Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Today's text

1 Peter 1:1-2

Blessed be God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who in his great mercy has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and into a heritage that can never be spoilt or soiled and never fade away.’s

Reflection

Only you are never spoilt or fade away. We rise and fall. We draw breath and grow quiet. The earth changes, erodes, erupts and reshapes itself in the constant movement of nature, unresting, unceasing, day to day, age to age.

Eons pass. The new that comes allows faint memory of the joys and sorrows of the millions who have gone before, of the earth they knew.

It is the nature of things, and we find ourselves thrown into it, taking our place in the chain of ever-changing generations, rising up with promise only to fade away.

This should be a council of despair to my soul. But it is not, for eternity is known amid the temporal and dying, the unchanging is felt in and through all that changes. You who are n ever spoilt or soiled, you who never fade away are tasted amid all that fails and falls.

Life is known by those for whom death is certain. Of this, I am certain, eve now.

For even now I know life, not as biological fact but as the eternal stirring of your grace and beauty in the tears of hope that are my morning praise to you.

Even here, even now, that which does not fade or fail, spoil or decay dwells in my inner experience of joy and hope … and the love that I know you to be, through and through.

What I taste is but a taste. Yet, it is real, and it is now. And my prayer to know the joyous consolation of your life within my mind and heart finds its answer.

So blessed are you, for you do not let death have its way in human souls. You give life and then life eternal to dead, here and now, and a hungry assurance that what I taste will be forever.

Pr. David L. Miller