week of Dec. 27 devotional

Sunday-Ps.148 is part of the closing collection of praise. This one sounds like Hark the herald Angels sing in its evocation of all creatures great and small,all elements of creation joining in voice, wordless and noisy, to praise God.What christmas decorations help you to praise god?

Monday-All of life is gift, and our most fitting response to this is gratitude for what Romano Guardini calls "all the hidden and holy bonds between the Creator and ourselves."'

Tuesday-We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It's easy to say, "It's not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem." Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes.- Fred Rogers

Wednesday-"When we begin to think 'I know how this will be,' or 'I’ve done this before with always the same results' we are not open to the process. Our expectations have shortchanged the journey before we even began. In the process we must rest with our discomfort."  Christine Valters Paintner,

New Year’s Eve-"Transformation is a slow journey, in fact, conversion teaches us that it is the journey of a lifetime. We are never “done.” We continue to unfold and grow and stretch and change."--- Christine Valters Paintner,

New Year’s Day we ask, even plead with God not to leave us alone, for when God leaves us to our own choices and turns us over to our own ways, we are certain to drift from him ... If we would break away from a spiritual life growing cold and a Christ who is becoming distant, we must be attentive to our spiritual discipline and long for God to break in on us with new life. When we do this, we experience the true meaning of...spirituality.- Robert E. Webber,

Saturday-"I don’t believe in a deus ex machina—a god who swoops out of nowhere to fix things. I do believe in a God who works in, with, and through us—through the labors of those who have learned to love peace as much as God does, who have chosen to eschew violence in their own lives, and who work in small and large ways to end violence in our world.", Rev. Dr. L. Roger Owens.

Sermon Notes December 27 Col3, Lk. 2:22-

Dec. 27-Col. 3:12-17

“Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”-Mark Twain  “How did people get so unkind?” Stephen Stills-Human Highway Kind is related to kin or child- also sense of how we treat the native people, the people planted there in the natural order sense of how we treat flesh and blood See Gk and Heb for kindness chais chrestotes also  goodness useful kindness, fitting, serviceable--chesed (loving kindness)When I quit getting toys or games for Christmas, I started getting more clothes. I have always treasured this baptismal image of clothes in Colossians, For here clothes do make the person-I have long used the book of Common Worship's suggestion to use this passage as the charge to the married couple. Of course they fit everyday, single or married and are oriented to living together in community.  I wish to work a bit more with kindness-random acts of kindness v. random acts of violence-planned ones as well

At this time of year, we picture Father time as elderly, and the new year as an infant.I always picture both people who greet Jesus as old. Certainly Anna could be very old. i picture them as kindly,  the very embodiment of grandparental kindness. Still they lived in expectancy.Yes, a newness is entering a world. At the same time as Anna and Simeon go offstage, they  receive a dream come true. They leave the stage refreshed in the knowledge that an ancient promise has come true; they lived to see it.I always find it painful to see a great athlete hang on a bit too long.

Kenny Rogers sang you decorated my life. the virtues here are seen from the inside out.Living in a Christmas state of mind “And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus.” Yet the special celebrations of the Incarnation can support a mindset that continues all year. Because the Godhead put on flesh, his people can clothe themselves with his qualities and do so not just at Christmas. But how? How do you keep the spirit of Christmas alive all year? This passage provides two avenues.  That leads to the second avenue for “Christmas kind of living.” To celebrate the coming of God in one’s behavior all year long is a communal event. There are no singulars in this passage; everything is directed to the “y’all” of the congregation.  To carry the songs and hymns and odes of the season on into the bleakness of winter and then on into even the dog days of summer takes a critical mass, a body, brought together by the spirit from a variety of backgrounds that can teach and admonish one another to live giving thanks to God always.Amy L.B. Peeler | Every once in a while, you still see a bumper sticker asking us to practice random acts of kindness, instead of violence. Maybe we need a bit of a break from all of the requests. I have concern that we ask too much of people during the holiday  season. When it is hard to keep some of the requests straight, we are being overburdened. Yes, I realize that need does not take a holiday.A part of kindness consists in loving people more than they deserve.Joseph Joubert Maybe kind acts come with no strings attached? Maybe they should? when a reward for bad misbehavior? I always think of My Fair Lady where Eliza's father makes a plea for the needs of the undeserving poor. For all, deserving and undeserving, the christ child makes a dream reality.

