By Deb Grant

ELOGOS for Tuesday

6/12/2018

Mark 4:30-32
He also said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”
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This realm in which God has given us to live, we can only see in part but the rich textures of its true nature reveal themselves. This land is more fluid than solid. The earth flows with either hot magma or the constant process of plant life growing and decaying, creating more soil from which new growth is possible. I never wanted to live in California or any places where earthquakes happen. There are certain things I count on. The earth being still beneath my feet is one of those things. But I know better now. I know that the earth is always in motion, always spinning and I don't feel the spin because I am spinning with it. I know the earth is sculpting sand dunes, changing river beds, exploding new land masses and shifting tectonic plates. It is soil and dying and growing. Where do hummingbirds go during a hurricane? Where do they find shelter and solid ground when their world becomes impossibly hard? What I know for certain is that we all belong here on this groaning, shifting sphere and the One who created it and us is a mystery of solidity and movement.
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Grant to those too content with stillness, the sensation of movement and to those who are motion-sick, the healing of a quiet nest. Amen.

ELOGOS for Thursday

6/7/2018

2 Corinthians 5:1
For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.
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It is difficult to know how people who live in my still flood-recovering town hear this verse of scripture. So many are still sitting in houses with walls that dangle their naked two by four studs in living rooms like a long-legged man sitting sideways on a hospital bed in a gown waiting to go home. Waiting. Is it a comfort to hear that the buildings that we have and the buildings that we are, though vulnerable to destruction, are different from the building we ultimately have from God? Is that a comfort or a source of irritation that there is waiting involved and deep pain before we are more fully aware and get to live into the nature of our true dwelling? I imagine living a whole life inside a house with no real view out the windows. A frightening event crumbles the house, and I discover, standing in the ruins, that the house had been built inside another house of stadium proportions with unlimited access to earth, sea, sky, love. All along there is so much more and I couldn't see it. I would be still, frankly, be both irritated to have discovered this and overwhelmingly grateful at the same time. Such is the uncomfortable mystery and the joy of this current dwelling.
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Dear Lord, peace be in our house and in our understanding, deep peace. Amen

ELOGOS for Monday

6/4/2018

Mark 3: 32-35
A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, “Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you.” And he replied, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” And looking at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”
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There was a woman I knew who was the matriarch of a large family. I was often invited to be at their dinner table and learned it was a typical practice of this woman to invite random people - some lonely, some poor, some with disabilities - to the family dinner table. This woman's practice reflected Jesus' own understanding of family. Christ pushed the definition of what it means to be brothers and sisters. He took a sledgehammer to walls that had become definitions of family so rigid that more would be walled out than ever allowed in. Let's expand our definition and do it this week. Sometime this week in your home or at a restaurant for a meal, invite someone who is not related by blood or marriage or already long-known, close friend.
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Open our hearts, Lord, to value family in the way that you do. Amen.

ELOGOS for Thursday

5/31/2018

2 Corinthians 4:6-7
For it is the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.
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In the course of his ministry, the Apostle Paul regularly had to deal with the credibility issue that critics clouded the air around him with the question: "Why should we believe you?" In his early life, Paul persecuted Christians. Now he was one of them and encouraging others to follow Christ. To his critics, he affirmed his unworthiness and yet turned the tables to say that God's power is revealed in being able to shine in breakable pottery. I think it is wrong to assume that this metaphor is a statement of the low value of human life. I would prefer to believe that on our most miserable days, when nothing is going right and nothing or no one we encounter is better by our presence, that God can still use the wreckage of our day, our life for a vehicle from which light can shine.
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Take these broken, shattered dreams and do your best, O Lord. Amen.

ELOGOS for Wednesday

5/30/2018

Mark 2:4-5
Then he said to them, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent. He looked around at them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored.
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The Law as it what given to the Israelites - the 10 Commandments - were both particular and a mosaic that revealed an overriding way of life: Love God, Love God's people. As the Israelites settled into this way of life they got deeper into the weeds of the particular. If they faced another situation to which the law codes did not directly address, they wrote sub-laws. When they got stuck, they looked to their learned ones and they just wrote more sub-laws. What that process did was create more weeds and move the people away from the overriding purpose of the Law. It also removed them from believing that they had the knowledge they needed to make good choices when faced with a dilemma. Sometimes, in the absence of a manual for our current times, we have to depend on the overriding purpose and the One who gave it to us. Sometimes we just have to face the dilemma of the day and ask ourselves what does Love require? The answer might not be simple. It may be laced with risk. It may even be wrong, but it is closer to God's heart than licking our thumbs and paging through a manual when someone needs our help.
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Forgive us, O Lord, for allowing thousands in Puerto Rico to die without doing what love required. Amen.

