APPOINTED and AUTHORIZED by Donna Schaper

“And he appointed twelve, whom he also named to be apostles . . . to have authority to cast out the demons.” Excerpt from Mark 3:13-19a

Appointment and authorization are words usually associated with a new job or job description. We get our credentials, we get our keys, and we get our security pass. We are sent. Jesus appointed and authorized twelve whom he then called by name to go out and speak his message and cast out demons. They mostly had on-the-job training for a very new job, called being “Apostles.” 

We, too, are called to be disciples become apostles. We, too, are sent out to do things we don’t know how to do. We are appointed and authorized in the same way the original untutored and uneducated disciples were turned into apostles. You only have to remember the word “apostate” to understand the word “apostle.”  An apostate is one who gets it all wrong. An apostle is one who gets it kind of right. Imagine the trust of Jesus in his people, which is to say us. He imagines we can get it right. He imagines we can do things we don’t know how to do. He imagines we can de-demonize the world. He imagines we can find the clumsy words to speak his gorgeous message. We are appointed and authorized. Our names have been called.

Prayer

May the courage of the original apostles be ours. May we accept the appointment to speak of Jesus with all we have and whatever we have. Amen.

SHOOTS by Quinn G. Caldwell

“It is not as though the word of God had failed.” Excerpt from Romans 9:6-18

In the city of Jurupa Valley, California, there is what appears to be a small clump of bushes. Look closer, with a botanist’s eye, and you will see that they are actually all one spread-out individual Palmer’s Oak. Look closer still, with a paleobotanist’s eye, and you will discover that it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 13,000 years old, probably the world’s oldest living thing. For millennia, it has grown up, then been burned down by passing wildfires, then sent up new shoots and started again, spreading out a little bit each time.

After the kingly line of David ended, Isaiah predicted that a shoot would come out of the dead stump of Jesse (David’s father), that the anointed line of God’s favor had not finally ended, that it would spring forth again. Christians claim that Jesus was that shoot. But then he, too, was cut down. And though he was resurrected, still he was no longer with the people in the way he had been. This is what Paul and the Romans were dealing with. It’s also what we’re dealing with.

Here’s how it appeared the word of God had failed: the Shoot of Jesse was cut down. Here is how it did not fail: turns out, the Shoot of Jesse was like the Jurupa Oak, and it sent up shoots, and they were you. And if they are burned down, he will send up more, and more, and more, and each time they will spread further, until the whole world is green and rustling with salvation.

Prayer

God, thank you for making me the heir of salvation, a shoot of the Shoot, the fulfillment of all your best promises to the world. Now give me strength to act like it. Amen.

Quinn G. Caldwell is an ordained minister of the United Church of Christ.

A SINGLE STREAM by Howard Thurman

It is a world-shattering disclosure that the stream of life is a single stream, though it takes various forms as it spills over into time and space. This disclosure is made to anyone whose discipline sends him on high adventure within his own spirit, his own inner life. By prayer, by the deep inward gaze which opens the eyes of the soul to behold the presence of God, a person feels the steady rhythm of life itself. We seem to be behind the scene of all persons, things and events. The deep hunger to be understood is at last seen to be one and the same with the hunger to understand.

Source: The Mood of Christmas

BEING SIMPLE by Caryll Houselander

The individual who is simple, who accepts themselves as they are, makes only a minimum demand on others in their relations with them. Their simplicity not only endows their own personality with unique beauty; it is also an act of love. This is an example of the truth that whatever sanctifies our own soul does, at the same time, beneft everyone who comes into our life.

Source: The Passion of the Infant Christ in A Child in Winter by Thomas Hoffman

BE STILL by Donna Schaper

“Be still and know that I am God.” Excerpt from Psalm 46

Around 9:15 one November morning I was driving on the Taconic Parkway in the mid-Hudson Valley.  Out of nowhere a large 6-point buck appeared as I was driving in the passing lane, giving new meaning to the Christmas song about Grandma getting run over by a reindeer.  I remembered all my country learnings and did not brake but drove through it.  It died upon impact, I got the car off the road, an ambulance came, and I spent the next six hours at the Westchester Medical Center receiving superb care. The deer spent way too long in the middle lane until some people finally carried him off the road. My adult offspring drove up from the city in a Zip Car to accompany me. I had CAT scans of the head, neck, and chest and ultrasounds of the spleen and more. I had a pretty bruised arm on the left and some very sad toes to accompany them on the same side. Getting out of the car after the air bags go off is not easy.

As the ambulance arrived at the hospital, the woman at the desk said, “Is this one the deer?”  I said “No, my name is Donna.” A chaplain visited me in the emergency room, after I had been unceremoniously moved to a hallway to await the results of my many tests.  He prayed with me.  It was very beautiful.  He also got my name wrong, asking God to bless Dorothy instead of Donna, but I didn’t care.

I have now survived breast cancer, ten years, being hit by a drunk driver and now a deer.  In each case, the scripture that mattered most was Psalm 46.  “Be still and know that I am God.”  Being still, even if people get your name wrong, is a place beyond serenity.  It is being really broken and also being really well, both and, not either or.  Standing on the side of the road, awaiting care, all I could remember to say to myself was “Be still, and know that I am God.”  Same thing I did with the drunk and the mastectomy.  By these words, I sensed that God was nigh. God is nigher than nigh, especially when we find ourselves scared stiff.

Prayer

Thank you God for the warm fundamentalists of my youth who insisted I memorize scripture and showed me how to drive through things.  Amen.

Donna Schaper is the Senior Minister of Judson Memorial Church in New York City. 

