Friday, August 25, 2017

The morning larks are already lifted high.

Make every effort to supplement your faith with excellence, and excellence with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love.  For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.  For whoever lacks these qualities is so nearsighted that he is blind, having forgotten that he was cleansed from his former sins. Therefore, brothers, be all the more diligent to confirm your calling and election, for if you practice these qualities you will never fall. 2 Peter 1:5-10

First the fall, and then the recovery from the fall, and both are the mercy of God. —Julian of Norwich (c. 1343­­–c. 1416)

Lord our God, we thank You that You have given us an entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We thank You that You have already begun to give us new vision, that already many things are being transformed, so that we may go gladly and confidently on our way with hope for whatever is still unsolved. May all this live in our hearts and fill us with thanks to You. We want to be courageous and keep in sight what still needs to be changed as we take our part as workers in Your vineyard. May the light You have given us continue to shine in us and burn ever more brightly, as You have promised. Amen.

I think that actually where we have landed outside of Lugo, Italy is an old warehouse for the vineyards that stretch out in tidy rows in every direction. There are several beautiful apartments now tucked inside its spacious rafters, but its simple rugged exterior proclaims its original purpose.

And one cannot help but thinking about workers and the harvest around here. Abundance hangs low on every branch. Yesterday even four-year-old Everette was able to pluck not only handfuls of every-colored grape and spit out the seeds with practiced confidence, she also ate two plums, three figs, a pear, an apple, two peaches, four tomatoes and homemade pesto.



And this big long list of virtues or excellence has nothing to do with earning our place in the already now eternal kingdom of God. Rather it is a long list of pruning and fertilizing and weeding in order to create the sturdy and full-of-fruit branches connected to the Vine.

Sometime way before dawn the engines started roaring outside. And I don't know whether they were mowers or hoers or shakers, but they were up and at ‘em early. And while this walk with Jesus is simple and straightforward on many levels, there are things that easily entangle us or long to jump up and pierce our thinking like the many stinging nettles that lurk in every pathway. And while there are the waxing eloquent metaphors describing how the branches’ job is simply to “be” while the vine does (or did, depending on the translation) all the heavy lifting, someone out there is rising up before the dark orange sun and kneeling into the backbreaking work.

This walk is not for the sloppy or weak of heart.

So we are saved by faith, that not of ourselves, lest any of us boast. And brokenness and death and falling to the ground dried up and spent are all part of the process.

But so are self-control and steadfastness as daily choices. As is love. Every hot sweating stinking day we have to choose to practice love, the acting out and doing of it. And sometimes love is great fun, like racing Everette down the white sandy beach as fast as you both can go, but mostly it’s a bit of a bear, and it’s loading six borrowed bikes or two borrowed beds into the back of your car or spending the afternoon visiting three shops to figure out which sim card to buy for the folks that just arrived from Spain, France and Germany.

Or noticing the blind beggar shaking his coin box. Or explaining yet again what it means to be greatest. Or preparing a fish breakfast by the side of a lake for a bunch of people who just abandoned you when things got rough. And they couldn’t even stay awake and pray for an hour.

 A lot of the new vision stuff is still walking silently along country roads, without even thoughts, and the transformation thing is so deep maybe that it is still seeds buried underground with just little green sprigs peeking out into the light, and bunches still feels unsolved.

Breathe in deeply.

Breath out.

Coming to an end of self. How does that happen?

But there is always what is right in front of me. Even if I am still working through what it means to love the Lord with all my heart, all my soul, all my mind and all my strength, there is always the neighbor right here.

One thing that I am being Spirit-prodded about is my edgy withdrawal from beggars on the street; even if I occasionally toss them a coin, I still look away. I am going to choose to pause, to kneel down, to look, and ask, “What do you need?”

How can I as a follower of Him not pause? He who paused for the unclean and marginalized again and again: the unclean bleeding woman, the woman caught in adultery, the tax collector, the demon-possessed naked man.

Come on. How did He answer the question “What must I do?” With a story about the religious people who looked away and the heathen who knelt down.

In excellence and knowledge and self-control and steadfastness and godliness and brotherly affection, and love. 


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