Day 39 – Trust

Sprout (TK)

How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? 

 How long will you hide your face from me? 

 How long must I bear pain in my soul, 

 and have sorrow in my heart all day long?... 

Consider and answer me, O LORD my God! 

 Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death… 

But I trusted in your steadfast love; 

 my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. 

 I will sing to the LORD, 

 because he has dealt bountifully with me. 

(Psalm 13: 1-3, 5-6)

 Today is Saturday. There is another Saturday – the one between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, between the cross and resurrection. It symbolises all the waiting spaces where we find ourselves living between promise and fulfilment, losing and finding, death and life. The community of Saturday people is very varied. It includes, eg those living with serious illness or life-restricting disabilities, and those who accompany them. Victims of social exclusion, prejudice and deprivation are also found here. Saturday people may be those living through unsettling changes in their lives where outcomes are uncertain. This is a community of all faiths and none, with no quick solutions on offer. There are no maps at hand for Saturday people. We usually have a clear idea of what we are waiting for but for Saturday people, the waiting must be open-ended. And open-ended living requires a surrender, an act of trust. We don’t come to it easily. Jesus is found among the Saturday people. We meet him here, with all who wait.

(Extract from Dust & Glory by David Runcorn)

For Reflection

Whose company are you sharing this Saturday? What might you be waiting for?

Prayer

Lord, help me to stop trying to be in control and, instead, to wait in openness and trust for the future you bring. 

Sky Swing (TK) - R&S Church gates - Swiss Alps (AMN)

Day 38 – Belonging

 Ruth clung to her… (and) said,

“Do not press me to leave you
    or to turn back from following you!
Where you go, I will go;
    where you lodge, I will lodge;
your people shall be my people,
    and your God my God.
Where you die, I will die—
    there will I be buried.
May the Lord do thus and so to me,
    and more as well,
if even death parts me from you!”
When Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more to her. 

(Ruth 1: 14, 16-18)
 

Ruth is a person who, beyond all prevailing wisdom or common sense, refuses to accept divisions, so her story is a challenging illustration of the cost and gift of ‘belonging’.  Her commitment breaches all boundaries of belonging.  By the end of her story Ruth, an outsider, is to be found at the heart of a community alive with new hope and has become the mother of a family line from which King David, and Jesus, will trace their descent. By her actions, Ruth challenges social, racial, ethnic and religious assumptions and divisions. We are called to be a community without boundaries. We are to be ‘bridge’ people and so become places of meeting, relating and healing. This requires a determined cleaving to each another, beyond our well-guarded frontiers of nationality, class, faith or friendship.
(Extract from Dust & Glory by David Runcorn)
 
For Reflection
What might such a commitment ask of me beyond my own community and networks?
 
Prayer
Lord, may I help others to know what it means to belong, and in doing so find my own place within your community of love.

Day 37 – Hallowing

 

Pray then in this way: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name’.

(Matthew 6: 9)

 In its deepest sense, to hallow is to honour and love another for their own sake. Hallowing is gratuitous – an honouring offered freely, without condition, charge, measure or any thought of self-interest or personal gain. The 12^th century saint, Bernard of Clairvaux, taught that there are four movements in the life of faith. We begin by loving ourselves for our own sake. Then, when faith awakens, we love God but still for our own sake, as one who blesses and meets our needs. Thirdly, we must come to the love of God for God’s own sake – as a gift, for nothing, for the hallowing of the divine name alone. Finally, in the loving of God for God’s own sake, we come to love ourselves truly for God’s sake. There is no contradiction here. God is the life of heaven and earth: it is all sustained in the love that is God’s own being. When his name is truly hallowed, all things find their true place, hallowed in their name and calling.

(Extract from Dust & Glory by David Runcorn)

 For Reflection

Do I love for nothing?

 Remember in Prayer

Those who struggle to love themselves.

Day 36 – Confessing

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 sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (1John 1: 8-9)

The Bible uses a variety of ways to speak to God, humanity and sin. Today’s passage speaks of ‘cleansing’. The word recalls the ritual purity required in temple worship, but it might also remind us of the compassion with which Jesus drew near to the marginalised, excluded and broken people whom the world of his day called ‘sinners’. He welcomed and embraced them with such love and touched them so tenderly. The work of cleansing, disinfecting, binding and restoring to health is one of gentleness and understanding. God’s greatest revelation of himself is in the place of our sin, so if we say we have no sin, we miss it all. He meets us here with love that is truthful, that does not deceive us, that forgives and cleanses us.

(Extract from Dust & Glory by David Runcorn) 

Prayer

Lord, help me to come to true repentance.

Day 35 – Rejoicing

Come and Sing at HPC

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4: 4-7)

 Christian joy is not a feeling that comes when life is going right (although we are grateful when it does). It is not based on material circumstances – quite the opposite. The striking thing is how often it is found among those for whom life is far from kind or good. Christian joy has a way of surfacing in the most unlikely circumstances, so it is present as a sign of contradiction. It is, first of all, an encounter with Jesus and his love. It is not, as it might seem, an attempt to spiritualise or ignore the reality of suffering and injustice. Quite the reverse: it is a work of resistance. Joy subverts the temporal realities and mock their claims. It insists, despite all the evidence, on the celebration of a different story. Joy is a work of faithful defiance.

(Extract from Dust & Glory by David Runcorn)

 

Rejoicing (DS)

For Reflection

Rejoice and leap for joy – and if this is too difficult, why not just practice for when you can?

Lockdown Birthday - March 2021 (DM)

Remember in Prayer

Those who have reason to be joyful and those who don’t. Give thanks for the joyful times in your own life.

Day 34 - Hate

Large crowds were traveling with him; and he turned and said to them, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14: 25-26)

 Jesus often taught in a style, popular in his day, that used extreme statements or cartoon-like opposites to emphasis a point. The effect was often funny and not to be taken literally. The society of his day was organised around closed structures of belonging, where loyalty was shown first to family and friends. He hated that these closed family-based worlds of self-interest destroyed the possibility of a society based on justice, equality, inclusion, generosity and compassion. The hatred to Jesus calls us is not the opposite of love. It is love rightly directed, passionately opposed to all that destroys, obstructs or undermines his radical community of welcome and justice. It is evil that we hate, not the people caught up in it. Poet William Blake called it ‘seeking the form of heaven with the energy of hell’.

(Extract from Dust & Glory by David Runcorn)

 For Reflection

We all throw the word ‘hate’ around now and again, in relation to many things from foodstuffs to songs. Do we really ‘hate’?

Prayer

Jesus, help me only to hate what you hate, out of the love with which you love.

Day 33 – Death

Rhu & Shandon Churchyard

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptised into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life… if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him… So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. (Romans 6: 3-4, 8, 11)

 There is no resurrection without dying. It is resurrection from the dead, not somehow bypassing death. We must die to ourselves, enter the waters and be buried with Christ. Some of us will remember a particular time and place where we did this, but for everyone it is a commitment that is revisited and renewed with every challenge that life brings. It may come as some relief, laying down the burden of the old, sterile ways of living that we could not change, but it may also involve struggles with old weaknesses or deep fears. We are the last people we should be trusting for our salvation. But our faith is in Christ and it is completely safe with him. We have been given another life, one that is truly our own.

(Extract from Dust & Glory by David Runcorn)

 Prayer

Lord, please lead me through death to life.