Daily Readings: Psalm 21; Genesis 15:1-18; Matthew 12:33-37

If you grow a healthy tree, you’ll pick healthy fruit. If you grow a diseased tree, you’ll pick a worm-eaten fruit. The fruit tells you about the tree.

You have minds like a snake pit! How do you suppose what you say is worth anything when you are so foul-minded? It’s your heart, not the dictionary, that gives meaning to your words. A good person produces good deeds and words season after season. An evil person is a blight on the orchard. Let me tell you something: Every one of these careless words is going to come back to haunt you. There will be a time of Reckoning. Words are powerful; take them seriously. Words can be your salvation. Words can also be your damnation. Matthew 12:33-37, The Message

We are all beautiful creatures of God and the Spirit, just like trees bearing beautiful fruit, gifts from God. Like trees we require care and guidance to be able to grow and flourish.

There is that phrase often shared and taught by our parents, grandparents, guardians and teachers : Think before you speak. These 4 simple words hold true each and every day, not to be forgotten, but to keep in our hearts and minds always, gently, whenever and wherever we are.

Words can be hurtful if not thought about carefully, leaving a terrible taste like rotten fruit; still, our words can leave a lingering feeling of joy and happiness when spoken with love and caring, like beautiful healthy peaches on their well-cared for trees.

As a classroom substitute, I am especially mindful when helping the 7 young students in their small classroom, with the words I choose when speaking to them, asking how and if I can assist them with their work. Each special needs student is different and needs to be spoken to in an individual way, with a calm and patient tone. There is no place for anger or intolerance, only total understanding of their needs. The students’ classroom teacher has an amazing ability and gift to speak to and teach each of her students in this way; she is an amazing role model for others. She has been a great role model for me as well.

Jesus, when we read his parables through the gospels, continues to be our role model for thoughts, words and actions. With our spoken words chosen with thoughtfulness and kindness, we can all be like healthy trees, bearing vibrant fruit.

Offered by Robin Nielsen, in whom God delights.

Daily Readings: Psalm 21; Isaiah 41:14-20; Romans 15:14-21

I need your help in carrying out this highly focused assignment God gave me, this priestly and gospel work of serving the spiritual needs of the non-Jewish outsiders…

I have no interest in giving you a chatty account of my adventures, only the wondrously powerful and transformingly present words and deeds of Christ in me that triggered a believing response among the outsiders. In such ways I have trailblazed a preaching of the Message of Jesus all the way from Jerusalem into northwestern Greece. This has all been pioneer work, bringing the Message only into those places where Jesus was not yet known and worshiped. My text has been,

Those who were never told of him – they’ll see him! Those who’ve never heard of him – they’ll get the message!

Romans 15: 16, 18-21 The Message

It took him time, a blinding come-to-Jesus experience on the road to Damascus, and the courage of Ananias, but Paul got there. He found his mission from God: reaching out to the non-Jewish community that for most of his life he had no wish to encounter much less serve.

I don’t know that it will be the same for most of us, but we share a vital something with Paul’s experience: our mission from God will move us beyond where we think we belong, and teach us to love people we never thought we could, would, or should.

Daily Readings: Psalm 21; Isaiah 24:1-16a; I Thessalonians 4:1-12

One final word, friends. We ask you – urge you is more like it – that you keep on doing what we told you to do to please God, not in a dogged religious plod, but in a living, spirited dance.

I Thessalonians 4:1-2, The Message

After these words, it’s about sex – or, more precisely, not having sex in a way that harms us physically, emotionally, or spiritually. It’s a plea to take into account the whole person you get naked with. Then it becomes a request to take into account the rest of the community members – even those we don’t know particularly well. In short, live and act as if your life and the lives of all those around you matter. Because they do.

It’s easy to misunderstand what that really is: a full, vibrant, connected life. It’s not a lesser, boring life that pleases God; it’s not giving up the things that bring us pleasure – it’s making sure that pleasure is found within the larger context of a joyful life for everyone.

