Friday, March 16, 2012

Today’s text

John 3:15-18

For this is how God loved the world: he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. For God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but so that through him the world might be saved. No one who believes in him will be judged; but whoever does not believe is judged already, because that person does not believe in the Name of God's only Son.

Reflection

Today, I want to live. This is a silly thing to say when taken on a surface level. Who doesn’t want to live? Only those so sick or troubled that waking up each day has become a burden instead of a blessing.

Here I am, Lord, awake again, fingers on the keys, awaiting for some small movement in my soul so that my hands may serve their truest purpose--pounding out words that bear your presence, shaping thoughts that come from your heart, speaking truth that wing my soul into the depth of your heart that you may enfold me and give total healing.

You are the Presence who eagerly awaits our return that our whole being may be wrapped in love.

That is what I want and need every morning, everyday … to feel my whole being--all that I am or ever will be--transported and wrapped in a love that rejects no part of me, a love in which I am always welcome. I want to feel and know it to be true. I want to know that whatever I feel when I am wrapped and lifted by love is my true identity--and yours.

So lift me into yourself, into the Love who holds me every moment so I may know salvation, the experience and reality of eternal life. To know your love is the experience of life itself. Anything less than this is the experience of judgment, of separation from our true home, from whom we really are and from whom you really are, Holy One.

Judgment is not something you lay upon us. We do it to ourselves every moment we live in fear, every moment we imagine that we are separate from you, every moment I fail to realize that this hunger in me for you is not a sign of your absence but of your presence pulling at me to surrender to your love, to quit doing, quit trying so hard, quit imagining that you are far off … and just know that all that I am and ever will be rests in your gentle hands.

So live with joy, you say. Abandon all fear. Cast away every anxiety and just know: your beginning and your end, your days and your years are in my hands. Fear not. Today is a day to live, really live.

Pr. David L. Miller

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Today’s text

John 3:15-18

For this is how God loved the world: he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. For God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but so that through him the world might be saved. No one who believes in him will be judged; but whoever does not believe is judged already, because that person does not believe in the Name of God's only Son.

Reflection

God did not begin loving the world the day Jesus was born as the bearer of the divine heart. God loved the world--and me and you--from everlasting, from before the explosion of wonder that created the dazzling universe we know through our microscopes and telescopes.

Before that, before the yawning eons of time, before the first appearance of tender green life on this lovely planet, before it all there was the love whom God is. And that is all there was. Just Love. All that is born into being is the offspring, the child of Eternal Love.

The face of Eternal Love appears in the Son of God, Jesus of Nazareth, who does not judge but welcomes all that is--and me--to return home, to dwell in the Love that gave it birth so that life may be complete and the Creator’s joy might be full.

Truth is we have never been separate from this Love. The reality of our life is sustained by Love every moment.

But only those with eyes to see know and understand that we dwell each day in a sea of love, surrounding us and holding all that is in being. They taste salvation, the freedom to live and love, knowing Immeasurable Love holds them in every instant.

The Son of God is given to this world to reveal the Love that always was, the Love we fail to trust and believe on many days, condemning ourselves to live the lie that we are something less than loved, that struggle, judgment and failure is the truth of our identity.

It’s a lie. Our lives were born in the mystery of the Love who is God. Our being is an expression of that One Love.

The Son of God, Jesus of Nazareth, appears to call us back to ourselves, to our true identity, to feel once more (or for the first time) that the love I taste in my soul is the love that fills him, the love that is from everlasting to everlasting.

Every time we taste it within, every time we feel such love surrounding us we know the eternal life that is our destiny. Such is the sweetness of salvation.

Pr. David L. Miller

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Today’s text

John 3:14-16

As Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so must the Son of man be lifted up so that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him. For this is how God loved the world: he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

Reflection

And what does this mean?

As I was a child, the meaning was clear. To believe was to accept that Jesus died for my sins. He was lifted up on the cross to bear my punishment and free me from God’s righteous condemnation.

This didn’t make sense to me, and I never really accepted it. My reasons varied through the years. I didn’t like the idea that God needed to kill Jesus to forgive me. Doesn’t that mean I am more loving than God since I can forgive--and sometimes do--without a lot of blood being spilled? I need no pound of flesh; why should God?

Did Jesus really die thinking he was paying God back for the world’s offenses?

My childhood understanding, still held my millions today, also put all the emphasis on one aspect of Jesus: the crucifixion, but without giving thought to why he was crucified.

Those who killed him cared not a wit about me and my sins. They just wanted him dead.

Why? What was so wrong with Jesus that they should go to the trouble and mess of executing him? Was the reason connected with who he was, what he said and how he lived?

Perhaps he was killed because of the sins of the world: because those in power recognized that the kingdom of God he preached was a threat to their own kingdoms and privileges. Perhaps his idea of a kingdom of love and justice, where the broken and lost are worth as much or more than billionaires, seemed crazy.

