Prayer for Our Feeble Attempts

 

God of affection and attention, who invites us to align our hearts, souls, minds, might, and whole lives to You.  We confess this isn’t easy, God.  Have You been online recently?  Have you witnessed our leaders berate and belittle each other, and blame one another?  Have You seen how people’s identity is fed by bank account balance and politics, and being seen as in control/in charge?  Of course, You have God.  This teaching on love feels both difficult and demanding, yet also like the balm our souls need.  How can this be?  We don’t comprehend, but are compelled by the promise and possibility.  We trust, O God, You are not asking us to be perfect or get straight A’s every day at sharing love.  You ask us to try, and in our trying, You collaborate and conspire with us.  So God, take my life and let it be wrapped up in Your great mystery.  Take my efforts, faint and feeble, let me be part of working with You to let heaven loose here and now.  Take all I do and say and where I am, so that Your great love might expand and embrace more than I can imagine.  Take this day, and fuel my light to shine.  With God’s love to each and every one of you.  Amen. 

Concoction of Complexity

 

o, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.

 

Paul is seeking to help us realize and recognize that God’s love fuels and feeds our lives.  Part of Paul’s point is that human beings, left to our own scheming and dreaming, will fail to enact and embody God’s love ethic alone.  This isn’t just a lack of knowledge, as Paul says.  It isn’t about increasing our faith like some commodities we control.  Paul is encouraging us to trust that God’s love has us, always.  Right now and every day this year.  Not that we won’t still be in the wilderness and wildness of life.  Not that we won’t be lured by other idols rather than the unconditional love of God. The passage this week asks us to reflect on life, what is beneath, why we do what we do.  The truth is, our brains are adept and agile enough to convince us we have altruistic motivation when we are just trying to earn the affection or attention of another.  To be sure, we are all a complex, complicated, contradictory, messy mixture.  We are all the baking soda and vinegar of the elementary science fair volcano, or a shaken soda bottle that could explode at any second now.  Did you catch what Paul says?   It doesn’t matter what you believe or do…that isn’t the point of faith, religion, or meaning in life.  Wait, what??  That statement can shake the foundations of much of what is found on churches' websites and preaching.  What does Paul mean, it doesn’t matter what I say/believe/do?  Paul is challenging our notion of what the means and ends of our life are.  Paul is challenging the direction and destination we are traveling.  If our means is to prove and earn God’s unconditional love and grace, we are still missing the point.  But if we let God’s unconditional and unceasing love be the jet fuel that propels our souls, we begin the wayless way of faith.  I invite you to sit with how counter-cultural this is.  I know for me, when I go chasing after what the world markets as a “good life”, I am often left empty or bankrupt.  When I strive for my own success rather than for the goodness and God-ness in life, my soul feels like it has a bad case of indigestion.  When I create litmus tests that another person must pass to be acceptable and earn my affection, the world shutters, and God sighs.  Hold this hard, holy truth as a light for your life and my life, and our life together in the world right now.  Amen.

Why Am I Doing that?!?

 

If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere.

 

Paul continues with the extreme examples of what our ego demands and decrees we do to be seen as amazing.  Yesterday, he said you could make a mountain jump, but without love, the action is empty.  You could walk on water, but if that is led/fed/fueled by a desire to be famous, then it is your ego that grows, not our capacity to love.  Today, he says, even if you give all your money away to the poor ~ which means you would be poor.  Even if you die, gulp ~ that got dark real quick ~, but if this is done for you to be revered, then we are stuck and stymied in the human realm.  We see all around us examples of Paul’s words.  We see billionaires wanting more money and giving away very little.  We see people hurting and harming others just for the sake of having the most clicks on social media, and our society is regressing.  We see a world where love can be curated with an AI-generated bot online, because human love is messy and hurtful and will ask our whole lives.  Today, where do you see human beings trying to feed their egos and not the common good?  Love is not sentimental or soft; love is more powerful than fame, fortune, and followers, but the gospel according to the World doesn’t preach that truth. 

 

Rewind and reflect on your past year. When did you do something out of love for another?  Maybe anonymously?   Maybe you opened your heart as wide as you could, prayed that would be enough, and by the grace of God, it was.  Not by my will, not by my planning, not because I had a fantastic strategic plan where my matrix was established and I hustled to get ahead.  In times of conflict, Paul is inviting us to be awake and aware of God’s movement in our lives.  We are invited to ask the hard and holy question: why am I doing what I am doing?  I pray that question stirs and swirls in your soul.  I pray you take that question with you today, let it interrupt you inconveniently, especially at a meeting or when responding to someone who pushes your buttons.  Let the question, why am I doing what I am doing, let that question interrupt you the way the Wise One’s question disrupted people thousands of years ago.   And may that question clear out the chaos and clutter of life for God to enter into that manger-shaped place you prepared and rediscovered at Christmas just a few weeks ago. Amen.  

Let Love Shift Your Soul

 

If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing.

 

Paul is using exaggeration or extreme hyperbole, just like last week when we commented that we could understand “all mysteries”.  He is saying, even if you wear a Super Spiritual Superhero and Super-shero cape (which I wonder what color that cape would be?  Maybe chartreuse, just because that is fun to say).  Even if you could perform miracles that mystify the minds of people, even if you could cause world peace to happen in the blink of an eye as everyone joined hands to sing "Kumbaya," even if everyone thought you walked on water.  Paul proclaims you’ve missed the point.  You are not here for fame and fortune and followers on social.  If what I do/say/and how I show up is not fueled by love, then my efforts may fall short of releasing heaven from my soul.  Please note that the love Paul is describing here flows not from humans but flows first from God.  The love we need to feed and fuel our whole lives is a pure gift (unearned and undeserved) from God.  Paul is inviting people who are at each other’s throats to think about what is motivating and moving within them and between them.  Which is a good question for us: what is motivating you today?  Is it a divine love that needs to be let loose in the world?  Or is it the desire for respect and to be revered?  Is it to score points on an imaginary scoreboard of life?  What motivates us is complicated and contradictory, because we can say and even believe that we are moved by love, but really our ego is wearing a mask that wants our friends to admire and for us to feel like we achieved something. 

