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A sermon preached on March 14^th, 2010 based upon 2Corinthians 5:16 – 21 and Luke 15:1 – 3, 11b – 32.

Six years ago or so, we hosted a “30 Hour Famine” at the church for the youth group, in which our teenagers would fast from Friday noon to Saturday dinner, staying at the church overnight.   They received pledges for the hours they fasted, with the money going to World Vision to help the hungry of the world.   The idea was to do some good while at the same time raising consciousness about the plight of the hungry of the world. 

At the last minute we had several high school students from beyond our youth group sign on to be a part of the Famine.   I was quite pleased with this until I caught wind of the fact that the newcomers saw the famine as an easy way to get credit for thirty hours of community service.  The high school academy required a certain quota of community service hours, and the students figured that by participating in a sleepover with friends they could meet their quota.   When I said there was no way I was going to sign off on 30 hours of community service, I had a parent calling me up to complain.   

Here I thought the kids were motivated to help the hungry of the world, and I find out they were out to pad their resume.  I was kind of disillusioned.  I shouldn’t have been though.   We live in a resume-driven society.  I remember going to back-to-school night when Kate was in High School and listening to her English teacher go on and on about how the focus of the class was to prepare the kids to do well on the achievement tests that were required with college applications.  It was clear to me that the teacher assumed this was what we the parents wanted to hear – that our focus was on getting our kids in the best possible colleges.  I was actually hoping to hear the teacher say something to the effect that her goal was to have the students catch hold of a passion for literature and the communication of great ideas.  Instead I heard about the importance of scoring high on the language arts achievement tests. 

As I thought about this, however, I realized that I shouldn’t be so quick to judge.  I myself learned in school how to pad my Grade Point Average — how to read with an eye for what would show up on tests, skipping over the stuff that wasn’t likely to impact my grade.  I avoided classes that had a reputation for being tough to pull an A in.   It wasn’t so much learning I was after as a padded resume that could get me into a divinity school with which I could impress people.

There is this lie we embrace that says that it is image and appearance that matters – that if you can successfully manipulate how others perceive you, well, you’re a success.   Once you embrace this lie, you can almost lose track of the difference between appearance and reality, and that’s terribly unfortunate.   You can’t really be whole until you begin to reconcile the image you present to the world with the reality of who you are inside.

The gulf between the two affects every part of our lives.  For instance, I am convinced that one of the reasons that marriages so often fail is that oftentimes — particularly when we are young and don’t know better — we look at marriage partners as another form of resume padding.   We emphasize things like physical appearance, charm, wealth and power in a potential mate when we should be looking for someone we can truly love and be loved by, for richer and for poorer, for sickness and in health. 

In the background of Paul’s letters to the Corinthians is a conflict he’s experiencing from afar with so-called “superlative apostles”, who, interestingly enough, have “letters of recommendation” to boast their resume.  Apparently they’ve been attacking Paul’s pedigree.   This morning’s epistle lesson begins with Paul saying that as a result of their encounter with Christ, “From now on… we regard no one from a human point of view…”, which is to see people from the point of view of image and appearance.  Paul acknowledges that once upon a time he viewed Jesus precisely this way.  He had no title, to degrees, no ordination.    He was — from the point of view of a resume-obsessed society — a nobody.  But Paul came to know Jesus as the real deal.

The Gospel lesson this morning begins with the Pharisees murmuring about the fact that Jesus dines with “tax-collectors and sinners.”  The Pharisees are very self-conscious about their pedigree, and it offends them that Jesus has no concern for the bashing his image is taking in their eyes as a result of the poor company he keeps.  

In response Jesus tells three parables, the last of which is the story of the father with two sons.   The elder son has done a bang-up job of building his resume.   He’s got an impeccable reputation; probably graduated from Yale Law School suma cum laude.    

In contrast, the younger son reaches a point where he concludes it’s useless to compete with his always outstanding brother.   He figures he might as well go have some fun, and so he demands his share of the inheritance, breaking his father’s heart.  He heads off for the far country where he undergoes a big time crash and burn, in the process pretty well shredding whatever was left of his image.

At this point he decides to head home, hoping for nothing more than the life of a hired servant – a roof over his head and three square meals a day.   He is astonished to discover that his father has been longing for his return, greeting him with a bear hug and a big-time homecoming party.  