Perhaps he was disturbing because he wanted to turn the world upside down with his vision of divine love embracing everyone and all that is. Perhaps everything he was and all he stood for contradicted the way powerful people think, the way society is arranged for their benefit.

I can’t grasp all the reasons the powerful wanted to kill Jesus except that he was a threat to them, which means that the all-embracing love of God was a threat to them. His hungry love and burning hope for a kingdom from God knocked the foundation from beneath their ordered world.

So what does it mean to believe in Jesus?

It means believing into the world, the kingdom, the vision that filled and animated him. It means seeing and imagining that world and giving yourself to it--surrendering to divine love and grace, acceptance and justice, compassion and yearning--even when the wisdom of self-interest, consolidating your power and protecting your comfort contradict it.

Jesus way, the way of divine love, his vision of a kingdom of compassion, was so radical that the powers of his age, and ours, wanted to sweep it away.

To believe in Jesus means holding his vision in our hearts and living, as best we can, the love that was in him, even when it leads to crosses of our own sorrow.

Pr. David L. Miller

Friday, March 9, 2012

Today’s text

1 Corinthians 1:18-21

The message of the cross folly for those who are on the way to ruin, but for those of us who are on the road to salvation it is the power of God. As scripture says: I am going to destroy the wisdom of the wise and bring to nothing the understanding of any who understand. Where are the philosophers? Where are the experts? And where are the debaters of this age? Do you not see how God has shown up human wisdom as folly? Since in the wisdom of God the world was unable to recognize God through wisdom, it was God's own pleasure to save believers through the folly of the gospel.

Reflection

I believe the glory of God is witnessed in the palette of miraculous color splashing across the western sky as the sun sinks beneath the horizon. Beauty is there for any with eyes to see.

God drops a hint in every sunset, in every sunrise, nudging our consciousness toward awareness and wonder. Here is beauty, but it is a drop in the ocean of the Beauty who made all that is.

But who can see beauty in an executed man? Can anyone perceive the wisdom of God in the brutality of intentional, inhuman suffering?

The Christian claim is that the heart of God is unknown and ultimately unknowable except in the cross, in the surrender of Jesus to a death at the hands of those who were protecting their power and maintaining an orderly and servile society.

For Christians, the cross reveals the meaning of all things. But what do we really see?

A man, Jesus, dying, failing to flee the death he could see coming to him because the powers that be saw him as a threat, a potential insurrectionist.

It is always interesting that people in poorer cultures seem to understand the cross better than we who live in more developed economies. They look at Jesus hanging on his cross and ‘get it.’

I saw this in reporting trips years ago in places like El Salvador and Namibia, Nigeria and China.

The poor looked at Jesus on the cross and saw that ‘he is one of us,’ sharing the struggle of living in a difficult place and time, identifying with whose most forgotten and left out of the gold rush for this world’s goods.

They saw him take on the powers that favor the few and hold others down, challenging the powerful toward compassion and announcing an alternative kingdom where the blessings of God are shared by all so that the desire of God might become human reality.

Jesus’ death on the cross meant that he did not run from the suffering that came to him because he poured compassion on the poor and challenged those that have. He submitted to suffering as act of love for all that God loves--the poor, the rich, the haves, the have-nots, all of us.

They saw the power and glory of God in sunsets like the rest of us. But in the cross they saw the heart and desire of God to love us all into justice and life.

Pr. David L. Miller

Wednesday, March 7 2012

Today’s text

John 12:35-37

Jesus then said: The light will be with you only a little longer now. Go on your way while you have the light, or darkness will overtake you, and nobody who walks in the dark knows where he is going. While you still have the light, believe in the light so that you may become children of light. Having said this, Jesus left them and was hidden from their sight. Though they had been present when he gave so many signs, they did not believe in him ... .

Reflection

We see what is in us. If we are in touch with the love and kindness of God in our hearts, we will see that love and kindness everywhere. If our hearts are hard, we will see it nowhere … and find bitterness everywhere.

In the beginning, God created light and opened human eyes to the beauty of the world and the generosity of the God who is love, whose pleasure is giving life.

History is a story of God continuing to breathe life into to the world and into us, seeking to open closed eyes and hearts to the Divine Presence, to the loving generosity that can be found in every time and place.

Sometimes God is successful, sometimes not.

Sometimes human hearts turn from love, seeking themselves and their own power, their own glory. They find the world a distrustful and threatening place

Sometimes human hearts are broken so badly by the suffering and tragedies of this world that they can see nothing else. Sometimes this pain turns their hearts from every vain seeking of self, knowing only a love willing to suffer with others can heal the wounds of this earth.