Sermon Notes December 20

Dec. 20- Micah 5,Lk.1:39-5The industry rusts away. The mall contracts, even during the holidays. Older churches empty. ISIS emerges out of the disaster of invading Iraq and expecting flowers to be tossed and to bloom in the carnage. Brussels, the site of the world court has been in a lockdown of Advent waiting for a terrorist assault.The bible set Eden in a mythic past, but the present is usually full of trouble.     We hear the words of Micah with fresh ears. Micah speaks of peace-Micah is angry with everyone for the way things are and should not be.The gospels trace Jesus back to David a thousand years before  him. Even for Micah David is in the past, as if we would reach back from before the Declaration of Independence.His hope is clear and we have one of the first hope for a Messiah here. Christians assert the Messiah for over 200- years and troubles continue to dog us. So Advent waiting is as real and frustrating to us as it was for those      who read Micah all those years ago.

For Bethlehem and those who come from her, the old biblical pattern holds true: the insignificant are exalted.God loves and works through the small as well as the large action.  The tables are turned, and the most unlikely of people are instruments of God's salvation. From this insignificant little village, a young shepherd boy grows up to become the most beloved king in Israel's history. And a descendant of that king fulfills God's long-awaited promises of deliverance, not just for Israel, but for the whole world. But it is the way God works,yet again.... A child born to a young unmarried girl, and that girl's song, heard today: "He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly" (Luke 1:52). And the one who comes from that little village and that young girl becomes the one Micah proclaims as "the one of peace" (5:5). It is a proclamation we will soon hear echoed from the pastures surrounding Bethlehem.(Schifferdecker) That is part of the reason people like A Christmas Carol and Tiny Tim, and The Little Drummer Boy.

This is a difficult season for church music. We want to follow the flow of the church year, but few wish to sing 4 weeks of Advent hymns, and the culture has been playing Christmas music in stores and on the radio for quite a while. We play it down the middle in a compromise and have a cavalcade of music for Christmas Eve. Know that when we gather together and sing to God, we, like Mary, are swept into God's divine activity to save and redeem. A few voices drawn together in song in late December may seem a small thing in the face of the wars and worries of the age, but surely no smaller than those voices joined in Leipzig and the fall of the GDR or those two voices joined in the Judean hill country twenty centuries ago. Mary's God, we should remember, delights in taking what is small and insignificant in the eyes of the world to do extraordinary and unexpected things.."David Lose

Both Hannah and Mary exclaim their joy ..take heart in the promise  that the Lord considers, cares for, and acts on behalf of the lowly -- despite what one might expect (and contrary to how we human beings behave ourselves)rather it is for all the rest that God does great things.Both Hannah and Mary identify what God is doing as being not just for them, but also through them for the whole people.(Jacobsen) Look around. God is at work in our midst,making Christmas live once more.

week of Dec. 20 Points to Consider

Sunday-Ps. 80 is one of our options for today.It is a plea for resotration. It has command of imagery, especially the “bread of tears.” Where do you most nee dresotration persoanlly? where does our country most need restoration.

Monday-The earth and the nations are already in distress and have been for millennia; this is not new. But what will be new is God reorienting all of creation back to what God intended: wholeness, freedom, and justice. Look expectantly this Advent season, Jesus says, for signs of what God is already doing in our midst.

Tuesday-“We who say we love God: why are we not as anxious to be perfect in our art as we pretend we want to be in our service of God? If we do not try to be perfect in what we write, perhaps it is because we are not writing for God after all. In any case it is depressing that those who serve God and love Him sometimes write so badly, when those who do not believe in Him take pains to write so well.”Thomas Merton

Wednesday-A line from the band, Third Eye Blind's song "Closing Time" is "every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end." As human beings, we dread, perhaps even fear endings. - we don't know what will happen next and that fills us with anxiety or fear. But God promises that our endings can also become beginnings better than we can ever imagine. This world that we know today might end, it could all go away tomorrow, but God will create a new beginning. Jesus tells us that when everything goes away and changes, Jesus and his word endure forever.