The party doesn’t sit well with the older brother, however.  He’s been working his butt off his whole life crafting his image and padding his resume and the smell of the fatted calf roasting over the charcoal implies that it’s all been misguided somehow.   Inside his heart there is foul-smelling puss – bitterness and resentment and only God knows what else – all this stuff that doesn’t jive with the image of success he worked so hard to create.

So it’s strange.   The younger son with the wretched past has a bright future because of the discovery of the depth of his Father’s love.   Oddly, it took a crash and burn for him to come to this realization.  In contrast, the elder brother with his impeccable past ponders a wretched future outside of the party if he can’t let go of the golden calf of a resume. 

“If anyone is in Christ,”  sings Paul, “there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”   In the kingdom of God, what we are becoming is more important than what we’ve been.   This can be an unsettling discovery if we’ve devoted our life to building a resume out of our past.  

But the irreconcilable gulf between our outer image and what we sense is inside our heart of hearts can only be overcome by the discovery of an unconditional love holding us, come what may. 

I successfully manipulated my image until I was 31.  In the public eye, I had done everything commendably.  Then my marriage fell apart, and a divorce was added to my “pastor’s resume.”  It was simultaneously the worst thing and the best thing.   With the crumbling of my impeccable resume I discovered amazing grace and the freedom to be human.   Knowing myself to be just another one of the sinners with whom Jesus chooses to dine, I was ready to begin the life work I share with all other Christians — being an ambassador on His behalf to other poor sinners like ourselves.

So I’ve been writing these reflections for 22 days now. It has been for me the one definitive Lenten undertaking of my life. I haven’t managed to pray or eat or exercise or anything else on any kind of consistent schedule. (I am praying and eating and exercising, but, as is my way, I’m doing all these things haphazardly.) What I have managed to do for 22 days in a row is to sit down and write a few words that I publish each day. I promised to do so to those of you who are bothering to read my words, and that promise has kept me accountable.

Writing these reflections every day has been both a burden and a blessing. I appreciate better what people go through who write columns serveral days a week. Somewhere I read that living under this kind of deadline is like living underneath a windmill. As soon as you successfully manage to negotiate the blade coming towards you,  there’s another one right behind it looking to give you a good wack, and then another, and another. There is no let up. That’s the burden part. I will be glad for Easter to get here so the blades will quit descending upon me.

The blessing is that grace threads have come to me that I’m pretty sure wouldn’t have if I hadn’t forced myself to sit down at my keyboard every day. A spark of a thought — that’s all I’m initially looking for — appears from somewhere.   Can I say that God gave me that thought? To say so might be presumptuous on my part, or, it might be presumptuous on my part to say it is my own thought. Who knows for sure? The interplay between our thoughts and God’s thoughts is mysterious for sure.

The work part has to do with taking that little spark of a thought and developing it for a couple of paragraphs. It is no different, in a way, from the work involved in, say, daily cleaning your kitchen. You don’t necessarily want to do it, but in doing it so you are gratified by the order that is revealed. The universe seems a bit less chaotic. The way forward seems a bit clearer.

So thanks for your part in holding me accountable, and may you allow others to hold you accountable in similar ways. We are on this journey together.

Lord Jesus, you have bound us together in a holy fellowship of accountability, that we might do our part to receive the grace with which you would bless us. Help us to be there for one another in ways that challenge us to become what you have in mind for us. Amen.

It is important to remember that we exist in bodies.  That may seem like an utterly (uh duh!) obvious observation, but the fact of the matter is that we oftentimes forget this, expecting our state of mind to exist altogether separate from the reality of our bodily existence.

On a practical level, what this means is that qualities that we associate with our spiritual lives like gratitude, compassion, and hope will be affected by such mundane bodily questions as:  have I gotten enough rest (or exercise)?  Have I eaten well (or poorly)?   Am I constipated? (How’s that for a spiritual reflection?)  Sometimes a foul spiritual disposition may have more to do with neglect of our bodies than anything else.   As we age, our body’s energy deplenishs.  It is our arrogance that assumes we should be able transcend our bodies. God grant us the serenity to accept that which we cannot change.

