UCC Daily Devotional

Let this day, this Ash Wednesday, be a day for fewer words all day long. Let it be a day for some stillness, for paying quiet attention to mystery, to beauty, to the sacred.

Cheap grace drives you to inconsequentiality. Grace drives us to consequentiality, not the kind that makes us self-important so much as the kind that pours out, overflows, gets everything that was all dry all wet again. We are NOT to sin more so that grace may abound. Just the opposite: we are to make our mark as creatures of a God that was not fooling around.

This President's Day, I want to say a prayer for them all, past, present and future, for seeking a job that strikes me as impossible. And I pray for a more peaceful political culture in which an impossible job might be redeemed.

The truth is, when we choose to improve the world through selfless service we come to know a joy beyond our comprehension.

It's the loving vigil and simple care we show others that makes the difference

It's the loving vigil and simple care we show others that makes the difference.

I've recently become something of a runner, and the more I've done it, the more convinced I've become that the running metaphors one finds all over the New Testament actually work quite well.

Today's reading from the Letter to the Hebrews is all about discipline. God disciplines God's sons and daughters. The message is that God's discipline is an expression of God's love.

Sometimes religion can be a means of escape from the urgent realities of now.

There is something about the bond that is formed over that meal that leads us towards the light. And like those meals with our children, the more we commune together, the stronger we become.

The man crippled since birth in today's story began to ask for money from Peter and John. He didn't ask for what he really needed but got it anyway: the ability to stand up and walk and even jump and leap for joy. Now he could take care of himself!

The leper may have had that dreadful disease of leprosy but he was also full of trust. If you have ever wanted for trust, you might even be jealous of his skin condition. Being bereft of trust is an acute kind of poverty.

Names are important. A name is so much more than, say, a label attached to a jar. We identify with our names. In fact, I feel so closely identified with my name that if I had a different name I feel like I would be a different person.

Make no mistake about it, our identities are confirmed as much by our foes as they are by our friends. We are known not just by the company we keep, but by the haters we incite. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus warns his followers to "Beware when all people speak well of you."

As an adult, it took me far too long to make a will. Who wants to consider the time of one's death? I didn't. Besides, there was nothing complicated about my estate, I reasoned. Anything I had would just go to my family. Wouldn't that just happen naturally?

For which we can be grateful. "Perfect" would have been like, "don't touch a thing." "It's perfect, don't mess it up." It's complete, finished . . . perfect.

There is nothing like an evaluation to shake things up. Paul and Barnabas are doing a review. They are taking the risk of looking back. If you love something, like the gospel, enough, you won't dare be unaccountable to it.

I'm not saying every committee meeting the church has ever held mattered; most of them didn't. I'm saying that all institutions are annoying, AND that the church is the one that brought your faith to you. So when you're feeling ground down by yours, right after you refuse to chair another task force, but before you decide to quit forever, just remember this: the work you're doing is at least as much for your grandkids as it is for you.

You may not be able to find today's reading in the regular part of your Bible. Chances are good that it is hidden in the footnotes in very small print with a line that says, "Not part of the best manuscripts, probably added later." Mark, scholars tell us, really ends at 16: 8 with the words, "They said nothing to anyone for they were afraid." That doesn't so much end as it breaks off. But then someone came along and added on. Wanted to pretty it up.

Relationships, love, and even our own faith leave us "restless," as Augustine put it, until our hearts rest in the assurance only God provides and nothing less.