Christmas Eve-The word merrythought has been around since the 16th century. It derives from the playful custom of two people pulling the bone apart to see who gets the longest, and therefore, luckiest part. The name refers to winner's happy anticipation of a wish soon to be fulfilled. (Way with Words)

Christmas-"The work of the universe unfolds gently, never rushed.  A baby takes nine months to form in the womb; imagine what kind of work and time the sacred art of living requires.”--- Christine Valters Paintner

Saturday-"O splendor of God's glory bright, from light eternal bringing light;O Light of Light, light's living spring, true Day, all days illumining." Ambrose of Milan,

Christmas Eve 2015 Sermon Notes

Christmas Eve  2015

Luke starts his little story  by placing it in the political world. With the long campaign season, we may have grown tired of Campaigning already. Luke is drawing an explicit contrast between empire and the birth of Bethlehem.It is the dawn of God’s political program,
God’s way,  in the shadow of empire, unseen unnoticed, except by shepherds and a choir of angels.We want Christmas to offer some peace from the noisy frantic world around us. I am so sick of the St  Louis news being driven by violent crime stories.We have gotten to the point when people complain that enough coverage is not being given the atrocities that touch us almost daily it seems. No amount of Christmas tinsel can divert our eyes enough.-Is. 59:8. With all of the Christmas carols, too many Christians have been raising public voices of aggression and revenge.

We need to hear the words of peace again. The Roman Empire was built by violence. Here God’s heavenly army has turned into a choir, singing of peace. I am sick of violence, or bloodshed, in the streets or across national borders. I hate the idea that the Oasis shelter is geared up for the holidays.Our girls were in the Indianapolis Children’s Choir, and their big Christmas program was called Angels sing. It is easy to fall into the innocent romance of children singing beautiful music, but the first christmas angel choir sang of peace. (silent Night)

Peace of new life, not the Pax Romana. It imagines that the meaning of the life of Jesus will run parallel to Roman power. The angels sing not as God's battle-tested heavenly host, but as a choir, as when the Air Force will bring a group of musicians to sing here this spring.

Maybe the great hymns sings of heavenly peace in sleep as it is seen and felt so rarely in our inner turmoil and our blood-soaked  world. The first Noel sins of peace on the earth-

the Lord’s Prayer on earth as it is in heaven  includes the divine desire for peace on earth good will among us, no? Luke places Jesus in a list of bloody rulers. A baby could be a threat to their method of violent domination in the world. When we excuse or defend violence we take the side of those listed in the beginning of this story not only as date markers but decided contrasts.Shepherd image was used for leaders in the ancient Near East. Abraham and David were shepherds. By this time they were at the bottom of the heap socially, but they hear the angelic choir and no one else.Pushed off to be with the animals to deliver a baby, Mary then gets a surprise visit from shepherds. Why do they angels sing to them and not in the manger? Luke tells us that she mulled this over, and I would bet for some time.It is possible that the stable was a marriage chamber built in housSupper was conducted.

In the end, the Incarnation, the birth of god’s own plan and logic as a human being engages those who carry the name Christian into the world fully.God has a baby born in desperate circumstance right in the middle of human life and situations.We carry the manger within and among us as we seek peace in this life.For about an hour, we will hear words of Scripture that march toward the story of Luke’s Bethlehem. May Christmas peace wash over you and give you a central point to guide the coming days.

