A Photographer's Glance
There are a few times when things just click and you know it is terrific to be alive.
The rocks are terrific.
The light, the water, the colour, the barnacled rocks. It’s the beach.
And the light just glances fabulously off the water around the sand and over the rocks.
When one sees the world with lies, it is never good for oneself and for all.
When one sees the world of beauty it is always a sense of grace that prevails for oneself and others.
1 John 7-9
If we walk in the light as Jesus himself is in the light, we have communion with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.
If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our si ns and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
Today, the waters of baptism flow freely in the Light, and we walk as one, accompanied by the saints of all time:
To be blessed to be a blessing to all, every last person who encounters us.
On this May Day, a festival of dance and spring, maypoles and cakes, a day of workers’ recognition and honour: Dance this day, full of hope and joy. The creation awaits your participation in its rebirth.
My Love,
On this May Day baptismal day we celebrate not only a small child’s baptism, but all baptisms, including our own: that God is a Gracious and Loving God, to have created this universe, and us with it, knowing what we would do, what God would have to do, what Jesus would suffer, what the Holy Spirit could do, and what we would do with all that to ignore all that God has done for us.
There is a wonder, in you, a miracle of reality. God created as child grown to a respected slim, silver haired elder woman, guided by grace in all you do, with a mind that flips your focused reality from short term to long term memory with concentration and focus, that lives in the world of emotions and sorts them, gives meaning to them and is able to see what others are blind to; and you use that information with grace for people to move forward in life. And your heart of compassion, kindness, grace, generosity, persistence and hope moves you and people around you into a world where God’s grace abounds. You face issues that others shrink from and give space for others to be as they will, yet insist that they hear the vision of justice that you bring, the vision of grace that you bring, the vision of understanding and compassion for all people.
In you our sons have a model for hope against hope. In you I have received my self again. In you God has made a miracle, a reflector of God’s light and music so that the dance, though by broken people shines with colours and rhythm that reveals the infinite in our limited finite reality.
On this May Day, a festival of dance and spring, maypoles and cakes, a day of workers’ recognition and honour: Dance this day, full of hope and joy. The creation awaits your participation in its rebirth.
And this is what it can look like, adjusting the photo for the human eyes tremendous flexibility.
There is little in life that is more precious than to see the one you love enthralled with delight at something simple; for therein one touches the self of one’s soul, the memories of the child grown, and with joy one heals many things that are not so.
With just enough wind to raise the kite, and not so much that one had no challenge to pay attention, provide tension, and bring success through intention against the wind, to give the kite cause to rise against the sky.
There the sun burst through the clouds of the day above the city skyline, giving witness to human effort to create a city and God’s good effort to create beauty at every turn, even amidst the chaos of human effort to falsify the past in order to ruin another.
In God’s world there are of necessity always things of our past that we must haul along with us, and we can complain that they are there, or realize that God leaves them attached so as to stabilize us in the present, to keep our heads up, our hearts beating, and our spirits oriented towards grace. The tails of life are not anchors of disaster, but lessons that can be the source of our wisdom.
There with light pouring through us we can truly be alive.
Or we can deny the past, pervert its memories, and shut out the light, and live a shell of God’s intention for us; we can live in darkness, fear and anxiety.
There is nothing so destructive for ourselves but to think everyone else is to blame for our failings; for then we never learn, we never grow, we never love, and we never truly live.
It is in knowing our own failings and our past, and receiving forgiveness for it all, that we learn to shine, and fly, and stay connected to those we love and those who love us.
As wise Phoebe said: once you lie, though it may seem so small, it leads you places you could not predict, places dark and destructive from which you cannot escape. Okay she didn’t quite say it that way, but she saw that truth: lies seep in quietly and suddenly grow to consume our lives. And we cannot get free of them.
Except, when the light of Christ enters our real though denied guilt, and then we see by grace the goodness we had forgotten and denied, the goodness all around us, and in people we once denigrated and rejected … and the profound goodness that God imputes to us though undeserving. And then we can live free of fear, for we are forgiven and valued and worthy … and able to stand as equals.
Equal in failures; and equally redeemed and made whole. Sinners made simultaneously Saints.