ELOGOS for Thursday

5/24/2018

Isaiah 6: 9-10
And he said, “Go and say to this people: ‘Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand.’ Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed.”
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MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.
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Have mercy on us, O Lord. Amen.

ELOGOS for Tuesday

5/22/2018

Romans 8: 18-19
I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God
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These two verses juxtaposed are a wonder to me. Sufferings of this present age are ENORMOUS! So the glory about to be revealed has got to be over-the-top STUPENDOUS!!! And then the curtain is drawn back to reveal.....the children of God? Wait, what? The glory that is to be revealed is....(looking over shoulder, left and right)... US? Eye roll. You've GOT to be kidding me. I have a friend who on a regular basis embellishes my name with lofty titles like "Exquisite" or "Magnificent." My reaction is always the same: looking over the shoulder, left and right.....Eye roll....you've got to be kidding me. On a variety of occasions, I have said similar things to this friend and to others. When I do, I am speaking the truth of something I see. Something that has been revealed to me. I am not at all comfortable with being called "Magnificent" but coming from a person whose vision I trust....it is hard to brush it off and sometimes when I am quite alone - I peek at the mirror in my soul and try to imagine what "magnificent" might look like on me. I don't see it but what if it is not for me to see right now? What if, it is just for me to take it as my friend's word? What if the glory that is about to be revealed to all is that we all take after the One who created us all so magnificently? Maybe while we are bearing the sufferings of this present time, we can hope that who we really are is peeking out for the sake of others.
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GIve me the wisdom and the vision to see you, O Lord, in every person I meet today. Amen.

ELOGOS for Monday

5/21/2018

John 3: 7-9
Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?”
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I am so grateful for Nicodemus, the Jewish scholar-leader, who lurked on the edges of Jesus' ministry. He is so every one of us. He was sent to sniff out a troll...an invader into their space ...someone that had no sense of purpose besides throwing an idea-stink bomb into a stuffy, suppressed society pretending to be free under the Roman thumb. Jesus was an explosion but not the type that Nicodemus expected. Imagine discovering that the tiny room - the only space you have ever known for your whole life - a space where you were comfortable, protected and nurtured suddenly constricted its walls upon you and spewed you out into the gondola of a hot air balloon suspended between the heavens and the earth. In a blink, you see the expansive truth of love. I am convinced that Nicodemus caught a glimpse of that new way of being and found it impossible to be comfortable in the shattered ruins of his puny room ever again. This is the tortured and magnificent vision awaiting those who inherit the Wind.
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Dear God of the Wind, comfort your people. Still our anxious, shattered lives. Bring peace quickly and so completely that we know immediately the truth and love of it.
Amen.

ELOGOS for Thursday

5/17/2018

Acts 2: 11b-12
"...In our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?”
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The first Pentecost is that moment when Christ's ragamuffin followers who were mostly blue-collar workers with little academic or public arena experience received something that lit them all up that Jerusalem day. They were able to communicate beyond their own ability. They sent a fire with so much energy that people on the other side of the planet and centuries away are still warming themselves in the flames. The Spirit of the Church has never been extinguished. It has been reduced to embers from time to time, but all it takes is a good wind to see, to hear, to feel the power of a Spirit that calls us together to understand one another for starters.
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Bring on the fire and the wind, Lord, show us what we can do together with you. Amen.
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ELOGOS for Wednesday

5/16/2018

Psalm 104:24-25
O Lord, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.
Yonder is the sea, great and wide, creeping things innumerable are there, living things both small and great.
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Once in a while, to gain some perspective on my life I zoom the lens of the universal camera out from my me-filled realm to the point of view where humans are ant-sized though perhaps not, ant-like. Before the flood waters receded, I happened to stand near the waters' edge. I watched a colony of fire ants floating by. They were constantly moving on top of each other, like a flame without a wick. Those on the bottom formed a raft for the others and then the other ants took a turn at what seemed like the impossible task of risking their lives in order to bear the weight of the whole. At first, I was more annoyed that such resilience would be so sublimely built into such a heinous creature as a fire ant. And then I recalled my place on this planet. A creature, bigger than an ant and more complex and even, dare I say with confidence, more divine imagination. And yet, even these fire ants were imbued with enough holy fire to live sacrificially for the sake of the greater good. One cannot insult a work of art without doing damage to the artist. It works the same with praise. I forget. I can be very insulting of fire ants and humans. I live in the Louvre of the Universe - a collection of magnificent works floating by me and through me every day. To ignore the art is to ignore the Artist. What a tragic way to live.
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Wow! Amen.