Sermon Notes Dec. 13-Zeph. 3, Phil. 4, Is. 12

Advent 3 December 13 Zeph. 3:14-20, Is. 12, Phil. 4:4-7

I’ve done some work on the book of the 12, so I determined to use passages from it as they arise for us. Zephaniah starts with words of doom, but like most apocalyptic material, it does not end with doom but hope, especially in this  passage.  God hushes us like a parent hushing, quieting a squalling infant. I wonder  if it has the hint of frustration in it when you have a child with colic, or a child screaming for no apparent reason at 3AM.As we are in the heart of the cutlrual Christma sseason, but not by the church clock, think of Mary and Joseph hushing baby Jesus, in spite of Away in the Manger’s “no crying he makes”Indeed God bursts into song for us.Again, punishment does not get the last word.I wonder what Christmas is like in heaven

God will renew in love as well as exult. I  repeat that I rarely hold this image of God in my mind. It does not comport easily with the punishing God.

As we approach Christmas we think of the infant Jesus. One way to translate a verse is to be silent in love-as we say hush to a squirming infant. Don't let your hands grow weak and slack. don't give in to despair. A better day is coming.

Bette Midler sang God is watching us from a distance. Zephaniah answers, no god is near to us. The shortest sentence is the fourth: ("the Lord is near"). . Like its English counterpart, eggus can be understood spatially or temporally. Brown Work Pr.) the epistle gives us all sort of virtues for Advent and Christmas living. In the third short sentence, the term to epieikes (NRSV: "gentleness") . Its semantic range includes "what is fitting," "magnanimity," and "reasonableness, fairness."clemency   .  Thus, the gentleness he describes is the response of a person who has suffered injustice and disgrace... "not insisting on every right or letter of law or wisdom." Also, "yielding, gentle, kind, courteous, tolerant." How can we live out these traits? How can we be known for our gentleness this Advent?

- is intoned with this exhortation to gentleness. It reminds us that the church should not be too preoccupied with its own interests/citizenship.

.At the physical level, our oceans have much more acid in them, and water rights and use occupies a good deal of consideration in our Western states, and we are engaged in a major levee upgrade in our part of the country. Water makes sense as an element of salvation, as it saves the life of a thirsty traveller and provides the necessity for life in the desert. I act as if I am going on a desert trek in going to STL and grab a soda as if I could find no oasis in a trackless desert. Getting water from a well is daily grind for women in village societies.

The water of forgiveness, of liberation from all that holds us in captivity, of refreshment of souls that are parched for grace,:... The water of salvation that flows with the very presence of God is coming again to the world in endless supply for our deepest need.Webb Working Preacher)At the spiritual level, The wells of salvation, the water of God’s gracious presence, are bottomless, endless. These are the waters that give life, restoring vibrancy to a world that is dying of thirst, and seeking wholeness for those overwhelmed by the floods of destruction

Is. 12 has 2 songs. Favorite hymns? Favorite songs? Favorite piece of music? different Christmas hymns evoke or reflect different moods from the melancholy of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas to the sentimental pull of a poor child doing well in Little Drummer boy.

Column Notes on Advent 3

The traditional method of naming Advent candles would symbolize this Sunday’s candle for joy. The readings shift to anticipation of the birth of Jesus, and the response is joy. In Latin it was called Gaudete Sunday. It comes from Phil 4: rejoice in the Lord always.  The priest was permitted to lighten the mood with rose colored vestments, and a pink candle was selected for this day.

“I don’t think of all the misery, but of the beauty that still remains.”- Anne Frank

Not easy to be joyful. Joy is part of the fruit of the spirit (Gal5:22). I freely admit that joy is well-hidden in my spiritual and emotional life. I have little patience with those who make the aesthetic point that  joy is n known as the opposite of pain and suffering. I do grasp that some can experience joy in the midst of suffering, not as a point of comparison but holding conflicting emotions in inner tension. It is difficult to write a story purely attempting to describe a joyful countenance or situation.

At this time of year, I move into the “Christmas spirit” by listening to a variety of Christmas music. For our purposes classics such as Joy to the World or God Rest Ye, and newer works such as Mary Chapin Carpenter’s Come darkness, co me Light.. I find pleasure in  reading stories of Christmas, especially illustrated Christmas stories such as ”The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan “Toomey” or “An Orange For Frankie.” I don’t think that joy can be commanded or even manipulated. The church can provide space for joy, time for  joy. When one looks to that material, sadness and poverty reflect the troubles at the Nativity of Jesus. So, joy arrives in the finding of someone or something lost, of a memory recovered, of an act of kindness that shines new light on a difficult situation, as touching the spirit of Christmas.