And the fun of it all, and I mean of it all, not just this evening in the park, or this week of lies and hell and hope, rather the fun of it all is like this evening;
It is the enemy’s ace, the Red Baron, which is portrayed, and which delivers the delight, and which, though in previous generations an instrument of death, is an instrument of joy.
Against the backdrop of light and darkness, or cloud and trees this red triwingeddevil thrills us.
And that childlike thrill reaches deep in the soul to heal and bring hope.
God is Good; and all will be well. We shall see the devil of the past, turn into the deliverer of joy, of life, of love, in the present and into the future.
If only the children (the child in us all) could see … the truth and be free.
There are so many lies hurled …
So many lies banked on …
So many lies embraced …
So many lies acted upon …
And there are cracks in everything, and that is how the light gets in (nod to Leonard Cohen.)
When will the light get in?
It was dark and this shows the dark but it misses something unseen while shooting.
This evening I took a walk, short but sweet, to catch the light in the snow.
And there is nothing quite like a wintery night
Frozen but still warm enough to not be dangerous or painful, so that one can delight
Here we can see it, with full light bright throughout the photo, but the sense of night is gone, too.
In
This is the dark, shining brightly through the photo, but not everything is showing.
The little things
And here the action, location and mode of transportation to and back.
That make it all okay.
It is something to be systematically attacked to the point that one has no support left, and then how does one hang on? Like Mandela in prison, Bonnhoeffer in prison, like Ghandi in prison and afterwards, all accused, all braved it out and all had something else in front of them, but Bonnhoeffer never made it back to normal life.
Who will be killed next time, will it be us, or worse them, or we all?
Life, choose life. Please choose life.
Lights
The darkness is immense, wallowing in all the corners deep across the time and space of an ordinary day.
There is no Other that sits so well as oneself alone, with all the others simply servants, not real ones, all lined up to give an illusion of reality.
But there is no goal if there is no Other.
Is there a light to light this darkness like no other? Is there a hope of a cure that everyone says does not exist.
And in the moment that artificial light will hit the trees of snow covered in agony and loneliness.
Where, Oh Where, Is the Hope in the Dark, if not in the Light from the Day.
New Year’s Eve
A year ago
One date, not so innocent,
Three kids, one hotel, one persistent intrusion,
Followed a few days later with one accusation,
That was impossible,
And now,
What is, is all the result of one be-devilled
Let’s see one year further into the future
And hope the same is bettered with hope
And persistent work to let Grace prevail!
There are cracks in everything, that’s how the light gets in.
There are some things that should not be done.
There are some things that should be done.
Catching light whenever possible should be done.
One shot.
Two shot.
Blaming others for the darkness that
one has chosen for oneself should not be done.
No shot.
Doesn’t depend on anything,
If you live in a darkness that you chose,
then blaming others just buries it under more darkness …
until the light is obliterated and
there is no more hope for light or love or life …
nor joy.
Until God chooses to change you!
And then there is life in abundance!
That’s Grace!
There are times in ones life when the beauty of it all is overwhelming.
When, through the cracks in everything, the light gets in …
and the light that brings life shines all around in the darkness, giving life.
Choose life, please, choose life.
And this from the supper table, piped into a fantastic sound system:
and this article as an explanation: Isreal records in one take
Tonight:
Last Saturday, Christmas, I put this together from pieces from my wife and my thoughts and my wife then edited a few times. And it contains the essence of faith; Faith in a gracious God; Faith proclaimed by our church, the Lutheran Church, the E.L.C.I.C.:
Second Reading: Titus 3:4-7
4When the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, 5he saved us, not because of any works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy, through the water of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit. 6This Spirit he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, 7so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.
Darkness
We wrote to a friend whose wife, Joan, was diagnosed with a really bad kind of dementia:
“Today, as the snow falls on the still dark fields in the view to the west and as single cars traverse the road on this side of the darker trees,
“I’m thinking of you and all the inspiration you have been to us;
“And thinking how [deleted expletive/]unfair and typical it is that you must face this, as you’ve faced so many challenges.”
Christmas Works
Every Christmas we see people, people, people expecting, expecting, expecting, buying, buying, buying, preparing, preparing, preparing, travelling, travelling, travelling, doing, doing, doing, cooking, cooking, cooking, wrapping, wrapping, wrapping, eating, eating, eating, and then we also see people grouchy and pressed, ornery and mean, exhausted and worn, hurting and torn, hungry in body and soul, upset and disappointed, disappointed, disappointed.
