Letting the Easter Light In

 

Holy One, here we are wrapping up another week and winding down another month.

How can it almost be May?  Time sometimes flows like a class-five-rapids through our lives.  We can feel like we are trying to keep our oar in water as we get drenched and doused with another wave in the raft of life. 

It is hard to enjoy the ride when we wonder if we are about to slip off the side and slide into the water.  It is hard to sense Your holiness when we are using all our strength to stay upright.

While the dangers are real in the world, and the news tells us as much each night, so is Your grace.  While the are reasons to fear, there is also faith that gives us the strength.

Meet each of us, O God, in the waters of life.  Awaken within each of us a holy moment of laughter.  Stir within us an experience that causes us to ponder our expectations.  Continue to be with us as we turn the calendar to a new month.  We pray You will continually invite us to name the gratitudes and do the holy work of forming a habit of letting Your Easter light into our lives.

May God’s love and presence be with each of you now more than ever.  Amen.

Letting the Easter Light In

 

A prayer from Pastor Ted Loder ~ I invite you to read slowly, savoring every word. Or even go outside to read each sentence aloud to creation, pausing at each period to let God's first testament of trees/grass/plants/ants respond to you.

I Tremble on the Edge of a Maybe

O God of beginnings, as your Spirit moved over the face of the deep on the first day of creation, move with me now in my time of beginnings,

when the air is rain-washed, the bloom is on the bush, and the worlds seems fresh and full of possibilities, and I feel ready and full.

I tremble on the edge of a maybe, a first time, a new thing, a tentative start, and the wonder of it lays its finger on my lips.

In silence, Lord, I share now my eagerness and my uneasiness about this something different I would be or do;

and I listen for your leading to help me separate the light from the darkness in the change I seek to shape and which is shaping me.

May the shaping and swirling God surround you today filling you with grace, gratitude, generative love for the sake of the world. Amen.

Letting the Easter Light In

 

What is stirring and swirling within you this morning as you wake up?  How did naming and claiming gratitude as you laid your head down last night cause something to shift?  Or maybe you did not notice a difference.  This is not a magic trick that instantly or immediately makes everything better.  One night of naming a gratitude doesn’t mean you will wake up happiest person every for the rest of your life. 

Gratitude is a muscle.  Yet, not much in our world today encourages you to practice gratitude. 

There are too many voices clamoring and claiming that you are being Pollyanna or neglecting the suffering of the world.  Or there is that part of us that feels guilty ask, “How can I be happen when this person over here is hurting?”  We tend to think that our hearts can only hold one emotion, but part of letting the Easter light in is the complexity of life that is embraced. 

Remember last week, Christ still bore the wounds of Good Friday, even as he ate the leftover fish of the disciples.  Remember ambiguity and astonishment can both sing to your heart – hopefully in harmony.

When we give voice to all that is stirring within us, we start to explore and experience God’s presence in deeper ways.  When we let both frustration, fear, and faith sit at the same table and be in conversation, it changes the ways we live as well as the ways our minds are wired.

Sometimes our emotions are stuck back in Middle School, where perhaps someone told you, you could only have one best friend, or you were forced to choose who you like best.  We do this all the time with our emotions and expectations and encounters.  It is perfectly holy and sacred to both laugh and cry at the same time.  It is perfectly grace-filled to both name our pain and celebrate ways we feel alive.

I encourage you again, tonight, to name the gratitude of this day that is unfolding around you.  Not because these are somehow truer than the difficulties we all face, but because if we can find ways to see God’s grace at work in our lives such a perspective can expand and embrace more and more.  To continue to practice showing up and opening up to God who is already at work.  We can commit to working on this together this week.

Prayer: God continue to guide, for You are at my side, and even when I snide, help me find a way to open wide.  Amen.

Letting the Easter Light In

 

How did paying attention to the art project called, “Your life” yesterday go?  Did you have a few moments where you were able to change your expectations in ways that sacredly shifted your experience?

How did acknowledging your expectations before you entered the experience make a difference?

Or maybe, it did not.

What we are dealing with here is that your brain is hardwired a certain way.  We have been conditioned by our families, friends, culture, church, and your life up to now.  And maybe you just think, “That’s the way it is.  Nothing I can do about it.”

But actually, your brain is constantly being rewired, especially when we sleep.  Recent research suggests that up to a trillion nerve cells are at work reforming and refashioning every night as you snooze.  “Oh, that is why I wake up so tired,” you are thinking.  The researchers say, that while you are in dreamland your brain is making a map of information - making new connections and breaking apart other ones.  While we are not conscious of this, what we can be aware and awake to is what sorts of information we are taking into our minds while our eyes are open. 

