I WILL LOVE THEM

PRAYER MOMENT

Friday 4 March 2016   

I WILL LOVE THEM

Pause. Enter into the stillness of God within.

Reading: “I will heal their disloyalty, I will love them with all my heart, for my anger has turned from them.” (Hos. 14:2-10)

Reflection. Our Lenten readings have called us to repentance and put before us the mercy of God. Now comes a climax preparing us for Holy Week, still two weeks away. All this movement towards God is a movement of love. God’s love for us and our response to him and to one another (Mark 12:38-44). Hosea, one of the earliest prophets, has tender words to describe God’s love. Only yesterday a colleague was telling me how astonished her retreatants are when they discover, in their prayer, how God loves them. It somehow had not occurred to them before. They thought prayer was only about words and singing. Now they are discovering God in quietness and stillness.  

Prayer. Lord, may we know your love and respond in love. Amen.

THEY WILL NOT LISTEN

PRAYER MOMENT

Thursday 3 March 2016   

THEY WILL NOT LISTEN

Pause. Enter into the stillness of God within.

Reading: “You may say all these words to them: they will not listen to you; you may call them: they will not answer.” (Jer 7:23-28)

Reflection. What a painful sadness subfuses this judgement! It is a comment on the deep obstinacy of human nature that refuses to change because men and women refuse to examine life from an alternative perspective. “My mind is made up.” The painful history of Rhodesia and then Zimbabwe over the past 90 years is an example. First one group, then another, became determined to pursue their own agenda without attending to how it affects the life of others. We can see it “out there” but we know too we have to look within ourselves, especially in Lent. That is what it is for. It is a moment of opportunity to look again “with rinsed eyes.”

Prayer. Lord, help us to be open to whatever way you are nudging and calling us now. Amen.

TAKE NOTE OF THE LAWS AND CUSTOMS

PRAYER MOMENT

Wednesday 2 March 2016   

TAKE NOTE OF THE LAWS AND CUSTOMS

Pause. Enter into the stillness of God within.

Reading: “And now, Israel, take note of the laws and customs that I teach you today, and observe them, that you may have life and may enter and take possession.” (Deut. 4:1-9)

Reflection. The relationship with God, like any relationship, has to be worked at. It is fragile. It depends on the people constantly nursing that relationship by their attention and care to show forth, by their way of life, the bond God has made with them. If they do that they will be blessed. So it is with all our relationships. They need constant sensitivity that they do not grow cold; that they are not taken for granted.

Prayer. Lord, may we cherish the bond that you have written in our hearts and may we live by it. Amen.

FORGIVE EACH OTHER

PRAYER MOMENT

Tuesday 1 March 2016, St David   

PRAYER MOMENT

Tuesday 1 March 2016, St David   

FORGIVE EACH OTHER

Pause. Enter into the stillness of God within.

Reading: “That is how my heavenly Father will deal with you unless you forgive one another from your heart.” (Matt 18:21-35)

Reflection. Forgiveness is the immediate result of repentance – at least with God. We are not so quick. Forgiveness is untying a knot, opening a gate so a prisoner can walk free, rescuing a stranded climber on a remote mountain, saving a drowning swimmer. A surge of new life and renewed energy flows into a person forgiven. You can see it in the lost son of Jesus’ story. The more real the repentance, the more effective the forgiveness. Sometimes it is hard to repent. If a person meets a willingness to forgive it helps them repent. God loves to forgive, to give new life, new energy. He just looks for that seed of repentance.

Prayer. Lord, help us to repent and help us to forgive. They are so close to each other. Amen.

Pause. Enter into the stillness of God within.

Reading: “That is how my heavenly Father will deal with you unless you forgive one another from your heart.” (Matt 18:21-35)

Reflection. Forgiveness is the immediate result of repentance – at least with God. We are not so quick. Forgiveness is untying a knot, opening a gate so a prisoner can walk free, rescuing a stranded climber on a remote mountain, saving a drowning swimmer. A surge of new life and renewed energy flows into a person forgiven. You can see it in the lost son of Jesus’ story. The more real the repentance, the more effective the forgiveness. Sometimes it is hard to repent. If a person meets a willingness to forgive it helps them repent. God loves to forgive, to give new life, new energy. He just looks for that seed of repentance.