Christmas Grace according to God’s Mercy
God comes into our stress and hectic, joins right in with us, walks with us, runs with us to the store, the bedroom to wrap, the kitchen to cook, the living room to deliver, the drive to shovel, the store for the last minute food or gift, … God is with us, and the greatest gift is not any of our hectic, or our doing, or our meeting expectations, or even our great goodness.
Christmas is God’s Gift to us, to remind us: God is WITH us in everything: there is nothing we can do to make God be with us. God has done this already, and demonstrated it with Jesus’ birth more than 2 millennia ago. Demonstrated it because we humans need it made real obvious.
The rest of the world, even other religions and the Christian churches, and even us Lutherans get so lost in trying to be in control that we preach, teach and live that we need to do the righteous things, that we need to say the righteous things, that we need to believe the righteous things,
All in order that God will be with us.
That’s a formula for disaster in our lives. It is the formula of sin: we take over the place of God … and then all hell breaks loose in and around us, and we wonder why.
But the one True Gift that the Lutheran Church offers our members, the rest of the Christian churches, other religions, and all the world is simple:
First we confess: We cannot make ourselves right with God. We are too far gone, lost to sin, even the seemingly ‘smallest’ sin separates us from God. And we JUST CANNOT DO IT RIGHTEOUS enough, none of us, never, ever, no how!
AND
Second we proclaim: we don’t have to make ourselves righteous enough, because God has already made us saints, even as we are and remain sinners. God COMES TO US, each of us. Though we are lost, God finds us every day, every hour, every second. God finds us, comes to us, and God is with us,
Always. God is with us, God makes us good enough to be in God’s presence! It’s a gift! Free!
And the only thing we can do is respond: we don’t have to respond well, but we can. Knowing God is with us can change our lives, what we think, what we say, what we DO, and what we believe. And God IS with us no matter how we respond! Its grace, its free, its life-giving.
Giving as Giving Life; Because God Gives, Therefore We Give
Knowing God is with us can change our lives: we can give freely just as God gives to us, we can give forgiveness and mercy, grace and hope: love! WE can give others unconditional love!!
Story: Giving Freely
Nancy Gavin tells the story of her husband, Mike, whom she refers to as “The Man Who Hated Christmas.” Now it wasn’t Jesus that Mike hated. It wasn’t the Christian faith that he hated. But Mike hated what our culture had done with Christmas. He hated trees, and he hated presents, he hated “Jingle Bells,” and he hated all that stuff.
And he was a grouch every year at Christmas–not because of Jesus and the manger but because of the way we observe it.
One December when their son, Kevin, was twelve years old, Kevin was wrestling on his Junior High Wrestling Team. During that month of December they had an exhibition match against a church team. [A] church team … from … the inner city, a team made up of the poorest of the poor …. When the day came for the wrestling match, Kevin and his team came out in their sparkling wrestling uniforms…. [E]verything was as high tech and glorious as it could be. The [other] team … came with sneakers that weren’t really wrestling sneakers. …they didn’t even have the helmets that wrestlers wear to protect their ears from being pinched and pulled and scraped [while] wrestling.
As the match progressed … the church team [lost] every match. Mike… leaned over to [Nancy] and said, “I wish they could win just one match. They have talent, but they don’t have any coaching.”… [It took some doing but somehow] a light bulb went off in Nancy’s head.
The very next day she went down to the local sporting goods store and bought wrestling headgear and wrestling shoes and sent them anonymously to the church whose team her son had wrestled the day before. Then on Christmas Eve she wrote a little note to Mike: “Dear Mike, I know how you feel about Christmas. … Remember that wrestling team from the inner city church? This Christmas, they have headgear and proper shoes … as your Christmas present.”
She put the note in an envelope and stuck the envelope up in the branches of their Christmas tree. When morning came, the children unwrapped all their presents, and there was the usual festivity. Then one of the children spotted this envelope up in the tree and said, “Look! What is that?” Mike took the envelope down and opened it and read the note. With tears in his eyes, he looked at Nancy and said, “This is the best Christmas that I have ever had.”
