who welcomed me when I was a much higher-index-kleenex-user than I am now (and those who know me now know I still use a higher than average index of kleenex and it ain't allergies! Lemme tell ya!)

Today I am happy for the tears of joy I had when I was hugged in the communion line by someone who had not seen me at St Mark's for a few weeks ... I could feel her love and the joy that cannot wait for coffee hour to give a hug, when I arrived (really) late and missed the sharing of the peace ... a hug which reminded me so bodily that peace sharing is not something we reserve for a special time on Sunday, but an action of the heart which we act out in the body and in the spirit. It is in our eyes, in our hands, in our arms - from our hearts.

Today I have a gazillion more things to be thankful for than to be fearful or angry or sad or mad or regretful about - and for these things too numerous to count I am thankful.

Today I am also so thankful for being a servant of a Lord who understands my fearful, angry, sad, mad, regretful and often ungrateful ways - and does not keep His love or grace from me, but showers me constantly in his abundant blessings - as listed only in small part above.

Thanks be to God.

The Thread & The Eye of the Needle: the Lamb and the High Priest.

We sing a line at church as part of the usual Sunday liturgy. It's words are: "Lamb of God You take away the sins of the world." Each time I think of the meaning of these words I am blown away.

Anything that takes away the sins of the world is some serious shit.

When I think of just my sins by themselves, I am overwhelmed. By sins I mean my misdeeds, things I have regrets for, things that have fragmented and fractured my relationships with myself, my relationships with others and my relationship with God... When I think of these by themselves it is enough to scare me into hiding under the bed for a lifetime.

By some small miracle I have managed to not yet kill or maim anyone (so far, in my lifetime, though there is time yet). That is not to say there have not been times when I would have dearly loved to seriously hurt someone - so the sin in these instances is not the the killing, the maiming (the thing that did not get done), but the hatred, anger and malice that lay beneath my desire to hurt another. Sometimes that anger hides under the clever guise of vengeful thoughts "He'll realize the error of his ways when someone hurts him the same way", "One day she'll gain weight and then she'll be sorry she said that to me".

I guess maybe on a scale of bad people in the world I might not appear to be too bad "on paper"; no criminal record and all that. But in the place where intentions and desires of my heart have been written, in that place sins, bad thoughts, regrets, bad intentions flourish like a well watered garden of weeds. So when I think of a lamb to take away my sins I think it needs to be a pretty serious lamb; a pretty darn sturdy lamb!

Add to my sins the sins of some people whom we might collectively consider sinful. Maybe like an Adolf Hitler, an African slave trader, a soldier in the early post-colonial Canadian bush lands, forcefully removing children from the bosoms of their families to plunk them into unfamiliar schools where their very identity would be ripped away. Combine these folks with serial killers and rapists, paedophiles, human traffickers of today, the man who cheats on his wife, the woman who beats her children because she cannot get a handle on her own anger about her own life, the youth who takes a weapon to school and kills a bunch of innocent kids, the one who plants a bomb to kill and terrorize people ... Well sum all these sins, and imagine them on a long scroll of paper. How many times would that scroll of paper circle the world? How small would the font have to be in order to hold all human sins, past present and future? It boggles the mind.

Then imagine in your mind the lamb who would die for a list of sins such as these, a lamb who would die to save a bunch of people like this - often people who we might imagine as unforgiveable, unworthy of being helped. The kind of people we might like to imagine thrown into some dark place where they would rot, never to be thought of again. Imagine the lamb that washes all these people clean... This is the lamb of God we speak of when we sing "lamb of God you take away the sins of the world". I do feel, when I look into the inner reaches of my own heart, like I could use a whole lamb just for myself, but this particular lamb is a one-size-fits-all kind of a lamb.

This is some serious shit. This is one helluva a lamb we're talking about here.

The practice of the lamb, the sacrificial lamb who takes away sins goes back to ancient Israelite tradition (and I suspect is common in many other ancient traditions). People, individuals and families would bring animals (unblemished animals were preferred and recommended, unless one could not get an unblemished animal) to the priests. The priests were to maintain certain standards of personal cleanliness and holiness, and they were to be morality suited to one who would have the job of offering a sacrifice.

The sacrificial animals were to be killed in a particular way, their blood dealt with in special ways, the best portions burnt at an altar to the one God, as a way of asking for forgiveness, and demonstrating the depth of remorse and repentance. But this system was not working too well... There are many rules around how the animal, the person seeking atonement, the priest, how all of these should prepare for their participation in this ritual of reconciliation with God. The ritual became its own act of sin, becoming more important to people than the function it was meant to serve. Books in the Hebrew Scriptures tell how the people of God failed to understand that the ritual was not the holy and consecrated thing, but rather the relationship that the people kept, with themselves, with each other (and especially with the oppressed, disenfranchised and weak) and the relationship they kept with God. The ritual was meant to be part of the relationship reconciliation toolkit. The ritual instead became its own god placed alongside what should have been the One God.

