Email from Church of the Redeemer

Morning Devotion for the Season after Pentecost

August 7, 2024

Invitatory

Come, let us sing to the Lord

and shout with joy to the Rock who saves us.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen.

Psalm 119:105-112

Nun Lucerna pedibus meis

Your word is a lantern to my feet

and a light upon my path.

I have sworn and am determined

to keep your righteous judgments.

I am deeply troubled;

preserve my life, O Lord, according to your word.

Accept, O Lord, the willing tribute of my lips,

and teach me your judgments.

My life is always in my hand,

yet I do not forget your law.

The wicked have set a trap for me,

but I have not strayed from your commandments.

Your decrees are my inheritance for ever;

truly, they are the joy of my heart.

I have applied my heart to fulfill your statutes

for ever and to the end.

Meditation-Rebecca Northington

I have been thinking a lot about this fall and the theme that RYG will be focusing on: joy. Coming out of covid Tory and I devised a three year plan theologically, scripturally and spiritually that we wanted to use to focus our meetings and classes around. We spent a year on lamentation and really explored the many ways we witness grief and suffering through scripture, poetry, artwork and literature; as well as the physical expression in kickboxing, yoga, service, meditation and immersion in nature. We tried to encourage the kids to access their pain, process it, thereby learning how to heal; rather than pushing their laments aside and muscling through life. Lamentation is a part of life-hard stop. Healing is a part of overcoming.

This last year we focused on the word and concept of surrender; not in a creepy way, but as an acknowledgement that from our birth we are in relationship. We are born from flesh and cannot survive without care. But we are also born in relationship to something bigger; call it God, the divine, a greater network of humanity-whatever makes you comfortable. The bottom line is we cannot exist alone. We need others and they need us. Talking about surrendering reminds these kids it is ok to ask for help. It is ok to ask someone why they think a certain way or do things a certain way. Being in relationship and in community means we must work together, and in an ideal world, this is centered around love.

This year our theme is joy. As I plan for the fall experiences and discussions I am not blind to the state of our country and larger world. Sometimes joy feels superficial or unrealistic. Maybe for some it feels selfish or ignorant. How can we experience joy when there is so much suffering, sadness and vitriol? But that is the point of these three years: expressed lamentation and conscious surrendering should lead us all to choose joy. There is so much sadness in the world. The Bible reminds us that there always has been. We cannot overcome that sadness alone, we must accept the hand of our fellow humans in relationship, whether we drop our basket at the grocery store, have an awful day and need a word of encouragement, or find ourselves paralyzed by the state of the nightly news. We do not have to lament alone. We should take care of one another and in that there is profound joy.

Maybe it is a choice as the psalm for today reminds us, and we will not be disappointed in our joy when we choose to follow God’s commandments and Christ’s commandments. In that choice we spread our joy to others, helping them to overcome their suffering and to surrender to the role that we can all play in one another's lives. We can all choose joy, thereby giving joy. As the Archbishop Desmund Tutu said in his wonderful book on joy with the Dalai Lama, “Discovering more joy does not save us from the inevitability of hardship and heartbreak. In fact, we may cry more easily, but we will laugh more easily too. Perhaps we are just more alive. Yet as we discover more joy, we can face suffering in a way that ennobles rather than embitters”.

It is not weak to choose joy, it is brave. It doesn’t mean you don’t have fear, it just rejects fear as the guiding force. It does not mean you do not see the pain and suffering and vitriol, it means you hope to overcome it; as Jesus did.

A prayer for disturbance by Desmund Tutu:

Disturb us, O Lord

when we are too well-pleased with ourselves

when our dreams have come true because we dreamed too little,

because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, O Lord

when with the abundance of things we possess,

we have lost our thirst for the water of life

when, having fallen in love with time,

we have ceased to dream of eternity

and in our efforts to build a new earth,

we have allowed our vision of Heaven to grow dim.