 

Paul is also being sarcastic here…because you and I know that we can’t know ALL mystery and make EVERYONE comprehend our point of view.  I have never moved a mountain or a rock or a pebble or a speck of dust.  I have never changed another with a sermon.  But I do believe, like a river slowly shaping a stone with its slow flow, love does change us.  I have been married to my best friend for 25 years now; her love has changed me.  I have served our church for 11 years, your love has changed me.  I have friends whose words spoken in love cause my shy soul to shift, not in spectacular or splashy ways, but slowly.  This is what Paul is saying.  You can aspire for great things and step on people to get to the top, or you can let great love (God’s love) guide you and ground you every day.  That is the invitation that challenges and changes us when we let it.  I pray today you fold up the chartreuse cape and be who God creates you to be ~ ordinary, beautiful, and especially loved.  Amen.  

Getting Heaven out of Your Soul

 

We continue to dwell on the words Paul wrote to Corinth, a church that was in the middle of a conflict.   It was a fierce and ferocious family fight.  Imagine a moment where people were bickering, belittling, boasting, and blaming.  Imagine people who wanted to rate and rank everything and everyone.  Imagine people who made The Real Housewives arguments look tame and lame in comparison.  Imagine the moments in your family when someone said something that hurt and harmed you.  Imagine the moments with friends when you could hear the sound of a rip and rupture as the friendship ended.  That is what and who Paul wrote to (not a wedding couple).  Paul still writes to ~ you and me and we today who still resemble this fight, flight, freeze, fawn, flock overload of our brains in response to the world today.  As we explored in the wilderness with Jesus yesterday, we are having a devil of a time.  So breathe and be.  Breathe and remember that humans have both the capacity to care and conflict.  Breathe and know that something in our mental hardwiring can have a short that sets ablaze all the normalcy we thought was stable and now feels like sinking sand.  Hold the headlines in your heartline and read these words from 1 Corinthians 13:

 

 If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate.  If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing.  If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.

Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.
Love doesn’t strut,
Doesn’t have a swelled head,
Doesn’t force itself on others,
Isn’t always “me first,”
Doesn’t fly off the handle,
Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn’t revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.

Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.

When I was an infant at my mother’s breast, I gurgled and cooed like any infant. When I grew up, I left those infant ways for good.  We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us! But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.

 

Was there a word that leaped from the page/screen into your soul today?  Was there a sentence that your shy soul exclaimed, “Tell me more”.  Meditate, ruminate, and dance with these words, letting them weave their wisdom in living God’s realm today.  Into the invitation of faith to not just get our souls into heaven, but get heaven out of our souls into the world.  So let the love of God feed and fuel your life this new year, this first month of 2026, and especially this day.  Amen.

The Wayless Way of Love

 

Please pray with me these profound and powerful words of Thomas Merton:

My Lord God,

I have no idea where I am going.

I do not see the road ahead of me.

I cannot know for certain where it will end.

Nor do I really know myself,

and the fact that I think I am following your will

does not mean that I am actually doing so.

But I believe that the desire to please you

does in fact please you.

And I hope that I have that desire in all that I am doing.

I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.

And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road,

though I may know nothing about it.

Therefore will I trust you always though

I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. 

I will not fear, for you are ever with me,

and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Amen.

The Mystery of the Love Ethic

 

What if I have the gift of prophecy, am blessed with knowledge and insight to all the mysteries. 1 Corinthians 13:2

 

When we race and run through reading Scripture, we sometimes miss the subtle and subversive.  Take the sentence above.  There is one word that sticks out like a sore thumb ~ all.  I remember growing up, my grandmother cautioned me not to be a “Know-it-all”.  Don’t miss Paul’s jab here at thinking we can have “insight to all mysteries”.  We don’t know it all.  In fact, many people have said, “It seems the older I get, the less I know.”  Or with every birthday candle on my cake, the I realize there is more mystery to life than I will ever explore, experience, or exhaust.  This doesn’t mean I know nothing, but it does mean I continually question what I know, how I know it, and what bias might be dripping from my conclusions.  Brian McLaren points out a few ways we can be tripped up by and trapped by our own thinking:

Confirmation Bias: We judge new ideas based on the ease with which they fit in with and confirm the only standard we have: old ideas, old information, and trusted authorities. As a result, our framing story, belief system, or paradigm excludes whatever doesn’t fit. 

Complexity Bias: Our brains prefer a simple falsehood to a complex truth. 

Comfort or Complacency Bias: I prefer not to have my comfort disturbed. 

Confidence Bias: I am attracted to confidence, even if it is false. I often prefer the bold lie to the hesitant truth. 

Where do you and I find ourselves falling into one of these biases?  Is there a time we think we understand everything exactly as it is?  Or do we see how we want things to be?  I pray today you would notice where you are convinced, confident, comfortable, and shying away from the beautiful complexity and contradictions of God born in a barn.  May you and I learn to be open to the mystery of the Holy that moves and creates in ways we may never fully understand.  Amen.