A PRAYER for the NEW YEAR by Felix Carrion

“And immediately they left their nets and followed him.” Excerpt from Mark 1:14-20

The author of the Gospel of Mark is fond of using the word “immediately” to describe a response that follows from a call or invitation. He attaches this word to the response of Simon, Andrew, James, and John to Jesus’ invitation to come follow him. However, what appears to be a casual encounter in the moment actually reveals  much more that is at work.

Something breaks through in the life of these four individuals and they can no longer remain attached to a life that does not capture the fullness of who they are and what they are here to accomplish. Jesus invites them to separate themselves from the world they know and to find new direction. They experience a breakthrough, an epiphany of sorts, and find the strength to finally follow a new path, long buried by the sleep of delay, procrastination, or neglect.

In his poem, “The Strength of Fields,” James L. Dickey cries out, “Lord, let me shake with purpose.”

Sometimes a prayer like this is needed to wake us from our slumber, to shake us loose from our fears, and to set us on our way of “immediacy” toward long-forgotten hopes and longings and dreams. I think this is a prayer for the New Year.

Jump now. Leap now. Follow now. Hurry now. Go now.

Prayer

Lord, let me shake with purpose. Amen.

Felix Carrion is Coordinator of The Stillspeaking Ministry, United Church of Christ.

IMAGINING a NEW REALITY by Elizabeth O’Connor

 

When we are dissatisfied with things as they are, or suffer and know pain, we begin to imagine what the world would be like if things were different–if there were no hunger or thirst and all tears were wiped away (Rev. 7:14). Creative imagination reaches toward God, and glimpses a new heaven and new earth. The new reality has nothing to do with the present order. In fact, the one who responds to call seeks to put something more beautiful in the place of what she sees. This is where the friction and fight begin.

Martin Luther King was not killed because he had a dream. Dreamers are easily dismissed. He was killed because he sought to introduce into the political arena what he saw with his heart and mind. The same was true of Gandhi and of our Lord.

As Jesus made clear his solidarity with the poor and his vocation to engage them in a liberating process, he came into confrontation with entrenched political and religious powers. As suspicion of him turned to resistance and then to hatred and fury, he began to prepare his disciples for what he would have to suffer. Peter immediately took Jesus aside to protest his continuing on what was surely a collision course….

Those who say yes to the perilous vocation of implementing vision at each stage will find new resistances emerging in themselves as well as in the society. Opposition to the new is very natural and should not cause any of us to be taken by surprise. The best way to understand it in one’s contemporaries is to have named and owned it in one’s self. That process is also some protection against the self-righteousness that plagues too many reformers as well as the pious.

Source: Cry Pain, Cry Hope

DAFFODILS by Lillian Daniel

“Consider how the wild flowers grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.” Luke 12:27 

When I was a kid, my mother planned a big garden party, where her yard would be filled with blooming daffodils that she had planted in anticipation. But as the party date approached, the weather stayed cold and no daffodils were even close to blooming.

Yet on the day of the party, our lawn was filled with daffodils, just as she had dreamed. The guests marveled. No garden had any springtime action like that.

But then after the guests went home, the daffodils drooped and my mother went through the yard carefully removing all the cut daffodils she had bought at the florist, that she had painstakingly attached to chopsticks with wire twist ties, and stuck in the ground.

Those daffodils weren’t fake, but they were short-lived and flimsy, with no bulb under the earth to allow them to survive the rough weather. On the surface and for a short while, they looked like real daffodils, but they didn’t have enough going on underneath to last.

Sometimes, I think that’s how the life of faith works. You can go to the religious flower shop, and pick up a little of this and a little of that, and decorate your life with it.

But deep participation in a tradition greater than our own invention is the bulb under the earth. It will live through the cold, to rise again, long after my self-made bouquet has faded.

Prayer

Great Gardener of the Earth, thank you for the daffodils in their beauty, and for the invisible bulbs, underneath, that give them life. Amen.

Lillian Daniel is the senior minister of the First Congregational Church, UCC, Glen Ellyn, Illinois. 

ONE POSSESSED of a KNOWING by Felix Carrion

“Nathaniel said to him, ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’” Excerpt from John 1:43-51

If we are to believe The Jerome Biblical Commentary, “Nazareth was an insignificant village never mentioned in the Old Testament. [And] no prophecy had connected the Messiah with Galilee, and certainly not with Nazareth.”

The first extraordinary leap the early disciples made was to believe that this fellow who looked and sounded like them was no ordinary character. In fact, they had to defy what they had been taught since they were children and for all intents and purposes had internalized:  “How can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

How did they begin to believe something different?

First, they “come and see” this Jesus who knows differently. They experience in Jesus One who is possessed of a knowing, an experience, an illumination, of his true identity and purpose. This is the “secret blooming” of his soul. With care, he gently reveals the essence of what he knows to the incredulous, to those who long ago stopped believing in themselves, to those who accepted pronouncements and proclamations made about their “kind”—their  family, class, etc.  And once they understood this for themselves, their lives were turned inside out to reveal the true stitching of their make-up.

And since his appearing over 2000 years ago, men and women, young and old, poor and rich, have been called to follow him who came from Nazareth.

Prayer

O God, help me to believe like Jesus believed. Amen.

Felix Carrion is Coordinator of The Stillspeaking Ministry, United Church of Christ.

SPIRITUAL and POLITICAL by Archbishop Desmond Tutu

One of the things about forgiveness you have to remember is that it is not only spiritual. It is part of real politics. In forgiving, people are not being asked to forget. On the contrary, it is important to remember, so that we should not let such atrocities happen again. Forgiveness does not mean condoning what has been done. It means taking what happened seriously…drawing out the sting in the memory that threatens our entire existence.

Source: Unknown