​Hebrews 10: 23-25
Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.
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In conversation with the volunteers who are have been coming in waves on mission trips into our community to help it rebuild, I have asked them individually why they are here. The answers vary, of course, but they have a similar theme: relationships. "I am here because my roommate invited me." "I came because our group of friends has been doing this for years and we have a blast together." "I came because my son asked me." "I came because you needed me." "I came because it just seemed like what God wanted me to do." Sometimes we need to provoke one another to love and good deeds. Even the most gentle poke of one person to another creates a connection that the spirit travels and fires up the flame of love, encouragement, hope, joy, laughter. You never know what God can do with a simple invitation or a heartfelt poke. 
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Holy God, may the cross of Christ encourage our hope. Amen.

​Psalm 116:1-2, 16
I love the Lord, because he has heard my voice and my supplications. Because he inclined his ear to me, therefore I will call on him as long as I live.
O Lord, I am your servant
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Every night I go to prepare for sleep and I am deeply aware that God is listening.   Every morning I wake to find God ever-vigilant.  This morning I am grateful for my life, for every breath I take is a gift.  The opportunity to love as I am loved is overwhelmingly sweet and constantly challenging.  This day the first humans I conversed with included a shout-out text message to a friend who is a gift and a servant.  The next humans I spoke with were up earlier than I was to work on the house our congregation will be offering to Episcopal Service Corps interns to live for a year while they volunteer in our recovering community.  These humans were people who "do this" every year during Holy Week - they give up this week to serve.  I am humbled by their witness.  I am inspired by their heart for strangers.  In this short life, what could be a greater way to live than to be Christ with dirty hands, sweaty t-shirts, and joyous smiles?  
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Help us, Lord, to reach the most vulnerable among us with your love.  Amen.

​I Corinthians 11:23-24
For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”
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These are the words I am privileged to say each Sunday as I preside at the altar. The phrase that never ceases to amaze me is "on the night when he was betrayed." It amazes me from Jesus' perspective that he fed them anyway. I learned recently that pilots are trained in the event of an imminent failure of their aircraft to "fly through the crash." There may be a remote chance to land the plane and save lives if they continue to manage their instruments and fly through the crash. Jesus' did the same thing on the night in which he was betrayed. He flew through the crash. Instead of flinging his arms up in disgust at his betrayers, he did what he always did. He loved them. His body was broken. His crash was the cross. His death was real. But he flew through the crash of his suffering and death by loving God and loving us. I can't imagine a more magnificent way to live one's life than to love God and love others as Christ has loved us. 
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Especially as we are broken and betrayed, may we love unflinchingly. Amen.

​Isaiah 50: 4
The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word. Morning by morning he wakens— wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught. 
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What a remarkable idea to be able to sustain the weary with a word. One of the great sorrows of my generation is to witness and, if I am honest, participate in the devaluation of our language. We no longer trust words. How can words sustain us if they have less volume than smoke that rises from a flame? In order for words to hold up in court, they must be witnessed and verified with a signature. A person's word spoken is not enough. When words are weak or confusing we read in between the lines because the words alone are just not enough. This is a profound sorrow for word crafters and people like me whose love language is words. The prophets speak of words given to them by God to teach and encourage. But then Jesus came and he was called the Word made flesh. The enormous vulnerability of God's Son come to us as flesh and word are chilling for this present age. Christ's tender exposure to our physical abuse and our disregard of his teaching is difficult to capture with the best of my words. 
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Silver and gold, have I none. Such as I have, give I thee. I love you. Amen.

​Psalm 118:22-24
The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.
This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes.
This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.
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When I was a mission pastor going door to door, asking people if they might be interested in attending a new church being formed, made for a brutally long day. Lots of rejection. A colleague told me not to take it personally. He said, "Remember, Deb, it is not you they are rejecting." That was supposed to make me feel better. Later, I realized that I had not stopped taking it personally when people chose not to come to the Lord's table. Again, I was reminded that it was not me they were rejecting. ( In some cases, it actually was me they were rejecting, but the idea that anything about me could drive them away from the Lord's table was not at all comforting. ) I do my best not to shame people into gathering. What joy is there in arm twisting? All I know for certain is that I don't belong at the Lord's table but God invites me anyway for one reason alone. God's love. God sets the table and provides the food. All God asks of us is thanksgiving and a willingness to be within an elbow's nudge of people we wouldn't invite into our homes. And we refuse. God takes this rejection personally. God just does rejection differently than I do. God gets up early, makes a new day and gives us another chance. Over and over and over again. 
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Holy God, dinner with you sounds marvelous. I'll be there. Amen.

