Thursday, March 19, 2009

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Today’s text

John 3:18-21


And the judgment is this: though the light has come into the world people have preferred darkness to the light because their deeds were evil. And indeed, everybody who does wrong hates the light and avoids it, to prevent his actions from being shown up; but whoever does the truth comes out into the light, so that what he is doing may plainly appear as done in God.

Reflection

What is the light we flee, Jesus? Or the darkness we prefer?

You appear in the world as a gift of love from the Holy Mystery who can’t stand to watch the world destroy itself. God loves and that love appears most fully, in pristine clarity, in you who welcome and forgive and reveal the darkness of our souls.

For it is the light of holiness, the glow of ultimate goodness that reveals how curved in we are upon ourselves, seeing little of and caring less for that which does not directly touch our flesh.

You love and you love to the end of your breath Jesus, giving yourself for the friends you gather. In this light so much of who we are and what we do appears as the pettiness that it is.

But you mince no words: You call it darkness. And on a deep level we prefer our darkness. Maybe it is easier. Maybe we have been so self-centric for so long it is hard to imagine even the possibility of changing, let alone actually doing so.

Maybe we see our lives as little fortresses that must be tended and carefully protected; hence we protect and tend our little gardens, hiding beyond high walls of ego defenses, making sure we are well, but avoiding the vulnerability of loving relationships for which you made us.

And maybe we just don’t think anyone or anything can be trusted with anything as precious as ‘my life.’

Whatever words capture the truth, it is true that we dwell in darkness and self-protection, avoiding the voices in our soul that beg us to open our hearts and give, and love and be vulnerable.

Being exposed to that much light is scary.

Still, you invite us into the light, there to know of ourselves what you know: that we are loved, completely, and in that love we could truly live, if we could only creep from our darkness.

Pr. David L. Miller

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

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

No one who believes shall be judged. And yet we judge ourselves and each other all the time.

But you, O God, do not judge me. You do not hold me up to the light and look closely at the lines and creases of my life, the imperfections that we both know are there.

This is not your way. Those who believe into Jesus dwell in an unfailing environment of grace, a bubble of blessing in which you seek to envelop our every pore.

Our lives know the ordinary bumps and bruises of living amid the unruliness of chance, of human emotion and action, of sickness and health. Sometimes those bumps are not ordinary at all, but truly frightening and destructive, or they fall heavy on our hearts.

Yet even then, we dwell in the land of the Son. We may struggle and fail, we may hold little strength or power; heaviness of spirit may grind us down, and circumstances may whisper that we have no worth. But we can look into the eyes of all this and more. And shout: ‘no judgment!’

None.

You judge us worthy of love and care, worth dieing for, treasured to the end of our days and to the eternity of time.

Our life’s struggle is to surrender our judgments of ourselves to your judgment--and to dismiss others judgments of our value altogether.

For you do no judge us based on our human frailties and wrong doing. You see us dwelling in the air of Christ’s love, struggling, yes, to breathe in the fresh, lightness of non-judgment.

Teach us to breathe the freshness of this air that our judgments and condemnations, our self-loathing and hatreds may end. We would walk unencumbered into the lightness of being you intend.

Pr. David L. Miller

Monday, March 16, 2009

Monday, March 16, 2009

Today’s text

John 3:14-17


[Jesus said] 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

Everyone who believes … will have life. But this belief is not merely affirming statements about Jesus, who he is or what he does.

It is a believing into, a believing into what he does and gives. Believing into Jesus is a movement of heart, mind and body.

We give ourselves over to a way of seeing and being, Jesus’ way. He is lifted up like Moses’ snake in the desert, a fearful symbol of death and destruction. Surely no one wants to be bitten by the snake or end up as Jesus on a cross, an instrument of execution.

But we are invited to ‘believe into’ this way, to see in Jesus’ destruction God’s ultimate sign of love and life. Giving ourselves to it means cleaving to this sign, holding it fast even when it seems we are being torn apart by destructive forces in our lives.

It is hoping against every whisper of hopelessness that as Jesus rose from destruction to new life, we too shall find life out of the ashes of every trial and terror, every destruction and loss, even that of life itself.

Believing in Jesus is living trust that the one who is lifted up on the cross now lives to lift us from each valley into the fullness of God’s love and life.

We look at the sign of the cross and make it on ourselves, knowing Jesus way is and always will be our own.

Pr. David L. Miller