For many people, this season feels as if it is mandatory to be cheery. Blue Christmas services are an attempt to note the season does not fit the reality of depression, grief, and loss of those who see the holiday season as one to be endured with Advent patience. I don’t think it intentional, but the blue Advent candles can easily capture this feeling quite well with the very color, blue. Some churches have a blue Christmas service for those who are struggling with the festivity all around them, often due to having suffered a significant personal loss during the year. It can be gift to be able to admit that one is not feeling joyful, feeling the “Christmas spirit.” (Just check with us at First Presbyterian, and we can schedule one again this month).

Joy has a sense of depth to its state of being. So much of what we do to prepare for Christmas seems to skate along the surface of life. In the midst of all of the harried parties, frenzied cooking, and pounding on computer keys, may we take a break during Advent. Joy needs room to take root, to be experienced. We speak so easily of seeing the Christ in one another, but we tend to neglect seeking the Christ image in ourselves, just as we often fail to note that Jesus told us to love one another as we love ourselves. In that sense, we all have a manger within. Instead, we act as if there is no room in our internal inn for the presence. I sometimes wonder if all of our rushing about pushes the joy of the season out. May we receive joy during this season, a fitting Christmas gift for anyone.

Points to cpnsider for Week of December 18

Sunday-Is. 12 replaces the psalm this week. It is a song for the season. What are your favorite songs, secular or religious. Favorite Advent song? What are your favorite Christmas songs?

Monday-"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kind­ness. .. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places - and there are so many - where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory." Howard Zinn

Tuesday-Psalms are a primary way we speak to God. We take all that we are, we fear and we rejoice in directly to God. We pray psalms that we might better know God and ourselves, and we take that knowing to God in prayer.Psalms are equally a primary way God speaks to us. Witness how they are most often quoted in the New Testament. Psalms provide a way for God to shape my religious life into something bigger than my own experience. Psalms bind me to the whole company of Saints, past and present. Which is to say, when we pray psalms we “catch” God speaking to us as we speak to God. If we attend well, we recognize truth that moves us beyond our own self-conscious concerns and transports us into the concerns of the ages. Diane Jacobsen

Wednesday-"Wisdom and love help us to discern between what is life-giving and what is destructive and call us to infuse our ethical and moral living with the vision of divine love and beauty, to know these actions in the world not as dry and rote ways of being good for the sake of avoiding punishment, but ways of cooperating with wisdom and love to bring life more fully to the earth and to our communities."--- Christine Valters Paintner

Thursday-Compassion is about the very innards of our being flowing with compassion. It is about being moved in our guts. This is how Jesus is described in the Gospel of St. Luke when he sees a mother who has lost her only son. She is a widow and is now following the body of her son for burial in the funeral procession. When Jesus sees her, he has "compassion for her" (Luke 7:13). The Greek verb used is splagchnizomai, the same word that is translated elsewhere as "bowels of compassion" (1 John 3:17, KJV).John Philip Newell

Friday-Chesterton points toward the consciousness within the church, historically at least, of a life that does not depend ultimately upon its skill, its wits and wiles, or even its wisdom (or, as some these days might put it, its executive competence, technical expertise, strategic planning and marketing ability). Neither does the church depend ultimately upon its own faithfulness, theological or moral. The church's life depends upon the power and faithfulness of God to raise the Body of Christ from every death. Our life as church is a continuing participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We have a God who knows the way out of the grave.Michael Jinkins

Saturday-What is it about waiting that we find so disagreeable? Is it that we are made to feel insignificant? Is it the slow tick of the clock, or all of the undone tasks? Advent is an unpopular part of the church year as it has waiting as its focus.What should we do with spiritual waiting?

