Eruption of Thanksgiving...

To give thanks insinuates something to be thankful for; it points to something beyond ourselves that has impacted our lives in such a way that our response is one of gratitude and praise.

Today many of us will find a multitude of “items” or “people” who fit this bill, and truth be told, many of us do have a plethora of things and/or people for which we are thankful.

But what if we stopped and took a moment... What if in the midst of all the food, football and fellowship we are missing the deeper, underlying foundation of thankfulness?

I wonder for those who bear the mark of Jesus - for those who call themselves followers of The Way, how many will illumine the cross on this day?

It is the cross where thanksgiving is found…it is where thanksgiving erupts.

As soon as we gaze upon the cross our hearts, our eyes are taken to the scene of the manager hidden away in the dusty, dirty, dark crevasse of a mountainside. Yes, thanksgiving is found from the cradle to the cross for it is here that we find the One who is the ultimate giving of thanks…Jesus Christ.

For God so loved the world that He gave… Our giving of thanks is the direct result of being given Love. That is, we must always remember that hanging on the cross is the One born in the manger—not just any baby, but the One who was with God, the One who is God, the One who is with us...The One who is Love...

Might some time today we give pause to the majesty of the cross? Might we stop to thank the One who gave of Himself so that we might receive the truth of ourselves? Might we take a moment and enter the drama of salvation so as to become the faithful performance of love?

Let your celebrations be magnificent this day! Stand, dance, shout for joy! And in your moments of bliss don't forget the One who is thankful for you! Amen Jesus!

Waters of thankfulness

Have you ever stopped to think where your focus is? Do you see self before you see Savior? Is the image of your creation self or Savior?

Many might balk at the aforementioned questions, but reality is, if one does not know who they are, they can never know what they have or where they are going.  For if we don't know who we are, then the reflection we will see in the water will not be the One who is the Almighty, but the one who is me. 

As we enter into the season of thanksgiving, a knowledge of who we are is crucial if we ever want to jump into the waters of thankfulness. Thankfulness is a state of the heart, and thus, it is rooted in who we are. Engaging who we are in light of who Jesus is calls for a heart that is passionately pursuing God. That is, when we seek the light of Christ so that His will might increase as my will decreases we find the truth of life. But so much of faith today witnesses not the increase of Jesus, but His decrease.

The decrease in Jesus has led to the decrease in thankfulness. For true thankfulness comes when the center of our hearts is occupied not by self, but by Savior. That is, we cannot find contentment, peace or joy if our focus in life is the increase of self. Only when we find ourselves seeking to live out the truth of decreasing will we find our joy, our peace, our contentment, our thankfulness increasing.

John the Baptist’s response to Jesus is one that many in his day as well as ours today, find unintelligible—namely, abounding joy and thankfulness over himself getting smaller and Jesus getting bigger.

“The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom's voice. Therefore this joy of mine is now complete. He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3.29-30).

Talk about perspective. John does not try to climb to the stars, seize heaven’s throne or take matters into his own hands; he receives everything he has, including his station in life, from God. And unlike many today, John’s Messiah complex was not about self but about living for the Messiah. And in his decrease, John’s joy was complete.

To decrease is not a popular concept because it calls for us to let go of our control in life. It calls for us to give ourselves wholly to the way from above as opposed to the ways of the earth. And make no mistake about it, Satan will strike against our attempts to decrease. He will find what you are good at and make it your god. If you are good at finances, leadership, communication, athletics, music, academics, you name it, Satan will use your strengths so as to strangle out any thoughts of decrease. Daily he pushes us toward a mentality of increase so that eventually our lives seek to live out the truth of my will as opposed to Thy Will.

Only when we embrace the Spirit can the truth of our lives become, “He must increase but I must decrease.” And in our decrease we come to witness the beautiful truth of increase. We come to an increasingly greater understanding of the love that has been shed for our sake. Yes, in Christ and through the Spirit our hearts are filled with heaven’s joy creating an uprising in thankfulness that can do nothing but overflow into loving the other just as we have been loved.

The “tude” of Righteousness

The News: what craziness this thing we call life is all about. Or maybe this is just the script we are attempting to write on our own?

