Cleaning Up

•January 3, 2012 • Leave a Comment

How the washing piles up over Christmas – well it has in our house!  The same is true with the washing up – the dishwasher has been on overtime.  And as I sit looking at my windows with the sun shining on them, I can see how in need of a clean they are too – maybe tomorrow…

Dirt happens, it just does.  But with our modern appliances and potions it is not difficult to make things clean again.

John the Baptist came at a time when people had wandered away from God.  Despite the perfect world that he had created, all in harmony and balance, people had done their own thing.  They had got things wrong, marred creation, and generally made a mess.  And the mess needed sorting out.

Sorting it out had to begin with themselves.  They had to recognise that they had got things wrong and start again in the right way.

Pieter Brueghel (II) [Public domain or Public domain , via Wikimedia Commons”]

 

John come offering them baptism – an opportunity to get cleaned up and start again with God.  To have the things they had done wrong forgiven.  The symbolism of baptism is clear.  It is the opportunity to be washed clean.  But unlike the washing or the windows, not just to be cleaned to be used and get dirty all over again, but to be washed and to have the chance to turn away from one way and to another.

Many took the chance John was offering them.  They felt the need to be washed clean.

The same opportunity is still available to us today.  God offers us a clean start, a new chance.

Washing needs a good detergent.  God offers us the best way to clean up lives.

What a gift: for those who cannot forgive themselves; for those who feel that they have gone too far away; for those who feel weighed down by what they know they have got wrong; for those who don’t know what to do next…

If a time of reflection has led you to think how wrong you have got it, and you know you need to try again, God can take the burden from you.  Try it.  Let him cleanse you.

God,

I want to thank you,

that you offer me a new way,

a better way,

the right way.

But more than that,

I thank you that through you,

the things I have got wrong

need not weigh me down,

and hold me back.

You take them from me,

clean me up,

and set me on the right way.

Thank you for that opportunity –

help me to take it.

Posted in forgiveness, God, Jesus, Lectionary
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Right at the Beginning

•January 2, 2012 • Leave a Comment

In the beginning

In the beginning God

In the beginning God created

 

Right at the beginning, God could have done anything he wanted.  Sat there.  Just being.  The world, well there wasn’t a world, but life, the universe, everything was his to do as he wanted.  And God chose to create.  To make the world and us.  He made it not as we know it now, but in its perfect state.  A pure place,a place of delight, of peace and of love.  Life came to be.

Whatever we think of the creation accounts of Genesis, be they fact or poetry, we cannot get away from the understanding that God actively chose for the world to be, and was delighted by how it turned out.

How does that make us feel?

Special?  We are no accident or freak of nature.

Ashamed?  At how we have treated the world and made it far from perfect.

Inspired?  To seek to do what we can to create harmony and love where we are.

At the start of a new year we are bombarded by images and soundbites of new beginnings. May we be inspired by the God of new beginnings to live in love, peace and hope; to live in the pleasure God took; and to live with care.

Thank you Lord,

for making the world,

for loving crafting the wonders,

for allowing us to share.

As we begin another new year,

may we be inspired by your care in creation,

and live in appreciation of it.

Posted in God, Lectionary
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All that I am, I give you

•January 1, 2012 • Leave a Comment

Today we shall be joining in a Covenant Service.

A covenant Service is an opportunity to hear again God’s commitment and covenant to us, and for us to make a commitment back.  I value it as an opportunity to put into words what it is that is going on between me and God.  All he gives to me, and to be able to say out loud what our relationship is about, and commit myself anew to him.

Covenant services can be awfully powerful.  They are also quite sobering.

This is the Covenant Prayer, as we offer ourselves to God:

‘I am no longer my own but yours.
Put me to what you will,
rank me with whom you will;
put me to doing,
put me to suffering;
let me be employed for you,
or laid aside for you,
exalted for you,
or brought low for you;
let me be full,
let me be empty,
let me have all things,
let me have nothing:
I freely and wholeheartedly yield all things
to your pleasure and disposal.
And now, glorious and blessed God,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
you are mine and I am yours.’

Within all this is offered:

A new start if you need it; a new place of hope; an acceptance of how God might use us; a willingness to be what he asks of us.  We put ourselves along side God allowing and inviting him to do what he needs to.

scary stuff!

But how truly awesome that God would want to, and does use us in his ways.  And why?  Because he is ours, and we are his – what more do we need to know?  Who ever we are, wherever we are coming from, God accepts us and offers that we can be part of a relationship with him.  He loves us.  He wants us to let him love us.  And he has something he needs each one of us to do.

Will we join him?

Posted in hope, love
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