Sometimes we see the breathtaking beauty of hearts that love this world and all in need and are moved to want this beauty more than anything else, sensing that this alone can heal us and calm our fears.

In every time, the light of God shines in every love, breathes in every beauty to awaken us to the light of God that shines most clearly and distinctly in our brother Jesus.

But if do not have this light and love within us we cannot see him.

Yet, do we not all have this light within us? Are we not all alive with the breath of God, animated by the One who breathes life into us and all creation in every moment?

And if so, then why did some see Jesus and believe and others did not? Why do some see and believe today … and others not?

Perhaps we need to have our hearts touched and moved by love for this world and all its beauty and struggle.

Perhaps opening our hearts to the presence of this wounded love within softens hearts and opens our eyes to see the fullness of this love in the face of our wounded brother, Jesus, who suffers for the sake of the world.

Perhaps then we shall see how this world and we are loved. Perhaps then we shall see his love everywhere and in everything.

Perhaps once we are in touch with the love of God who is the Source of our being we shall see the light that shines in every darkness, even ours.

Pr. David L. Miller

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Today’s text

1 Corinthians 1:18

The message of the cross folly for those who are on the way to ruin, but for those of us who are on the road to salvation it is the power of God.

Reflection

There is nothing attractive about the cross despite the millions of replicas we hang on our walls or around our neck. We may make it of gold or silver and adorn it with beautiful stones. Our artists contort and color it in ways that can erase its brutality.

But it remains a ghastly affront to human sensibilities, which was always its intention.

In the ancient world, the cruelty of hanging society’s offenders on a cross, slowly to die, kept people in line. It was an instrument of execution and social order that made it clear who was in charge and what would happen to you if you forgot.

Centuries later, we can’t imagine the ugliness or pain of such a death. The cross has become an amulet, a good luck charm we hold up against the struggles of our lives to shield ourselves from the pains of living.

But it doesn’t protect us from a thing.

The cross invites into those pains, to give ourselves to those struggles trusting that there is One who has gone there before us, One who did not avoid the pains of the lost and forgotten, One who brings life out of death and hope where none seems possible.

The cross of Christ invites us to the hope of life where life seems most lost and we feel most alone.

For we are not alone. The Holy One who is God walked in the way of the forsaken, the way of the cross, awakening the awareness that there is no place the power and love of God will not go, no power that divine love cannot conquer.

Pr. David L. Miller

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Today’s text

Mark 8:35

Anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.

Reflection

A great deal of ink has been spilled during the past 35 years about why churches are failing. I remember one particularly honest op-ed article written by an Arizona pastor 22 or 23 years ago. The headline, which he chose, was “Entertainment evangelism.”

He argued that congregations must engage people through music and various forms of entertainment because traditional church liturgies fail to attract people or to excite imaginations about the power of God and the truth of the gospel. Through forms of entertainment congregations can draw a crowd and share the message of Jesus.

A firestorm of reader criticism followed the appearance of the article, but many agreed with the writer’s argument that the church must be far more attractional, more contemporary in music and approach.

The focus was on speaking to and meeting the needs of worshipers through media they understood and would not dismiss. Congregations willing to do this will grow and remain significant in their communities, he said. Those who do not, well … their fate is sealed.

Looking at the ministry that occupies much of my days, I see that meeting needs is a large part of my day. But the needs I most typically meet are those to be found at the hospital beds and hidden behind the anxious faces that walk through my office door, seeking hope, consolation and a word of guidance about God’s presence amid the confusion of living.

Those are needs I believe Christ calls the fellowship of the church to address. But catering to the needs of consumer culture for amusement is as antithetical to the gospel call of Christ today as when I first read that article in the late 1980s.

Consumers come to church wanting to be amused, entertained. They come with an implicit demand (sometimes explicit) that their needs must be met or they will go away … to someplace that better meets their needs, however defined.

One sometimes hears echoes of this refrain when people leave one congregation for another, and there can, of course, be good reasons for leaving.

Attending to human needs for community and care amid the difficulties of life was central to Jesus’ ministry of revealing God’s kingdom.

But as often as not the consumerism rife in our society moves us to look at our congregations as one more place whose value is established by how well it serves me: Does it make me comfortable, does it suit my views and desires, does its teaching and celebrations touch my heart?

Consumers totally miss the call of Jesus. Consequently, a deep need in their soul goes unmet: the need to find oneself by giving oneself away to the mission of Jesus.

Life is found in surrender to the cause of God’s loving kingdom, the cause to which Jesus surrendered.

This paradox is the center of Jesus teaching. In losing ourselves, we find ourselves, in giving ourselves for the sake of God’s love we receive the self we truly are, in forgiving we find forgiveness and in dying we discover eternal life.

Gracious God, show me this day where I might give myself, my heart and mind, my soul and strength, that in giving myself away I may discover what it means to live.

Pr. David L. Miller