Prayer. Lord, help us to repent and help us to forgive. They are so close to each other. Amen.

NOT ACCEPTED

PRAYER MOMENT

Monday 29 February 2016   

NOT ACCEPTED

Pause. Enter into the stillness of God within.

Reading: “I tell you solemnly, no prophet is ever accepted in his own country.” (Luke 4:24-30)

Reflection. Our readings grapple each day with the question of conversion, changing one’s mind. Naaman the Syrian opens his mind twice: once when he listens to a little captive girl and again when he listens to his own servants (2 Kings 5:1-15). He is a foreigner, an outsider. The lost son in the parable has to go to a foreign country before he can clear his mind and recognise the compassion of God. There is something frightening about familiarity, habit, complacency, routine. They dull the mind and leave us incapable of seeing things differently.

Prayer. Lord, help us to keep an open mind to the surprises you send us each day.  Amen.

OLD HABITS DIE HARD

OLD HABITS DIE HARD

An old missionary used to come in from a hard day in the outstations and take off his boots in his upstairs room. He would take off one and then fling it across the room to a corner; then he did the same with other. The priest downstairs put up with this for a while but finally got tired of this ritual and went up to complain. Next day the old man returned as usual and flung one boot across the room. Then he remembered! The man downstairs waited a long time for the second boot but there was silence. This maddened him even more and he mounted the stairs and said, “For heaven’s sake, throw the other boot as well so as I can get some peace!”

Old habits die hard, they say, and it is probably because we are unaware of them. They are so ingrained. They are part of us. We devised our ways of coping with life years ago. Some of our eccentricities are harmless but some are the opposite. I can size up another person and all their behaviour is viewed through the lens I have created. Then one day someone praises that person using words quite different from what I would have said. I wake up with a jolt and, maybe, change my way of thinking about the person.

Whatever else Lent is it is a time for paying attention to jolts and not inoculating ourselves from them. They come but I brush them aside because they do not fit with my lens. Those people who died when the tower of Siloam fell on them or the ones who died in the Malaysian missing plane – they must have been guilty somehow. Perhaps we are not so crass as to believe such things today. But we can still be in the habit of categorising people: Muslims, migrants, prisoners or the disabled.

We can read about the “stone rejected which has become the keystone” and quickly say we understand its meaning. But can we file it away so easily? Rejection is a constant theme since Eve chose the apple. I think I am a reasonable person and yet hidden away are these dark habits I am hardly aware of. I am weighed down by the burden of my own self-centredness which makes my compass always point in my own direction. I hear the words, “Choose life,” (Deut 30:19) but they don’t get through because I have built up habits over the years that block out the word than liberates.

28 February 2016                   Sunday 3C in Lent

Exod. 3:1…15                        1 Cor. 10:1…12                                  Luke 13:1-9

HE CAME TO HIS SENSES

PRAYER MOMENT

Saturday 27 February 2016   

HE CAME TO HIS SENSES

Pause. Enter into the stillness of God within.

Reading: “Then he came to his senses and said, ‘How many of my father’s paid servants have more food than they want, and here am I dying of hunger? I will leave this place and go to my father’ … His father saw him and was moved with pity.” (Luke 15:1 ..32)

Reflection. That moment of coming to my senses – how can it be described? It is a new creation, a new life. What has to happen for a person to come to that moment? Some circumstance jolts a person into a new way of thinking. We can sense the surge of the moment – like turning on a light switch. All is clear. It is a moment of intense joy, but also mixed with sorrow for the blindness that preceded it. And the father’s joy is also intense. He is moved with pity. This charged scene sums up our longings for the Year of Mercy: that the world, each one of us, comes to our senses.

Prayer. Lord, we ask for you mercy in this year of grace, for each one of us and for all your people.  Amen.