blessing or choice?

February 13, 2018

Beloved:

              Early in the morning with sixty-five snuggly dog pounds on my lap, my coffee steams beside me and Taizé plays on Spotify.  I write in my journal and hear my husband putter in the kitchen.  The dog sighs, and great is the temptation to thank God for a life so safe and warm and blessed, rather than admit that all these blessings are the benefits of privilege willfully exercised.  I might just as willfully have chosen a tiny apartment at one tenth this monthly mortgage and to eat on ten dollars a day.  Better folk than me do so all the time.  Am I prepared to call them less blessed than me?


              Sometimes only after I preach a sermon do I realize what I was supposed to say.   In John 9 some religious people longed  not to see (know, believe, remember) that once upon a time “to have it all” meant God was on their side, that God loved them most and best.  We are, in a word, most blessed, they kinda, sorta, really thought.  Then Jesus turned the tables on that notion and gave a man born blind his sight, putting blessing up for grabs, making it not so much a privilege as a gift ~ for positively anyone whom Jesus wants to have it.


              I like my house and dogs and books and coffee but I’m reluctant to give thanks for them.  They are possessions (not the dogs, of course) and can be done without in a New York minute, things I’ve chosen over other choices ~ good works of biblical obedience, for example.  Does it make faithful sense to give thanks for lack of faith?  Such questions are the work of the coming season, beginning with Ash Wednesday.


              Let Us Be Done With It is the title, the theme that comes to mind.  
                   What it is must be up to you and me.  
                        Whatever we have loved or needed more than what God wants for us ~ that is it.  
                             What we have wanted, clung to and hoarded as our own.  
                                  Anything we chose when we might have chosen otherwise -
                                  and then regarded it a blessing.

             As we begin the Lenten season, I am glad to pray and worship with you.  


peace & prayers,
pastor annette

P.S.  I found this wonderful Taizé instrumental playlist on YouTube. Check it out!