Thursday, August 2, 2012

Today’s text


Ephesians 4:1-3

I, the prisoner in the Lord, urge you therefore to lead a life worthy of the vocation to which you were called. With all humility and gentleness, and with patience, support each other in love. Take every care to preserve the unity of the Spirit by the peace that binds you together.

Reflection

Unity of Spirit is not toleration, not mere acceptance or the absence of mistrust and conflict. It is the loving awareness that swells when human hearts experience common faith, hope and endeavor.

A song at worship can do this, sweeping souls into a single hope, lifting them into awareness of the great love who holds them.

Common work or sorrow also brings unity. Times of great loss or destruction breaks open our individual cocoons and joins us in common efforts to care for each other or rebuild broken lives and homes.

Christians … others, too, for that matter … band together to send crews to towns ravaged by disasters. We say we do it to live the love of Christ, and that is true. The Spirit within moves us beyond ourselves.

But we do it not only to share the love of Christ but to know Christ’s love, to be swept up in a love that binds us to each other and to the One who is the Fountain of that love.

Amid the common labor--or in sharing the sorrow of one who has suffered great personal loss--the gulf between our souls disappears. Our aloneness in the world evaporates. We feel connected at the heart, and God’s hope and plan for the world becomes real.

Our completion, the Spirit’s fulfillment and salvation of our lives is not an individual reality but a communal one. We are not saved by ourselves, all alone, but as we are gathered in an ocean of love that holds us all, and all of together, knowing one love.

Pr. David L. Miller

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Today’s text




Ephesians 4:1-3


I, the prisoner in the Lord, urge you therefore to lead a life worthy of the vocation to which you were called. With all humility and gentleness, and with patience, support each other in love. Take every care to preserve the unity of the Spirit by the peace that binds you together.


Reflection


There is a peace that binds us together and the name of that peace is Jesus.


In recent weeks, I sometimes have taken to repeating a simple phrase as a mantra. I say it under my breath or barely aloud: Jesus is our peace.


Sometimes, such as when I feel anxious, I speak it as a petition: Jesus be our peace.


It is not easy to say what this means to me, but I can share what it does. The phrase is a portal, a doorway into a fresh and immense reality.


I enter a space big as the universe or at least as large as the universe within the mystery of my own soul. The noisy chatter of my anxieties fall quiet, and I know the love that is in Jesus.


It is as if I enter the reality that he is, the world that is in him. In that world, the love of God is as embracing and pervasive as the sky, and I know beyond any doubt that there is nothing to fear.


I wish I could say there were particular images or words associated with this awareness, but right now I can name none. There is nothing I see that I can describe. I know only that I enter this immense space where I know union with the mystery of all that was in Jesus, loving unity.


I am in him, in the unity he shares with that Loving Mystery he called Father, who is a living fountain of love and life in such abundance that worry about … anything … disappears.


The world lights up as place of wonder where joy and peace of heart are not only possible but plentiful, even amid the challenges of the day. A desire emerges to live in peace with every living thing, every human soul and all creation.


The reality into which I enter is not an occasional reality but always there, waiting for my awareness to open the door, the awareness that comes in simplest prayer: Jesus is our peace.


Knowing this peace, seeking unity in the Spirit is not a chore but an invitation to live in the reality that Jesus is instead of the much more fearful world we create in our anxious imaginations.


Pr. David L. Miller

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Today’s text



Ephesians 4:1-3


I, the prisoner in the Lord, urge you therefore to lead a life worthy of the vocation to which you were called. With all humility and gentleness, and with patience, support each other in love. Take every care to preserve the unity of the Spirit by the peace that binds you together.


Reflection


The grace that I have most consistently rejected in nearly 60 years of living is that of community, solidarity, togetherness.


I was raised in an age when individualism was at high tide. But I also nourished a deep personal strain that wanted to stand over and against others, seeking to establish an identity that was unique that I might pretend that ‘they do not--or cannot--understand me.’


At the same time, I wanted to be admired by those from whom I imagined that I was so different. As if I were less flesh and blood than those from whom I would distance myself; as if they felt all that much better understood by others than I did.


As if my sense of aloneness in the world was not shared by ... everyone.


I have imagined the journey of faith, too, as an individual endeavor, not as a pilgrimage to God’s eternal city in communion with other souls as blessed and needy as my own.


The grace to which I come in these years is one of realism, the grace of realizing I am a merely and blessedly human-- not some kind of separate uber-human species so different from all the others with whom I walk the streets.


They are like me. Just so, they are God’s gift to me as I am gift to them, whether any of us recognize or not.


But when we recognize it, surrender the arrogance of imagining we are so different from each other and seek to live with humility and gentleness, the gulf between our souls is bridged, the myth of our alones is shattered, our wounds find balm, and we feel the unity of life and heart God intends.


At our best, the church and each congregation is a place of knowing the grace of community that sets us free from ourselves for truly human lives.


Pr. David L. Miller