It became a tradition in their family. Every year there would be an envelope, with no name on it, just an envelope in the tree. One year Nancy sent a group of mentally challenged kids to camp. Another year she sent some funds to a family whose house had burned down during the month of December. Year after year after year some sort of gift like this was Mike’s Christmas present.
Then, Nancy wrote, there came the fall, about the time their children were grown, when Mike died of cancer. When Christmas rolled around, Nancy could hardly put up the tree. But she did, and somehow in his memory she felt that she ought to once again put an envelope in the tree to make some sort of gift in Mike’s honor, just as she had during his lifetime. The three grown children came home, and Christmas morning came. And there in the branches of the tree were four envelopes. For, unbeknownst to each other, each of their three children had also made a gift in honor of their father.
And that too has become a tradition in their home. Nancy Gavin writes, “For generations … as my children become adults and have their own families, there will be an envelope for Mike in their tree.” And when her grandchildren have families of their own, there will probably still be envelopes for Mike in their tree. For the Gavin family is a family that “got it.” …. (SERMONSHOP December 1999, JOE PARRISH)
They began to understand Christmas, God’s gift of life for us.
Giving as Works
But our giving gifts at Christmas, not even an envelope in Mike’s memory, is not supposed to be our way to earn love from others, or from God. It is supposed to be BECAUSE we love them, and we love them because God loves us first, even though we do not deserve it, never, ever, no how.
Giving as Response to Mercy, to Grace
This Christmas, not in order to gain anything from God, nor from others, but because we recognize all that God has given us, let us Give to others. Give something just because God loves you, accepts you as you are, forgives you, and because God walks with you.
Christmas Grace
But whether you give because God loves you unconditionally, OR NOT; whether you are caught up in the hectic of making it perfect so that the traditions are not lost and are there as a loving structure that gives life to you and yours, OR NOT; whether you have quit giving gifts and you hate Christmas, OR NOT; whether you love the snow and the possibilities of the Christmas season, OR NOT; whether you have or will give all the right gifts to all the right people, OR NOT;
NO Matter What: God walks with you each day, each hour, each minute, and loves you unconditionally.
Christmas Light
We ended that note to our friend with these words:
“As the light of Christmas dawns, and the details become clearer, of the landscape before us, it is with deep gratitude for your gifts, part of God’s gifts for us, that we say,
“Know we pray for you and Joan,
“Know that if you need whatever, we will find it, in ourselves or organize it with others, to provide for you, as you have provided for so many people, us included.
“May the light shine even now brightly for you and Joan.”
Christmas Blessing
Breathe easy; you’re in God’s hands also this day. So let God’s light of love shine through your heart, mind and soul to all those around you.
Have a blessed Christmas!
Amen
See the light
The concept is that if one fully trusts God’s grace one does not sin frivolously,
nor purposefully nor purposelessly;
rather if one sees no way forward other than to sin, then trust that forgiveness is already promised, move forward, without regret but full of humility, and trust also in this moment that God will forgive.
For no matter how well one lives, because one sins constantly even if one is not so aware, no matter how well one tries (all humans are in bondage to sin) –
No matter what, even one’s daily breath is a gift of forgiveness, one always needs God’s forgiveness.
Recognize the Fire that is one’s own
No matter what, one needs forgiveness every moment ….
Therefore this one sin does not change how dependent one is on forgiveness. And if God’s forgiveness is real, then trust also that God forgives even when one sees no other good choice and must consciously choose to sin.
So in all things, choose life, and trust God’s love and Grace.
And be that for each other.
The Luther quote:
“If you are a preacher of mercy, do not preach an imaginary but the true mercy. If the mercy is true, you must therefore bear the true, not an imaginary sin. God does not save those who are only imaginary sinners. Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong (sin boldly), but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world. We will commit sins while we are here, for this life is not a place where justice resides. We, however, says Peter (2. Peter 3:13) are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth where justice will reign.”
Letter 99, Paragraph 13. Erika Bullmann Flores, Tr. from: Dr. Martin Luther’s Saemmtliche SchriftenDr. Johann Georg Walch Ed. (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, N.D.), Vol. 15, cols. 2585-2590. [12]