The Biblical tradition declares that creation is good, which means that it is good to have a body.  We are wondrously made by our God.  Our bodies permit us to experience the beauty of creation through all our senses.  Conversely, it also implies that we will be impacted by such things as whether a particular day is sunny or cloudy and gray.

Our bodies are mortal, and that fact must be honored.    As a faithful Jew, Jesus kept the Sabbath, appreciating the body’s need for a full day off once a week.   Generally speaking, he lived in harmony with the natural rhythm of night and day, resting when the sun went down.   Walking is perhaps the best exercise, and by necessity Jesus did plenty of walking. (In certain ways, we might be better off if the automobile had never been invented.) He took his time eating his meals (there are no instances recorded of Jesus eating fast food!) His digestion surely benefited.

Bodies also have the capacity to experience pain, which Jesus knew as well.  It’s a package deal:  the capacity to experience beauty goes hand in hand with the capacity to experience pain.

The Lord’s prayer reminds us of our physicality:  “Give us this day our daily bread.” It also includes the verse, “And lead us not into temptation.” We have a hand to play in avoiding temptation.  When we are hungry, or tired, or constipated, we are more likely to succumb to the temptation to be cruel to others as well as to ourselves.

Creator God, you have declared that our earthly lives are good.   Help us to be good stewards of our bodies, that we may embrace the gift of created goodness.   In Jesus’ name.  Amen.

As the Pharisees grumbled about the fact that Jesus shared meals with “taxcollectors and sinners,” Luke records in chapter 15 three parables that Jesus told, linked together by the common theme of “the lost being found.”   If you’ve hung out in church, in all likelihood you are familiar with the first of these parables:  the story of the shepherd seeking out the one lost sheep.  You probably are even more familiar with the third: the father with the two sons.  You may be less familiar with the second parable: 

“Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’”

In the other two parables we readily assume that Jesus is saying that God is like the good shepherd and the father welcoming home the lost son. Could God be like a woman carefully searching her house for a lost coin? 

The words we use for God are always inadequate to express the divine mystery, which is part of the reason Jesus used parables to talk about what God is like rather than what God is. The images that Jesus chose broke with traditional expectations.  For instance, from a practical standpoint, the shepherd would be better off to simply cut his losses; spending all his time searching for the wayward sheep isn’t cost productive.  And the father, having been treated by his son so disrespectfully, would be expected — at the very least — to demand that the wayward son earn his place back into his good graces. 

There is something similarly unexpected going on with the image of the woman.   First off, the primary function of women in those days was to have children.  There is no reference to a maternal role with the woman in Jesus’ parable;  she exists apart from the mother role.  And second, she is associated with money – silver coins — which would have been more commonly considered the domain of men going about the business of the world, where money represents power.   Specifically, the woman in Jesus’ parable is determined not to lose a single one of her coins – the power representation. 

In the context of Pharisees who are quick to condemn the “sinners” who haven’t followed their religious conventions, Jesus presents three unconventional figures who are each determined in their own distinctive way to recover the lost, and are quick to rejoice when the lost is found.

Save us, O God, from an unwillingness to embrace the surprising ways you would come among us.   Save us from our inner Pharisee; open us to the joy of Jesus that never stops searching for the lost. In Jesus name.  Amen. 

WWJD?  What would Jesus do? The question isn’t always as simple at we assume.   We live in a society quite different from the one in which Jesus lived.   For instance, most everyone Jesus would have come in contact with would have  been  fellow Jews born and raised in Israel.   On the edge of his world were Romans who were part of the occupation forces,  a smattering of “pagans.”

Those of us living in Northern New Jersey in the 21st century dwell in the midst of extraordinary ethnic, cultural and religious diversity.   What would Jesus do if he were living in this context?     Some Christians assume that Jesus would be in an adversarial relationship with non-Christians.  They cite certain scriptures, such as where Jesus says in John’s Gospel, “I am the truth, the light and the way; no one comes to the Father apart from me.”

