Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Today’s text

3 John 1:9-10

“I have written something to the church; but Diotrephes, who likes to put himself first, does not acknowledge our authority. So if I come I will call attention to what he is doing in spreading false charges against us. And not content with those charges, he refuses to welcome the friends, and even prevents those who want to do so and expels them from the church.”

Prayer

We are guests here, my Lord. The earth is not mine. I did not make it. The soil with its fruit and flowers of myriad and unlikely color, the sun’s warm caress, the rain wearing resistant rock into rich loam, gentling the ground that seed may spring from the darkness: all this awaited my appearance in time and space, carefully prepared by your genius through unnumbered millennia that life might spring forth in abundance, delight to the eye and strength for body and soul.

Nor did I create the structures of society that allow my common and ordered life. Long generations preceded me, struggling against chaos with the mind and good will that is the breath of your Spirit in every generation, moving us to seek that More for which we know we are made.

And the community of faith in which my hungry heart finds its home, there, too, I am a guest. I receive what you have done in loving hospitality through the resurrection of my brother, Jesus, welcoming me to know the life that appears in him, ever inviting, “Come you who labor. Abide in me.”

And I come, finding again the hospitality that meets me in every place of my habitation, discovering again that I am always a guest, dependent on an unnamed hospitality for each breath, each step, each of the millions of tiny acts and occurrences that make my life possible and worth living.

Thank you. Those two words are the quintessential prayer. I know of no better. Thank you, dearest Loving Mystery, for your immense hospitality throughout all ages, creating life abundant and giving your life eternal through Jesus, our brother. Your great and continuous giving fills me with gratitude that I, with all your saints, may become the face of your resplendent hospitality, shining in the face of Jesus the Christ, your beloved and mine. Amen.

Pr. David L. Miller