Mark 11:11
Then he entered Jerusalem and went into the temple; and when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve.
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This was the first time I ever noticed that Jesus took a "look around at everything." Very difficult to know exactly what that moment was about. It was noteworthy enough for Mark to mention it. It has the feel of saying - what Jesus is about to do, he did with eyes wide open. The time would come soon enough for the drama of the most profound event in human history to play out. Time to pause. Time to spend one more night with the people with whom he had spent acres of dirty roads and mind-blowing evening conversations. Henry David Thoreau once said that he went to woods because he wanted to live deliberately. Jesus chose to enter into our dark woods because he wanted to live deliberately. Jesus knew what he was doing and he didn't want to do it. Yet. There was something bigger than what he wanted. There was this relationship with God. Jesus was willing to be a part of our everything even when it hurt. Even when it would get him killed. What wondrous love is this?
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Holy God, I am breathless in the presence of the one who is so in love with the likes of us. Amen. ​

​Jeremiah 31: 34
No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.
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There is so much about God I do not know. I cannot pretend to know the unfathomable nature of the divine spark, the creative mind, the every expanding and playful heart of God. But what is absolutely necessary for our relationship, if it is to be a forever thing, is to stand inside the unknowing without a death grip on the knob of the exit door. I have learned that what I need to know the most about God is knowable. What frightens me the most about God's ability is that I am completely knowable to God. To know me so completely is to know that my good does not outweigh my bad, that my sins would waft a stink into the room that would make our space together uninhabitable. What I need the most is forgiveness that is stronger than the stink and a memory with an intentional muscle to forget. That is exactly what God offers us. It does not mean that I have from time to time reached for the exit door out of shame and fear that it would be better for me to hide from love than be rejected by it. It does mean that knowing God and the truth of God's grace and forgiveness has given me what I need to know to feel something I have longed for .....belonging. 
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God, let me rest in you and dare to dream of what we can do together today. Amen.

​Hebrews 5:7
In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission.
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What makes you cry? Do you have certain triggers that immediately cause your sight to blur and your soul to burn? Years ago I had a dog who died and I haven't been able to watch a movie where a dog dies since. I become a puddle. Lots of other stuff cause the symptoms I have come to recognize. The catch in my throat that makes my words stumble. The rush of blood to my face. I suck it up. As often as possible, I hold it back because it is a vulnerability that few feel comfortable to witness. Do you extend a hand? Offer a shoulder? A tissue offered too soon becomes the white flag signaling that it is time to stop. Or do we just sit and hold the space? Holding space is excruciating. To hold space while the other suffers knowing there is little anyone can do to change the circumstances, the reality of the suffering is exhausting. Sometimes there is no consolation. Sometimes we need to sit inside someone else's pain and learn what we can from the truth of it. Jesus invites us into his tears. 
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Holy God, hear my cry. Amen.

​John 12:24
Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. 
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One of the enormous lessons of recovering from a disaster like the flooding from Hurricane Harvey that devastated my neighbors, my community and my church is that the disaster continues to happen long after it falls out of the news cycle. It continues to happen for years. There are people this morning living in homes that have not much improved since the initial weeks after the flooding. Resources - money, muscle, materials, skilled workers - hit a bottleneck. The most vulnerable - seniors, disabled, undocumented - lose their identity and dignity as the ones who "fall through the cracks." I have seen different kinds of dying happening since the storm. The dying of letting go and the dying of re-embracing the very things of which we claimed to have let go. Neighbors who took risks to rescue are now shunned again. The neighbors we comforted on the streets by the debris are the neighbors we go back to ignoring while they sit in houses without a kitchen. In the scope of humanity, there are those who are dealing with having no house at all, much less a kitchen. We are challenged in these days to do some dying. We are challenged to face a disaster of our own making. What does it mean to die to a way of life so that what can be restored is our hearts' capacity to love our neighbor?
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Holy God, save us from ourselves. Amen.

Numbers 21:4-5
From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.”
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When we read the scriptures, there are two basic things happening. God is saying and doing stuff. People are saying and doing stuff. It occurs to me that, more often than not, we question what God is doing. We want to know why God does what God does. We question why God punishes. We question who God chooses. We question what God was thinking. We question God's motives. We never question what the people say or do. We spectate on the grand drama of the exodus from Egypt. We question why God made Pharoah such a pain. We question why God used plagues of frogs and locust and blood on doorposts as methods of persuasion and protection. We spend way too much time trying to figure out how God did the split the Red Sea thing. But when it comes to people who have been saved and freed complaining about the food, we think, "yeah, that's what we do." We look at it and see the fault in it even as we complain about our own lives in the next breath. We are, after all, "only human" which is our less than subtle way of blaming everything on God and taking no responsibility. When we turn the questions on ourselves- "Why did we say that to that person?" "Why did we do that?"- the scriptures become less of a spectator sport and more of journey of the discovery of our deepest need and our greatest hope. 
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Holy God, may we be bold enough to exam ourselves in the light of your love. Amen. ​