“ALL THINGS COME OF THEE, O LORD"

At the Offertory when there is no music the priest lifts the monetary offerings on high toward heaven, then the chalice and paten, and says, while doing so, "All things come of Thee, O Lord." And the congregation responds, "And of Thine own have we given Thee." Prosaic language which simply means that God has given us everything and what we are doing in our offering is simply giving back a small part of all that God has given to us.

We know all that. We're no dummies. We know that God created everything – and still creates – and that we are the recipients of that creation. What is even more wonderful is that we are the greatest result of that creation. We are God's best work. And everything we are, everything about us: our ability to sing, to think, to dance, to work, to dunk a basketball – or the lack of those abilities – are the result of God's creating us the way God chose to do so.

And so everything we can do and everything we do is directly the result of what God has done, and is still doing, for us. The possessions we have, the money we earn, everything, in the final analysis do not belong to us: they're all God's. God simply puts us in charge of those talents and possessions. And so when we give away some of what is in our charge, we are not giving away something that is ultimately ours but something that is ultimately God's. We are giving back.

We know that, too. But sometimes it is so difficult to give away some of what we have accumulated because we worked so hard for it. And we did. There is no denying that. God did not simply plop the possessions into our hands. We had to use the raw materials God graced us with to earn, purchase, build up those possessions and those bank accounts. And we worked hard to do so.

What God calls us to be are good stewards of all that we are, all that we possesses. God also reminds us that the gifts we have been given and the ability to use those gifts well were not given to us for us alone. They were given to us, and deep down we know this to be true, to share with those who are less blessed. And they were given to us to help us become even more blessed.

When we give some of "thine own" to our church, we do so because we know the importance our church, our church family, is in our lives. We are better people because of this place and these people. We come to this place and are among these people because we are fed here – with the Eucharist, with fellowship, with education. That may sound self-serving, even coming from someone who is retired (sort of). And it is. But unless we are fed spiritually, we die.

God blesses us so that we may live and in so living and in so giving some of what God has given to us, we give life to one another and to others. We may never see the results of our sharing, just as others do not see the results of what they shared with us from their giving that has made us who we are today. None of that matters. What matters is that we are thankful for our blessings and for being able to share them with others.

DARE TO BE BOLD

One of the first prayers my Mom taught me to learn/memorize was the Lord’s Prayer, or as we called it “The Our Father”. Through my first many years of going to Mass, I said the prayer to myself as the priest said it in Latin. When the liturgy was allowed to be said in the vernacular, I could finally pray along with the priest who introduced us to the prayer with “we dare to say”. When I migrated to the Episcopal Church as a priest, I have been leading into the prayer with “we are bold to say”.

Do we dare to pray or are we bold to pray? Do we dare to approach God in prayer or are we so bold that we stand right up to God and make our wants known? They are wants as well as needs that we are about to verbalize in that prayer. Do we stand in awe of our God or do we take God for granted and lay our wants and needs on the line certainly and surely expecting that God will listen and respond?

It’s a little bit of both, I think, and not too much of either. It’s not a case of “How could you dare to approach God in prayer, you little Nobody?” Nor is it “I’m not afraid of God and not afraid to tell God want I want, so there!” It is somewhere in between. And, I think, that is what all prayer is about.

We stand before God in prayer knowing, certainly believing, that God listens and God cares but also aware of our many failings and shortcomings, certainly aware of our sinfulness and selfishness. We know we are not worthy to ask, sometimes wonder if we should ask, but ask anyway with a little trembling in our bones. At least that should be the case and certainly is when we are in serious need of God’s help.

On the other hand we know Jesus told us that we should pray. He always did. That is our example. He even taught us how to pray (The Lord’s Prayer). Thus, we can very well be so bold as to put before God in prayer our cares and concerns, our needs and our wants, and not be hesitant or afraid to do so. And so we do even as we know that God knows our needs even before we ask.

But we have to ask. So we dare to be bold. We come to God in prayer humble enough to know that in many ways we are unworthy even to dare to ask but bold enough to ask anyway. What is even bolder is that our asks come off as demands: Give us our daily bread, forgive us or sins and trespasses, lead us not into temptation, deliver us from evil. We’re daring to be bold enough to tell God what to do!

And so we should. I mean, if we want to blame anyone for taking this attitude, we can blame Jesus. He taught us how to pray. He told us the words to use. And so we do. Then we, as always, leave the rest in God’s hands. On our part, we have to dare enough and be bold enough to do our part in bringing about what we are praying for. Sometimes it is not much and sometimes it is a lot. Prayer is always a two-way street. Dare to be bold.

DISEASE AND DIS-EASE

No one likes to be ill. When we are, our life gets messed up. Sometimes it is completely in shambles. We are at sixes and sevens, not knowing what to do or where to turn because our once seemingly tranquil state is now turned upside down. We’ve all been there and will be there again – and probably again and again in this life. Illness comes with the territory of being human.

And so does being dis-eased when disease strikes us, whatever that disease is. It does not have to be traumatic. It can be a simple head cold that knocks us for a loop; and, again, it does not matter how big or small that loop is. We’re rolling with it and not knowing where it will take us because we’re not in control even as we down the aspirin or whatever meds we are using to get the body under control. That is discomforting and making us feel not the least bit at ease.

We’ve been there. We may be there right now. If you are like me, whenever a disease brings on that feeling of dis-ease, especially if the disease is more than sniffles and sneezing, but a real loss of control over what we are to do next, God comes into the picture almost automatically. We may, thankfully, have a great support group to help us through this trauma who try to bring some sort of ease back into our lives, but we know we also need God’s help. So we turn to God in prayer.

