“Listening to Jesus entails complete attention, full commitment, and steadfast devotion. We have to go to the fringe places, to the beat-up people, to the edge of the culture and the world. . . . We can hear Jesus: in all those who differ from us; in human variety with no regard for race, creed, nationality, gender, class, orientation, ability, or age; in the stranger at your door, in the vision of a forgiven, reconciled humanity.”—John Dear, Transfiguration
In true solitude there is an unlimited space for others because we are empty. In this poverty nobody stands over and against us, because our enemy is only our enemy as long as we have something to defend. But when we have nothing to hold on to or protect, when we have nothing we consider exclusively ours, then nobody will threaten us. Rather, in the center of our solitude we meet all men and women as brothers and sisters. In true solitude, we stand so naked and so vulnerable before God, and we become so deeply aware of our total dependency on God’s love, that not only our friends but also those who kill, lie, torture, rape, and wage wars become part of our flesh and blood. Yes, in true solitude we are so totally empty and poor that we find our solidarity with brothers and sisters everywhere. Our hearts, full of God and empty of fear and anger, become a welcoming home for God and for our whole human family on earth.
Verse of the day
Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.
– 1 John 3:18
Voice of the day
Is this how it’s always been? / To exist in the face of suffering and death / And somehow still keep singing
– Florence + the Machine, “Free”
Prayer of the day
May we never grow weary of reaching out to one other.
Verse of the day
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it.
– John 1:5
Voice of the day
But where there’s hope, there’s life. It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again.
– Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl(1947)
Prayer of the day
Fill us with hope, Lord. Let us be the light that shines through the night.
“The nonviolent person does not seek an impossible compromise with the times, nor a prior, intemperate synthesis for the times. The nonviolent person sees life in terms of a choice toward change, involving a re-ordering of life.”—Daniel Berrigan
Verse of the day
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?
– Psalm 8:3-4
Voice of the day
Some people say they feel very small when they think about space. I felt more expansive, very connected to the universe.
– Mae Carol Jemison
Prayer of the day
Thank you, Creator, for your handiwork — for making me as expansive as the universe.
“Nonviolence alone is the true religion for all times. Nonviolence is the dharma of awakening. Its votary has to make conscious use of it at every moment as we are surrounded by violence on all sides. Every one of us has according to our capacity to make our own way out of this dangerous predicament.”—Mohandas K. Gandhi
Verse of the day
When they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God with boldness.
– Acts 4:31
Voice of the day
We need to find a new language that cannot be as easily co-opted by the systems of domination.
– Rosemary Radford Ruether, “Sexism and God-Talk”
Prayer of the day
Holy Spirit, fill us with creativity and connectivity amid the chaos.
Verse of the day
Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”
– John 4:13-14
Voice of the day
Do you think the water will forget what we have done, what we continue to do?
– Natalie Diaz, “The First Water Is the Body”
Prayer of the day
Pour out your Spirit upon us so our lives might overflow with your love.
It’s Pentecost Sunday once again. We will wear red and talk about tongues of fire and the fact that Peter and the others weren’t drunk on new wine at 9 am like some in the crowd suspected! It is a holy day like so many other holy days such as Christmas, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter. The thing is, to discover the awe and wonder of these holy days and to specifically discover the awe and wonder of Pentecost we are invited to peel away the layers of history and imagine what it was like to be in with Peter and the others. We are also invited to imagine what it was like to be in the crowd on that day.
This Pentecost Sunday is also significant because it is the first Sunday that I will be preaching as the new interim minister at Swift Presbyterian Church in Foley, Alabama. Just as Peter and the other disciples were caught up in something new and amazing when the Holy Spirit came to visit, I believe that the church and I are also being invited to experience what the Holy Spirit has in mind for us.
This year the lectionary pairs the Acts reading with a deep conversation between Jesus and Phillip (and the other disciples) as recorded in the Gospel of John (chapter 14:8-17, 25-27). As I began studying and reflecting on both readings from Scripture in light of the festival of Pentecost and beginning this journey with the good people of Swift Presbyterian some themes began to emerge. The message of the Acts story reveals to me an exciting, even though at times overwhelming, opportunity to bring the people of God, all of God’s children, together as one body that celebrates the beauty and diversity of God’s creation. What is the message of Pentecost? I believe it is more than the prophecy of Joel with blood, fire, smokey mists and the moon turning to blood. Isn’t the message of Pentecost calling us to love and serve the Lord here in Foley, South Alabama, and beyond?
To love God, all neighbors, and ourselves was Jesus’ summation of the law and the prophets. As Peter and the apostles began their journey, their call was to share that message with the known world. When Jesus told Phillip that to love him was to obey his commandments, Jesus was giving the disciples their marching orders. They were to love as Jesus taught them to love and they would do even greater things than Jesus as they followed the Spirit’s guidance in their ministry. If you love me, he said, if you love me.
Dear reader we are each called to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength. We are also called to love our neighbors, every neighbor, as ourselves. Thomas Merton had an epiphany on the corner of Fourth and Walnut in downtown Louisville, Kentucky on March 18th, 1958. This revelation opened his cloistered world in a new and amazing way. It was also part of his transformation from being apart from the world, to becoming a significant part of the world from the monastery. He wrote the following in his book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (pp 156-158) about this revelation.
In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers… It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes; yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. A member of the human race! To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake.
I have the immense joy of being a man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
I firmly believe that this is the invitation of Pentecost. To love all “those people and realize that we could not be alien to one another… and to see each other walking around shining like the sun.” In that sense, we become one in the Spirit and one in the Lord and seek to be recognized as Christ-followers by our love.
Pastor Michael Moore's Blog 