But what did Jesus mean by “the way?” This, of course, is at the heart of Lent, since our intention during this time is to follow in His way.  His way is distinguished by some extraordinarily challenging characteristics that don’t lend themselves to an “us against them” mentality.   For instance, he demanded that his followers love their enemies, refuse to return evil for evil, and forgive wrongs done unto them.   He called them to be merciful and peacemaking.  He made the “hero” of perhaps his best known parable a foreign pagan who showed compassion on a stranger — a man of another nationality and religion who had been left beaten and dying at the side of the road.   (Do this, he said, if you want to inherit eternal life.) He turned down the offer of political power offered to him by the devil by which he could have coerced others who disagreed from him, calling his disciples instead to servanthood.

This is indeed a difficult way, one that led Jesus to the cross, dying for not just some, but for all people.

If Jesus were walking among us today, wouldn’t he be at the forefront of efforts at reconciliation, rejoicing at every instance where people from different backgrounds and belief systems treat one another with kindness and respect?

Lord Jesus, your way is hard for us.   We prefer the age-old assumption that we are to love our family and friends and hate our enemies — those of other tribes.   Help us to see the diversity of our world as a blessing and an opportunity to learn to love as y — a setting to learn how to love as you have loved us.  Amen.

We are just about midway through Lent. Perhaps we started off Lent with some good intentions about steps we wanted to take to be more intentional in our spiritual lives, and maybe at this point we are feeling discouraged because we failed to carry out our good intentions.

If this has happened to you as it has happened to me, take heart in the fact that you have yet another confirmation (if you needed one) that you are, indeed, a fallible human being. The Gospels record repeated instances of the disciples stumbling off the path in their attempts to follow Jesus. Fortunately, Jesus never gave up on them. He won’t give up on us either.

Here is the thing to remember about stumblings: Don’t allow your stumbling to turn into an avalanche. Don’t indulge that part of yourself that wants to take advantage of the spill you’ve taken to award yourself with the title of “biggest loser” or “worst sinner” of all time.

Simply acknowledge your stumbling, take advantage of yet another opportunity to surrender your arrogance, and move on.

Simply try again.

Try again.

Lord Jesus, long ago the disciple Peter failed to carry out his pledge to stand with you in the darkness, and was tempted by despair. When we likewise fall, remind us that your hand is perpetually offered to us to help get back up again. Save us from the pride that would revel in the mud and refuse the gracious offer of your out-stretched hand. Amen.

Last week I was driving down Rt. 46 headed towards the recycling center when the familiar rumble of a flat tire forced me to pull over to the side of the road.   My tire-changing equipment in my trunk looked woefully inadequate to the job, but fortunately, I have AAA, so I called and was told someone would be by within the hour.

Finding myself in a place I’ve driven through literally thousands of times before, it was odd to be just sitting there, waiting, watching.    Most everybody else in that space was just “passing through” as I customarily was.

Perhaps because it is Lent and I was intentionally trying to be more prayerful, I figured I should take the opportunity to do so.  I resisted the urge to feel annoyed about being “stuck” there, and tried to open up to God — to be a blessing, somehow to all the people rushing by.  

Curiously, within a minute or so of consciously beginning to pray, some sort of delivery truck pulled up in front of me.  A man who looked like he was newly immigrated to this country got out of the van and walked up to my window, offering his help.   I thanked him, but said I had someone on the way to assist me.   He nodded and got back in his car and drove off. 

I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a connection between my praying and having this man stop to offer help. 

My mind is often in an altogether different place, feeling rushed and “put upon,” and at such times, help doesn’t seem much in evidence.    It gets me thinking about the impact our mental states have on the world around us. 

Jesus sent his disciples into the world with specific instructions to travel light.  He seemed to assume that help would be there when they needed it if only they were willing to be open to it.  “Ask,” he said, “and it will be given.”    AA talks about the “higher power,” with the assumption that unless you consciously, humbly reach out for the help, you cannot avail yourself to the assistance that is offered. 

Loving God, you have far more help to provide than we are willing to receive.  Slow us down when we are tempted to rush through life, and remind us, as best we can, to open our hearts and minds to your grace.    In Jesus’ name.  Amen.  

A sermon based on Luke 13:1 – 9 and preached on March 7, 2010. 

At our first meeting of the Lenten group that is focusing on the words of the Lord’s Prayer David began our time together by asking us to share some kind of work we’d always imagined doing, but hadn’t had a chance to do.   Al was sitting to David’s left and was the first to speak. I’m taking liberty here repeating what Al said, because David had us pledge to keeping the words spoken there to ourselves.    But I trust Al won’t mind. 