Column Notes on Advent

Many Protestant churches adopted the basic church year calendar of the Catholic Church. It does not seem to mean that it has been a transition that has sunk its roots well. I like the idea that church does not even need to follow the secular calendar as it worship the God of all time. Taken as a whole, the church year is a narrative that follows the course of Jesus Christ and the church, from beginning to end, from expectation, to birth, to death, and the movement of the resurrected life. It cycles through year after year, an emblem of remembrance of milestone events for the church. If one attends to the readings daily, a three year set of readings allows the Old Testament to be heard in its entirety, and the New Testament to be read in its entirety every single year.

We start the church year with a season of dual focus: Advent. We await the advent, the second arrival of Jesus Christ as the sign that God’s plans will finally be fulfilled. At the same time, we honor the arrival of Jesus as a baby in Bethlehem. It is a complex religious theme: all ending signal new beginnings. So, the readings point to the dawn of the new age in Christ and its culmination one day in the future. Older churches hold to the tradition of the Bible, read fully, that has suffering and hope in a new future are two sides of the same coin. Apocalyptic readings in Scripture are usually poised within this tension and rarely end on a note of despair but hope. This marks a cleavage point in America where newer churches.  They tend to try to read end time material as a timetable started by John Nelson Darby in 1829. They tend to emphasize a sense that a perceived downhill slide in the world will push an end, and that God will choose to rescue a few people from cataclysm.

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One of our problems is a collision with the secular calendar. This year, I have heard Christmas music in stores since Halloween. In the church calendar, Christmas is a short season that starts at Christmas and extends in the 12 days of Christmas to Epiphany on January 6. Are we being grinches if we insist no Christmas music until Christmas? We split the difference at First Presbyterian and introduce some Christmas song as we near the date.

A liturgical tempest in a teacup is the color of Advent candles. The tradition is purple in the Catholic Church, but a number of Protestant churches have switched for blue. In part, I would guess that purple is a penitential color and 2 penitential seasons seems excessive to some. Variety may be at play. The fun comes in assigning symbolic value to the color. Some see blue as the color of creation itself, sea and sky, or the deep color of the sky before dawn, so it fits Advent expectancy and waiting. Some see blue as the color of hope and grace.

I appreciate that Advent becomes a home ritual. Advent calendars mark the days until Christmas. Advent wreaths appear in some homes as well as in churches. Some folks read special devotional material every day of Advent as part of their personal spiritual discipline. (Of course, one can buy a whiskey Advent calendar). My plea would be that we can use Advent time, corporately and privately, as a time of spiritual reflection and preparation. If that time of preparation helps us to consider the passage of time and the remarkable assertion Christians make about the Incarnation of God’s own 2,000 years ago in Bethlehem, then it is a season well-served.

Sermon Notes Dec. 6 Advent 2 Mal. 3, Lk. 68, Phil. 1

Dec. 6-Mal. 3, Lk. 1:68-78, Phil.1

Malachi talks of a deep cleansing. purification-cleansing-without harm to the fabric refining has a fearsome ring to it-what does it mean to have our impurities burned away-purgatory image it is bleaching a fabric as a fuller or burning away the impurities in refining a metal or refining oil for that matter.

Malachi mean angel or messenger.It fits our time in a couple of ways. first, it fits a time of smaller concerns, where the great figures seem to line the distant past. Second, it has a faint hope for divine intervention as hands are exhausted at living a good life.As we have experienced the first advent of Jesus Christ perhaps we can approach the season more kindly and gently.

It links worship and proper social behavior. Let’s be clear here. it does not invalidate worship.   Our section answers a question from the people in 2:17: how have we wearied god? (see Is. 43 on god being wearied )Where is the god of justice-why does God seem to see the vil as good?Answer appears to be eschatological, in an indefinite future. Maybe  a link to the angel of Ex. 23:20-elijah, malachi-John the Baptist or the baby Jesus in some reading alignments. That seems reasonable, but it does not limit other readings of the passage.