A good life isn’t a long slog on a rocky road. A good life is a turn on the dance floor. Unpredictable. Breath-taking. A joyful moving in the company of others.

Enjoy!

Daily Readings: Isaiah 11:1-10; Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19; Romans 15:4-13; Matthew 3:1-12

While Jesus was living in the Galilean hills, John, called “the Baptizer,” was preaching in the desert country of Judea. HIs message was simple and austere, like his desert surroundings: “Change your life. God’s kingdom is here.” Mt. 3:1-2, The Message

The popular notion is that John came into Jerusalem wearing the classic sandwich board, “Repent!” We imagine that the Baptist stood on the streets of Jerusalem in front of Herod’s fabulous Temple, across from the Jerusalem Museum of Fine Art and the First Judea Bank building with a bullhorn, shouting, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. . . . You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”

But it didn’t happen that way at all. It’s much more fascinating. Matthew is quite clear. “In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea.” That’s where he was proclaiming, “Repent.”  So, was he a “voice in the wilderness,” as we say—a lonely coot preaching to the wind and the sand and the bitter rocks? Hardly. “Then,” Matthew says, “the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan, and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.” 

The topography of this spiritual encounter is hardly a chance feature of Matthew’s story. Notice the symbolic movement: You have to move out of the city . . . cross a river . . . and enter a desert. And there you will meet a very strange man who will offer to plunge you into the water in an act of purgation, cleansing yourself for your encounter with God.

The call of John reminds me of those early Desert Fathers in Egypt, the first Christian ascetics who went out into the desert. They weren’t just leaving the city and its culture; they were leaving the church. By the time Anthony the Great moved into the desert in 270, the church was already not-enough. Nothing wrong with it, just not-enough. Just gradually getting institutionalized. Again, nothing wrong, but in spiritual development terms, the church was mostly about first-half-of-life issues. Building a moral foundation, rehearsing right from wrong, learning impulse control, making and keeping basic commitments, being a stand-up man, a dutiful woman. 

But when that program crashes, as it always does on the rocks of the middle voyage, we’re ready to hear John. And that is what people like Anthony the Great did. They listened to his call and literally went out into the desert. And, just as the crowds followed John into the wilderness, so ordinary Christians in the third century went streaming out into the wild to sit and pray with Anthony, with Paul of Thebes, and eventually with the Desert Mothers—or ammas—like Sincletica of Alexandria and Sarah of the Desert.

Many people have suggested that we are on the cusp of a new monastic movement, that the weakness of the contemporary church is pushing people out onto the margins—sometimes literally into the wild—to find that something more. Advent is a perfect moment for each of us to hear John’s call and find some wild place where we can encounter the fullness of God. 

Offered by David Anderson, in whom God delights.

Daily Readings: Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19; Isaiah 30:19-26; Acts 13:16-25

Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, who alone does wondrous things. Blessed be his glorious name forever; may his glory fill the whole earth, Amen and Amen. Psalm 72:18-19, NRSV

Blessed God, Israel’s God, the one and only wonder-working God! Blessed always his blazing glory! All earth brims with his glory. Yes and Yes and Yes. Psalm 72:18-19, The Message

The three most difficult things to say are:

1)I was wrong

2)I need help

3)—wait—wait—Worcestershire sauce

The I need help one is for real for me. I was brought up with a strict Protestant ethic where asking for help was a sign of weakness – who hasn’t been told If you want a job done right, do it yourself? Some of this, I think, is also a male thing. I’m supposed to have the answers not the questions. I’m supposed to know what to do and how to do it (though in all fairness, I  know women who are better at this than I am). Sometimes I just need to get out of the way, kneel down and bless God, the Do-er of wondrous things.

It’s amazing what can happen when we give up being Captain of the World. Turning to God to bless God shifts my focus from all I have got to do during this season to what I get to do with God’s help—what a difference. Praying for the whole earth to be filled with God’s glory sets me in a direction that helps that happen. After all, God only does wondrous things.

Offered by Bill Albritton, in whom God delights.