 It happened to be his 61st  birthday.   Al said that he was presently working as a nanny, and that there was nothing he’d rather be doing at the moment.  (Al has been on disability for the last couple of years because of a heart condition.  He works three afternoons a week taking care of three-year old Kathryn, a time that gives him much pleasure.)

These were remarkable words coming out of a man in our society.    For most men, the conversation regarding what we do for a living is something of a competition with a definite hierarchy, with things like being CEO of a Fortune 500 company, playing for the Yankees, and leading safaris for dangerous wild game being at the top of manliness.  For a man to say he is working as a nanny and content to do so is definitely counter-cultural, and it was liberating for the rest of us men present in the room. 

Child care isn’t a high status position in our society, and it certainly isn’t compensated well.   But there is nothing more important than children receiving good, loving care.   At the heart of good child care, is paying attention – noticing the little things in the little one’s life.  It requires great patience.  

It just so happens that these are the same qualities that are required for the cultivation of our spiritual lives.   It was Mother Teresa who said, “We can do no great things, we can only do little things with great love.”  Or, as the Apostle Paul put it, you may be a mover and shaker with a Fortune 500 company, you may hit for power with the Yankees, you may have the balls to take on lions and tigers, but if you have not love, you are nothing.  The Gospel lesson from Luke is a surefire Lenten one, focusing our attention on death and the way it shows up unexpectedly.   People tell Jesus about recent news of sudden, violent death.   A bunch of Galileans have been killed by the Roman Governor Pilate and his men.   Those recounting the story may have had two reasons for telling Jesus about this violence.  First, perhaps they hoped that it would move him to get behind a violent revolution, throwing out Pilate and all the Romans.  And second, perhaps they’re looking for some reassurance.   There is a strain of thought in the Old Testament, found most notably in Deuteronomy that puts forth the notion that if you do good and follow the Law, you will be rewarded with a good and happy life, and if you do bad and break the Law, you will be punished with misery.   Did these Galileans receive their violent death because of some kind of bad behavior on their parts?  Can we stay clear of such violence for ourselves by keeping our nose clean and keeping on the straight and narrow of God’s Law?

Jesus disappointed  both motivations.  He didn’t take up arms against the Romans. And he says that they had all fallen short of God’s glory and they all needed to repent – turn around, start walking with  God, and if not, the same fate would likely befall them as well.  (It is also worth noting that Jesus was the holiest man who ever lived, and all his righteous living didn’t save him from dying a terrible death nailed to a cross.)  

On the Monday following our first meeting of the Lord’s Prayer group, Al started feeling quite sick while working at the church to provide hospitality for a bunch of clergy who were on hand to hear a speaker about Spiritual Formation.  Gail took him to the hospital, and within a matter of days, Al had a diagnosis of acute leukemia, a life threatening disease that requires a stiff inducement of chemotherapy to knock the leukemia cells into remission.   Following the chemotherapy, if all goes well he will recuperate and prepare for a bone marrow transplant that could hold out the possibility of a cure.  

This is heavy stuff indeed, bringing to the consciousness of us all how assaults on our health can strike us out of the blue, threatening our very life.   Jesus proceeded to tell a little parable about gardening, another favorite activity , along with cooking, of Al’s.  Said Jesus, a man owned a vineyard in one corner of which a fig tree was planted.  After three years, however no figs had appeared on the tree.  The owner of the vineyard is angry with the fruitless fig tree, taking up as it does the space and nutrients.   He wants to cut it down.  The gardener, however, pleads for more time for the fig tree.   He will plant some extra manure around the fig tree, and with a little extra attention and tender care, well, who knows, maybe next year the fig tree put forth figs.  If not, says the gardener, you can go ahead and cut it down. 

In my experience the parables of Jesus are wild and open to insight in surprising ways from a variety of perspectives.   The commentators I read on this parable, however, tended to reduce it to an allegory:  The owner of the vineyard is God the Father, demanding justice; the Gardener is Jesus the Son, tempering the justice with mercy.   We are the figless fig trees.  But what if find we can identify with all three?   How easily we feel condemnation for parts of ourselves, as well as of others, that strike us at a given moment as useless.    But can we also identify with the gentle gardener, who like a good nanny, attentively pays attention to the places in ourselves and in others that seem to be barren, hoping instead to cultivate fruit heretofore unimagined from the tree?