Phil 1 sounds like a parent wanting to see a child come home for Christmas-

Is god grateful for us-too often, the church asks for more,more ,more-It is good to hear a word of thanksgiving

peace that passes all understanding read at funerals, but it is a hope for our anxiety -ridden lives. (Notes on anxious communication) outrage culture know little of peace, and it has infected churches as well

Worship is us being grateful to God for this world, God’s hope in the midst of division, for christmas As phronesis practical wisdom-learning about gift giving and gratitude gifts with and without strings-learning gratitude by acting on it even when we don’t feel it

Zechariah talks, no we are told, sings,  of a God who is patiently faithful.It draws in other Scripture to blend into this poem.

No gospel speaks of peace as much as Luke. I just picture Zechariah as the very image of the guy we portray as representing the old year. Life has passed him by. People have murmured that he can’t be so good as he has not been blessed with a child. He has given up on waiting. He was struck mute when he dared to question the angel’s message of a new child. Now his tongue is loosened.Zechariah is old but God remembers even if he won’t. Like Hannah and Mary he takes the birth of a child as a sign that god has not forgotten his people but remembers them. Every new life is a sign that God’s commitment to life continues.

bob dylan-oh mercy-used to be a first name-tender mercies could be the heart the inward compassion/mercy/charity of God. Do we think of god as tender? The word could be inmost, form the gut and act of mercy/charity/kindness. god’s inner disposition is glimpsed in the birth of the child who will become the Baptist.Tender Mercies is still one of my favorite movies. when Mac, the down and out country songwriter and singer, is rebuffed in his attempt to get some new work published, his new wife tells him that when she prays, she widowed at 18 with a small child, tell hims that when she counts her blessings and god’s tender mercies toward her her husband and young son are at the top of the list. She is the embodiment of tender mercies.

Devotional Pts for Week of Dec. 6

Sunday-.Psalms are replaced by Luke for  December 6. It is the great song of Zechariah in Luke. Few words grab me in Scripture such as his evocation of tender mercies.The power of god gets expressed in a kind-hearted, accessible way, the birth of a child.Tender is quite mild, as it usually means from the gut, and mercy is a root for a word for charity. God’s inner being is demonstrated in the miracle of new life that will become  the Baptist.

Monday- Faith is a way of looking at what there is to be seen in the world and in ourselves, and hoping, trusting, believing against all evidence to the contrary that beneath the surface we see there is vastly more that we cannot see.-from Secrets in the Dark

Tuesday-“We should ask for the grace to weep for this world, which does not recognise the path to peace. To weep for those who live for war and have the cynicism to deny it,” the Argentine pontiff said, adding: “God weeps, Jesus weeps”.

Wednesday-Gratitude has a way of transforming our approach to life into one that is more open-hearted, generous, and joyful. Rather than moving through our day feeling cynical or burdened, we can consciously choose our thoughts. This doesn’t mean that we have to offer gratitude for injustices or abuse, we are always called to resist those. But it does mean we might be able to tap into greater joy to replenish us for those moments when we do need to fight for dignity and kindness. Gratitude overflows into joy and makes us feel connected to something bigger than ourselves.

Thursday-To the home of peace/to the field of love/to the land where forgiveness and right relationship meet we look, O God,/with longing for earth's children/with compassion for the creatures/ with hearts breaking for the nations and people we love./Open us to visions we have never known/strengthen us for self-givings we have never made/delight us with a oneness we could never have imagined/that we may truly be born of You/makers of peace.:John Philip Newell

Friday-Jer. 33:14-16-God breaks into the Israelites and our fearful realities with a word of promise about the future. "The days are coming," says God, "when my justice and righteousness will prevail." God beckons us to open up our imaginations to what God is doing and will do in the future. Justice will reign and rulers and all people will participate in God's righteousness, humbly living with one another in a just and loving relationship. The waiting of Advent is not simply making the best of a bad situation but trusting in the creative and redemptive purposes of God. Trusting that God has more in store for us than any Christmas gift can offer. "The days are surely coming," when God's peace, love, wholeness, and mercy will be the reality in which we all partake.(From God Pause)

Saturday-"If in your lifetime the only prayer you offer is Thanks, that would suffice," wrote medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart. I find thanking another is an act of humility; I admit I'm not self-sufficient. Ira Kent Groff