That’s all well and good and what we should do. But why is it that it so often takes a real disease that makes us so dis-eased that we turn to God? Why does it seem than God is only on stand-by duty rather than being on duty all the time? Yes, we don’t want to bother God with the coughing and rasping. We can handle that dis-easiness. It’s no big deal. It’ll pass soon enough if not as soon as we would like it. But we can buck up and plow through.

We can go through the day and even days on end without ever giving any real thought to how God is a part of our daily lives both on God’s part and on our part. God, of course, is always a part of our lives. That’s God’s doing. We are not in control of that and can do nothing about it – thank God! Our doing is to consciously make God a part of our lives on a daily basis and not just when our life seems to be going to hell in a handcart because we are so dis-eased because of some disease.

Easy to say and I’ve just said it. Hard to do. We get so caught up in our daily living sometimes, oftentimes, that it is so easy to take God’s presence – and caring and concern for us – for granted. But we do. We do. And then when we turn to God for help in a real need, we come a-begging rather than knowing and feeling that God knows are needs before we ask and don’t really need to ask. Realizing that truth may not and probably will not make the disease less painful but it will bring ease to our dis-ease which is often comfort enough and enough to get us through the day, one day at a time.

SOMETIMES A METAPHOR FOR LIFE

Awhile back in the comic strip Shoe Shoe is stopped by a traffic cop who says to him: “Do you realize you’re headed the wrong way on a one-way street?” Shoe’s response: “Talk about a metaphor for life.”

Indeed, talk about it! We’ve all driven down that street, sometimes, is seems, in the middle of the night with our headlights out in a strange city. We wonder how we ever got there as being there was never our intention. And we wonder even more how we will find our way out. Such a situation may not happen these days with most everyone having a smart phone with a GPS app included.

Unfortunately the human body does not come with a built in GPS to guide us through life and prevent us from driving down a one-way street the wrong way or to make sure we always drive in the right direction to the place we are supposed to go. Even more, there is nothing internal that even lets us know what that right place is. There are times when we fly by the seat of our pants through life hoping we are on the right street going in the right direction to the place we are supposed to be heading.

Fortunately for us and fortunately for the world, those times are not all that common even though, when they do occur, we think we’ve been there too many times already and should have known better or prepared better when we started out. For if those times were all too many, our life would be a mess. And if everyone were like us, imagine what a mess the world would be in!

Come to think of it, maybe the world is in the mess the world is in because all too many of us keep driving down one-way streets the wrong way. What is worse, we often do not discover that that is what we are doing until some sort of traffic cop stops us and prevents us from going further and getting into real trouble. But not always and with no the harm we bring to ourselves and to those we injure because we are going the wrong way.

In fact, we do have an internal GPS that is supposed to show us the way through life, keep us on the straight and narrow, and prevent us from harming ourselves and everyone else. That GPS is our faith. For the most part in this life, we know when we are heading down the wrong street in the wrong direction. We know when we are doing what we know we should not be doing and not doing what we know we should be doing. And we do not need some kind of policeman to stop us in our tracks and call us on it. We know.

We knew when we started down the wrong road. We knew it when we were travelling that road. And we knew we had no one else to blame but ourselves. The opposite is true as well. Wouldn’t a better metaphor for life and for this new year be this: always drive to the right place in the right way in the right direction? We can. Our faith will show us how and the way. Happy New Year!

GENEROSITY

Someone, and I apologize for not remembering who, once observed that if we are generous, our whole life will show it; and if we are selfish, it will infect our very soul. Isn’t that the truth? We certainly know that to be when we stand off to the side and observe the way people whom we consider to be very selfish and self-serving act. Everything is about them and only them.

They do things for others and can be very generous, but they do so only because what they are doing is advantageous to them. Then they brag about how generous they are and expect to be praised to the highest heavens. When they are not, they take offense and cannot understand why they are criticized.

It is certainly quite easy to point out those selfish and self-serving people. When we do, we often take delight in castigating and condemning them and their behavior and their attitude. Maybe it even makes us feel better in some, probably perverse, manner. We all do it; or maybe I should say, I know I do it and probably should not assume that everyone else does it too.

In our smugness what we often fail to do is look into that mirror that makes us take a good look at ourselves and our actions. Why do we do what we do? Is it out of generosity, out of our concern for those who are less blessed, out of a desire to lift up those who are down? Or is it done to make us feel good about ourselves and, perhaps, to reap praise and recognition from others?

My guess is that our egos never get out of the way. There is always a little of the what’s-in-it-for me in our actions. There has to be, of course. Everything we do begins with the self and we can never take the self out of anything we do. No one can be generous for me just as no one can be selfish for me. The ego, the I, is always front and foremost whether we realize or recognize it or not.

The point is simply that we need to be honest with ourselves, brutally honest. That is often difficult to do. It is not wrong or selfish to feel good about helping another, about sharing our gifts and talents. That is why they were given to us in the first place, why we were blessed by God. And while we enjoy that feeling, we must also be thankful for the blessings given that we have shared.

Selfishness is insidious. It can grab us by the neck and choke us to death before we even realize it. Selfishness often masks itself as, well, generosity, and tries to convince us that we are so wonderful and giving and even loving when actually what we are doing is simply being, well, selfish. Generosity is also insidious all in the right way. Better to be chocked by it; but that can only happen if we deliberately keep selfishness in check and always try to look as to how we can share our blessings in thankfulness for them.