On the third Thursday of each month I go over to Troy Hills Nursing Center to lead a worship service.  I usually get about a dozen old women present who are really appreciative of my presence there.  It’s curious, but a number of the women come at this little parable from a different direction.  They look at their lives in the terms of this world and they judge themselves useless.  They cannot walk, nor do any of the things they have always thought of as “work.”   They feel like figless fig trees, and wonder what’s taking the gardener so long to get on with chopping them down. 

I say to them, “Try to take a breath.”  If they can, then that is the most concrete sign that God wants them to go on living.   They do indeed have a holy purpose.  They’ve been missing it because they’ve been looking to high up at the things the world counts as important.  What they can do, and do better than most, is pray.  They can host in their bodies the holy presence of God, and in doing so, their very bearing becomes a blessing to whomever they come in contact.  They have the capacity to bless a troubled world in ways they will never be able to know the extent of.   All that is required is that they trust, and open their hearts in love.  In the end, this is the kind of fruit that truly matters – the fruit that the whole creation longs to taste.

A couple of days ago I talked about the parallel between the disciplined training of the Olympic athlete and the spiritual disciplines that we are called to engage in to form our inner life.  Jesus would have been shaped by a life time of praying the 150 psalms.   In turning again and again to these words his inner life was shaped in obedience to his Abba (Daddy) God, in whose hands he daily placed his life.

We can only imagine, for instance, how many hundreds of times Jesus prayed these words from Psalm 139:

Where can I go from your spirit?
   Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
   if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning
   and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
   and your right hand shall hold me fast.
If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me,
   and the light around me become night’,
even the darkness is not dark to you;
   the night is as bright as the day,
   for darkness is as light to you.

For it was you who formed my inward parts;
   you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
   Wonderful are your works;
that I know very well.

My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
   intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.
In your book were written
   all the days that were formed for me,
   when none of them as yet existed.
How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God!
   How vast is the sum of them!
I try to count them—they are more than the sand;
   I come to the end —I am still with you.

There is something both comforting and unsettling about God’s knowledge of us.   We are here by God’s will, not by mere chance.   On the one hand, this knowledge means there really is no need to stress over our lives; God already knows where our lives are headed, and God will be there with us in every step we take.   And yet there may well be times we want to flee from such knowledge == to be allowed to simply live our lives as though nothing much mattered.   

But our lives truly do matter.   God attended to every aspect of our formation in our mother’s womb. 

And we cannot be taken out of God’s light, no matter how dark the world’s darkness may seem, or how deep our own personal sense of darkness may become.    We still belong to God.

God whose knowledge is infinitely greater than our little knowledge, we would ponder your greatness, and trust in your grace.   Give us the courage to embrace your presence in our lives,  that instead of our lame attempts at fleeing from you, we might instead walk consciously with you.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen. 

I spent the better part of the day at the hospital with Al and Gail.    The hospital – especially the oncology ward — is a place we all would rather not be, but you certainly meet some truly good souls there.   The woman in her eighties, for instance who came by as a “volunteer patient advocate” handing out shawls made by other volunteers.  In the course of the conversation she mentioned that years earlier she had undergone a mastectomy, and that she had lost her husband to cancer.   But here she was giving three days a week of her time to provide some comfort to people dealing with cancer,  using the empathy and knowledge she had accumulated to help others.   There was the volunteer who came by handing out Daily Records, who offered a “joke of the day” as well.  (Al gave her one as well to pass on as she went about her rounds.)    There were the competent and compassionate young nurses and the therapeutic touch specialist who provided care for caregivers as well as patients.    The oncologist gave out complex information regarding the dire diagnosis while at the same time conveying hope,  providing  a hug when needed as well. 

The light shines brightly in the darkness.    There are signs of God’s grace if you watch for them, and more often than not they come in the form of simple human kindness.  

Dear God, thank you for all those persons we meet in the course of our lives who make the rough paths gentler.  Give us strength to be such signs for others as well.  In Jesus’ name.   Amen.