One simple practice is when you go to sleep, offer gratitude for at least one experience and one person that day.  You can level up this practice by not repeating the person or moment you are giving thanks for over a period of time.  So, I can give thanks tonight that people actually read these morning meditations.  I mean with all the YouTube cat videos, you have lots of options out there to start your day.  I can give thanks for the person whose love makes a difference.  I can give thanks for the person whose challenging comment was said with compassion and care.  Try this out tonight and I will see you in the morning!

Prayer: God, now I lay me down to sleep.  I pray my mind and heart to meet.  Help me name the places of grace, open me know You are in this place.  Amen. 

Letting the Easter Light In

 

Within each one of us we hold a space between our expectations and the experiences of our daily life.  Sometimes there is no space between these two realities, they overlap and intertwine in harmony. For example, I expect ice cream to be delicious and am rarely disappointed.  Then, there are moments when there is a Grand-Canyon-like-gulf between what we want to have happen and what actually happens.  Often the dissonance and disconnect decides to live in our jaws and shoulders is because our hopes are unrealized, unfulfilled.  The tension sits restless in our souls and we can pass along our pain to others.

Pause with me.  Where did your life just whisper, “Amen”?  Where do you sense this to be true?

Let’s dive deeper, because even when our expectations and experiences are aligning, doesn’t mean everything is coming up roses.

For example, when you go to the grocery store just to pick up bread and milk, do you expect that the express lane will live up to its name?  Or has experience taught you that of course the person in front of you will have fifty containers of yogurt he is counting as one item, his milk container will start to leak, and his credit card won’t process.  And you think, “This always happens to me!”

Or when something good happens, do you immediate start to look for something bad to occur because that seems like the way life goes?

We carry around with us expectations about doctor’s visits, traffic, relationships, ourselves, and our faith.  Which brings me to the Easter question: do we expect Jesus show up in our lives?  Do you expect to encounter and be embraced by Christ as your companion today?  In story after story in the Gospels Jesus appears after Easter: to Cleopas and his companion on the road; to the disciples in a locked room and out on the beach; and on a hillside before ascension. 

Maybe you are saying. “Well that was nice back then…but doesn’t feel like that happens much for me today.”  What if, our expectations end up causing us to miss the traces of grace?

Here is the experiment for the art project called, “Your Life” today.  Think about your expectations for the events on your calendar.  Do you expect this to be a good day or a bad day or a meh day? 

If you are venturing out to bravely interact with other humans, what sorts of anticipations are there before you even enter the room? 

Could you change one of those anticipations into the hope that Christ is already at work before you even leave the house to go to that meeting?  Or sign on to your computer for that Zoom gathering?

This week, I want us to play with our expectations and experiences as a way to let the Easter light in.  The disciples did not expect to encounter the risen Christ, which is why I think Cleopas missed that it was Christ on the road…which is why I think the disciples had joy in their disbelieving. 

How might you expect God to show up in beautiful ways that surprise you today?

Prayer: God interrupt and enter into the places and spaces of my day, reordering my expectations with Your grace.  Amen.  

Letting the Easter Light In

 

The final phrase of the passage we have been living with this week proclaims, preaches “You are witnesses of these things.”

Pause with me, what is your life witnessing to right now?

How have your words shared God’s Easter light of love this week?

Where has the shadow side sometimes insisted that it’s interpretation is the right one, the only one?

Where were you gracious and with whom did you hold back?

To witness to others isn’t just about testifying to Jesus or sharing your faith.  You witness in your conversations with others.  You witness in your social media posts.  You witness with your calendar (see the post from yesterday).  You witness with your checkbook and credit card.  You witness with showing up in prayerful ways to God.  You witness in sitting silently with a friend who is suffering, struggling, and searching.  You witness physically, emotionally, spiritually all the time.  You witness in being honest about doubts and disbelieving.  You witness in moments of sharing joy.  You witness in bringing a Tupperware casserole to someone.  You witness when you receive someone else’s love in the form of a casserole left on your doorstep.

You are witnessing right now.  Rewind and review your week.  Not with guilt or looking only for the boneheaded mistakes, but also the blessings – both are there from these past five days.

May the Easter light of God’s love enter in showing you, blessing you, opening you to witness incarnationally – in your life – in these days.  Amen.

Letting the Easter Light In

 Enjoy this video morning meditation today!!