Posts
I have had to learn to be a careful listener not only as
a pastor but as a human being truly knowing the reality of the spiritual world
and things we still have yet to fully understand or want to understand. This leads me to share another fold into what
I have experienced from the spirit world.
Which means yes, my grandmother’s spirit is once again reaching out to
me in this new home. I don’t consider it
a “haunting” but she is there in essence as a guardian and “encourager.”
I have been careful to hear from a place of faith since
evil is real and evil occasionally interrupts these moments of my grandmother
speaking by saying—“It’s a secret.” The
devil has a lot to hide and would like us to be lured and tempted to find or
seek the secret knowledge of things.
This is a lot like life though, when we want what we want, when we want
it but don’t really “get” it.
Those uninterrupted moments at all times of the evening
and early morning to the lulling sound of the white noise of my sound machine—she
reaches out to encourage me. The past
week she has repeated over and over with her Southern Illinois accent saying my
name first— “Nicole, God gives you all that you could ever possibly need, as He
pleases, Believe in Jesus.”
Other evenings she would repeat and say—“Nicole, you need
to have faith in yourself, I know you can do it.”
This past Saturday Phil & I had to put our kitty
Sedie down since she went into systemic organ failure—heart, lungs and her
intestines were no longer working. That
evening I asked my grandmother, that I hope Sedie is with them and my
grandmother said: “Yes, she is here.”
So what’s the purpose of sharing in essence this “ghost”
story with you here this morning? Grace
lived into is all about tapping into the spirit—that seat of the soul, the
first church where God works. We are not
mere “meat” held together by science but have a spiritual aspect originating in
the heart—where God does His work, first.
When we die, we do leave dust, we leave everything behind
and take the most important thing—our soul, our spiritual self to join Jesus
and all whom we have loved; family, friends and creatures! We must continue to
remember God’s timing is not our sense of timing at all. It is of many dimensions and holds many a
purpose we have yet to realize in our limited, temporal thinking… In some ways
as an act of gracious teaching, my grandmother has continued to be a “presence”
to help encourage me to not be weak and discouraged. Which in ministry is pretty easy to fall
into!
God uses a lot of messengers to reach out to us daily~ it
can be in those moments and experiences we don’t pay too much attention to—in the
things we often say and do. It could be
in the social media legal-ease theological wars over anything and everything
except what’s more important… Christ! It
could be in life-changing decisions you have come to full circle in making… Do you know the final outcome? Does it matter
at this point? Sometimes you have to go boldly with a blind but powerful faith—to
quote Star Trek: “To Boldly go where no man has gone before.”
Having faith in yourself is testing that Grace given—the New
Nature planted longing to be reaped… Nearly eight years of Roman Catholic grade
school and two years at a Roman Catholic high school didn’t necessarily bring
me to Christ. It took God reaching down
to me at that conversion moment 12 something years ago to hear the Spirit of
God’s Voice in my heart to take Him seriously! God’s messenger that time was
through the voices of Ebenezer Lutheran Church’s choir singing “Spirit, Spirit
of Gentleness,” as the closing processional hymn of that service.
Everything at that very moment came together where my
heart was restored and my faith challenged to turn that next corner. If I didn’t turn that corner, where would I
be? If I didn’t continue to seek finding God in the church and beyond, who
would I have become? I needed something
I couldn’t explain… that only the cross and the Love of Christ Jesus becoming
ever so real in my heart… GAVE ME!
If, is that conditional of the Law, it can also be a
handy tool for the devil to use to weaken and lure you away from realizing
genuine purpose in your life. We can all fall hopelessly into this abyss: If I chose this path, would I be “happy?” (Remember
happiness is that Pandora’s box…) If I dare to be a bold witness; could I
handle the consequences? The cost of
discipleship requires a Bold Witness to speak the power of Grace and our need
to be truthful with ourselves to take it on! Maybe my story like your own story
would raise a lot of red flags to a controlled perspective of the “way things
should be…”
Maybe some of us would like to run away from all of it—retreat
into the comfort of a loneliness no one can understand or should… but God
alone. Do we give up? God sure doesn’t, neither does He want us to! Even if we are one of those sickly looking
trees in the backyard of God’s Kingdom that you’d wish a neighbor would pay
mercy upon and cut it down… God never cuts us down, He loves us and guides us
in many ways, we have yet to fully understand or want to realize!
We can’t take the reality of God and the reality of the
Spirit for granted. It is when we do
that we fail, fall away and wither—dying not to the Old Ways and neither rising
into the New. How can we understand
Grace, if we do not open our hearts to God’s loving Spirit—leading us, teaching
us, transforming us? Let us not forget that the law is to be but a humbling
mirror to the Gospel. We need to look
deeply within ourselves to reap that New Nature seed.
We’re not the best gardeners, or adept at “self-care”
when it comes to maturing our faith. In
fact in actual physical gardening, I actually beg people to not buy me a plant…
I have a brown thumb. Our former house’s
lawn you could probably have spotted from an airplane… All humor aside, the
gardener of the heart is God, and the faith that is reaped is our gracious
response.
Coming to the point of responding in Grace is reconciling
ourselves with God. It is reconciling
ourselves to not hear Satan lure us into feeling a failure on who we are and
where we are. It is seeing God’s love
shining into us resurrecting us from the abyss of sin and its adjoining
despair. It doesn’t take that mirror for granted, for we need to gaze into it
and beyond it in order to find the Gospel living within our very selves!
How can we carry the Good News, if there is no hope and
despair weighs heavily upon our hearts?
I would say that’s where we’re testing Grace which as Saint Paul said is
not only dangerous but toxic to the very gift given to us by Christ Jesus the
Lord! We have to lift these things up to the Lord in more than prayer but
through being, doing! St. Francis’ more
famous quotes resonate here, he says: “If God can work through me, he can work
through anyone.” He continues in another
quote to say: “Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and
suddenly you are doing the impossible.”
Living into the lifestyle of Grace is not impossible it
is just painful and difficult. Your life will need to be shaped, challenged and
disciplined by and for God. We may have been given this one solitary earthly
life, but the one to come is the Kingdom of God reaped from that New Natured seed.
I would like to close this morning’s message with a
nugget of thought from Thomas Moore’s ‘Original Self:’ “The pulse of life is as
close as our own throbbing veins, but everything around us conspires to
convince us of its nonexistence and unworthiness. The poet and the artist have no place in a
society that has forgotten the soul. But
we can live differently, basking in the exoticism and eccentricity of a life of
vision. The camera of our awakening may
be Iris, the messenger of sprite, our own eyes of the imaginal that look at the
flat of existence and see the poetry.”
God wants our lives to come alive by Grace through faith
for His will and precepts. We are the messengers of the Gospel in spirit and
yes, by using those hands and feet. It
doesn’t start in the head though, it begins in the heart, the soul—the mercy
seat of Our Crucified Lord and Savior risen and rising as our New Nature is
reaped.
Amen.
February 28th,
2016; 3rd Sunday of Lent; Year C; SOLA Lectionary
Sermon by
Reverend Nicole A.M. Collins, FODM
Psalm 85;
Ezekiel 33:7-20; 1 Corinthians 10:1-13; Luke 13:1-9
~
No comments:
Post a Comment