Most of the time we are not fully in alignment with God. There is a distance between God’s ways and our ways. And there is an invitation...to swim in the river of God’s movement. To do so, we will need to let go of our pride, of our determination to do it our own way. We will need to stop striving, earning, climbing, getting it right, proving ourselves worthy.

People hurt and abuse each other and the web of creation. And God stays present in all of this, all of our mess, and keeps right on being God, creating whole worlds out of chaos, breathing life into piles of dust, taking the wreckage of our lives and making something beautiful out of them in spite of us.

Our tendency when we’re hurt is to turn the other into a monster, to depersonalize them and ascribe to the other all manner of horrific attributes, because then, instead of resolving the matter, we have an enemy; can seek revenge and retaliate – sweet, sweet revenge. And that feels far easier, somehow, than actually resolving differences.

God, through Her Grace, will give us strength to lose our life and carry that cross in Christ’s work of forgiveness and reconciliation in the world. We do that in community… Christian community…right here….when we pray and meditate, sing and break bread, listen and learn, laugh and cry, share and support, and partner in solidarity with others to work for peace and justice together.

Each one of us – of any and every gender – carry within, safely in baskets of our own making – the sparks of hope. Do not fear Pharaoh; fear God. Seek those who conspire to do whatever is needed to keep that hope alive.

Is justice ever freely given or must it be demanded by those in want? Must justice be demanded even from the Messiah, the son of God? Does justice come only when we’ve had enough...and rise up with insistence, with the fierce determination of a mother who seeks life for a child? Is there justice for us to demand in our lives?

The difficulty of life together comes in the continued reality that brothers still threaten and capture one another, leaving their siblings trapped and vulnerable. It is overwhelming to live in a world where suffering exists in large part because of the ways we mistreat one another.

It is God’s desire to feed us—not later, now. The feast is offered now, whether we are in our homeland or in exile, whether we are found or lost, filled with joy or parched in heart and soul. The banquet prepared by God for all the beloved children of God is here before us, right in front of us.

If you were to describe the kingdom of God, what sort of story would you tell? Maybe more than anything else, the kingdom of heaven is a willingness to leave the final judgment to the angels and to keep our eyes and ears and hearts open to what God is doing all around us and within us.

That urge to judge, to separate into good and bad, seems to exist in all humans-as if we aren't all hybrid plants--wheat and weeds grafted into one stalk. As if we can tell in an instant what a person’s character is-- and is if we get to be judge and jury rolled into one. And one of the obvious problems with “easy” classifications is that we can write off those we deem to be weeds--judging them to be less valuable than others and dismissing them--until eventually we have dehumanized them completely.