Prophets across the ages were tapped on their shoulders by God, and given the word of the Lord. They spoke out about the way in which the rituals (of reconciliatory sacrifice, of festivals of thanksgiving) had displaced the true meaning of the reconciliation and relationship with God. Perhaps not unlike our modern hallmark festivals: Christmas, birthdays, valentines day, thanksgiving day - do we observe these festival days truly as days of thanksgiving for Christ, life, love, and plenty respectively? Or do we observe these festival days as rituals of turkeys, hams, treats, gifts and cards? Do we celebrate these festival days as days of relationship or days of merchandising, consumption and consumerism?

I imagine God in heaven shaking His head time and time again and saying "Looks like I have to go find me yet another prophet to tell these fool people what's what down there on earth."

I maintain a hope for life on other planets, partly because I would like to imagine a less foolhardy race of beings somewhere, who have been able to get the message of God, and live it with a modicum of consistency - for we have surely failed at doing this on this planet! But our Lord tried long and hard to get us to understand His message through commandments, leaders, judges, kings, prophets.

Then he sends a lamb.
A human lamb.

And this lamb is not sacrificed in accordance with the laws of purity and temple sacrifice.

The ones who put him to death are not consecrated ones, as priests who perform sacrifices should be.

They probably have not bathed and adequately cleansed themselves since their last intercourse.

Their last intercourse might have been with a prostitute. Or a he-goat for all we know.

They are most inappropriate hands for putting our sacrificial lamb to death.

The sacrificial lamb should be unblemished,

But this lamb arrives at the cross, which ends up being the altar at which he is sacrificed, physically soiled in every imaginable way: spat upon, beaten, kicked, crowned with a mockery of thorns on his head, clothing ripped, doubled over from the weight of the timber that he would shortly be hung on, nailed to.

That weight is negligible though, compared to the weight he will bear when he is nailed in place and hoisted up, beside criminals, dying the agonizing death which birthed him into eternity, like the scapegoat in Leviticus, bearing all our sins upon his head, so that we could be set free. So that we would not have to carry the burdens of our own regrets, bad intentions, unkind thoughts, and deeds that have fractured our relationships with self, others and God.

This is some serious shit.

This lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

This lamb of God who sets us free.

Make no mistake, the ones who brought him to his death in the manner of a common criminal, they were not the priests in this scene of the Jesus story. This lamb was both the sacrifice and the high priest in making himself the sacrifice. There was in fact no high priest worthy of being the one to put him to death. So he, knowing fully what his death would mean, wanting with all his human self to avoid the pain and punishment of it all, asking his Father to take this cup from his lips, he brought himself to the sacrificial altar of the cross, knowing the death he would receive to bring us liberation from the burden of sin. This is some serious shit.

This is the message in Hebrews chapter 2, verses 17 and 18, paraphrased from the Amplified Bible and the NRSV:

It is evident that it was essential that He be made like his brethren in every respect, in order that he might become a merciful (sympathetic) and faithful High Priest in the things related to God, to make atonement and propitiation for the people's sins [like the sacrificial lamb of old].

For because He Himself [in His humanity] has suffered in being tempted (tested and tried), He is able [immediately] to run to the cry of (to assist, to relieve) those who are being tempted and tested and tried (ie us all) [and who therefore are being exposed to suffering].God Himself, in heaven understood that He could not get through to us speaking from His Godly boots in heaven, so He came down to earth in human boots, He suffered, was tempted, tried, tested, and now, with the knowledge of the human experience, with the knowledge of the ignorant and unrealized divine that is the human condition, now he is able to attend to us in the very midst of our suffering.

God works on himself, in being made like his brothers in every way, even onto a suffering and awful death, God works on himself so that he might become a merciful, compassionate, sympathetic and faithful high priest. And then as the high priest, he lays his own mortal self on the cross: an atonement for our sins. So that not one of us has to carry the burden of our regrets and things we (may) have done wrong on our puny little human shoulders. He knows we cannot carry it, and he comes to take it on his shoulders.

I think of the impossible drawings of the artist Escher. Stairways that twist and intertwine impossibly,

birds that fly both forward and backward,

a box whose front is its back.

Jesus, as the high priest and the sacrificial lamb, is both the thread and the eye of the needle. He accomplishes for us what no high priest, no lamb on their own could do.

Thanks be to God, for this lamb of God who takes away all our sins, for this is truly some serious shit.