Whenever I read the news I seem to ask myself: "Self (I like talking to myself, because I always have an attentive audience :0) what the heck does it mean to say I worship a Just God? Like Pilate I wonder what is truth, what is justice?" On Monday of this week, (Jan 21) the paradox of life could not have been more apparent: America inaugurates its first Black President for his second term and on the day this nation stops to celebrate the life a civil rights pioneer, the POTUS uses the very bible of the Rev Martin Luther King Jr to be sworn in by; on this day, a 15 year old boy kills 3 siblings and his parents; on this day 37 hostages are killed in Algeria; on this day the POTUS hails civil rights for "all" people - black, white, gay, straight - moving the discussion on to the road less traveled thus far; on this day the S&P 500 and Dow Jones both finished in the green (with earnings) while nearly 1.3 billion people got by on less than $1 for the day (hardly a gain); on this day millions went about life with hardly a thought of the "other"; on this day, I wonder what Jesus thinks about our nation, His church, me and my role in His drama of salvation?

So often I remain blind to the reality of the action on the world's stage. I become bent on the "tude" of self as opposed to the "tude" of the Savior (cf. Phil 2). The injustice I appear to face always has a way of eventually making me aware of the lack of justice all over the world. Bummer that I am so often blind to injustice until it lands smack on my doorstep! I live just as Alice in Chains song "Man in the box" sings:

I'm the man in the box
Buried in my crap
Won't you come and save me, save me

Lord, would you open my heart, my eyes, my ears so that I would be one who "hungers and thirsts for righteousness" (cf. Matt 5.5-10) so that I might be one who seeks to be a peacemaker thereby helping "justice roll down like a river, and righteousness, like a never-ending stream" (Amos 5.24).

In reading through the Beatitudes, I was awakened to how so often the Lord uses the so called "injustices" in my life to re-orientate my focus back to Him. There are real injustices that I neglect because I don't want to be inconvenienced by them, be challenged by them, or what's worse I don't want them to destroy my own comfort because in the end I am nothing more than self-focused. This is how Eugene Peterson translates Habakkuk 2.4: "Look at the man, bloated by self-importance--full of himself but soul-empty. But the person in right standing before God through loyal and steady believing is fully alive, really alive." Most of us understand or have heard this verse as "the just or righteous will live by faith."

A study of the four times this verse appears in the Bible sheds light on the attitude or the "tude" of the righteous. We have a choice in how we respond to life, the question we have to ask ourselves is what foundation will we build our responses on and from?

Helen Keller wrote:

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.

For those who call themselves a follower of Christ, our character and our response to life is in light of His response to us, and this is not always easy nor does it often times lack pain and suffering, but we are called to respond to life as our Savior did, with joy and praise! We who follow the Crucified King are called to live out His insane love through actions that the world will see as being nothing more than pure insanity (cf. John 10.20). We are called to participate in His Eucharistic (self-giving) performance by and through our own self-giving (Eucharistic) performances. So as the author of Hebrews writes, "Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God" (Heb 12.2). Let us live out the "tude" of righteousness as we live out the insane love of Jesus...

Dude Jesus you rock my world everyday! Thank you!

Living out our thanksgiving word

The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him.

 - Romans 8.16-17   

Thanksgiving: a day in America when many will sit down with friends and family and embark on a crazy food journey! Before diving into the turkey, stuffing, cranberries and the like, might we first search the depths of our hearts so as to remember the dramatic intervention taken on our behalf? Years ago the Godhead chose to shower its lavish love through creating - that is in Their creation of the human.  For through creation, the glory of God was set forth through the unimaginable grips of eternal love.  As it is said in Genesis: 

In the beginning God created the Heaven and the earth.  And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the waters.  And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.  And God said Let there be light, and there was light… Then God said, "Let Us make them in Our image, according to Our likeness;" (1.1-3,26)

What is crazy is that the outpouring of love did not end with creation. Some 2000 years ago we were given the ultimate performance of love through the suffering and death of Jesus. 

God lived out His love and for this we have a plethora to be thankful for. So what then is the meaning and foundation of thankfulness? In attempting to answer such a question we should seek to look further than the beautiful landscape we inhabit and truly grasp the underlining meaning of gratitude and thanksgiving.  For it is written that with the death of Christ, we were given the key to enter into God’s heavenly paradise.  We have been made heirs to the eternal riches of Christ through our relationship with Him - an inheritance that we are called to live out here and now - to live out the hope of tomorrow, today.   

I am thankful that the God loves us so insanely that He did not simply seek to create and then walk away. Nope. He created and loved so insanely that He chose to give His life away for us so that today every single one of us can celebrate the breath we just took in, we can celebrate the look of beauty in the eyes of the other, can give thanks for being the "beloved" of God. So instead of simply giving thanks, let us begin here and now to live out our thanksgiving word by loving and serving the "other!"