Tuesday - December 26, 2023

SCRIPTURE  Exodus 23:2 “You shall not follow a majority in wrongdoing.” WORDS OF HOPE There are several stories in scripture about characters who act like bullies. Perhaps the clearest example is Goliath, who repeatedly taunts, insults, and intimidates the Israelites, challenging them to send someone to fight him. His enormous size and threatening words are intended to make them feel powerless. Goliath is an example of an individual bully. A form of bullying that receives less attention is group bullying . In Scripture, Joseph’s brothers are jealous of him, mock him, strip off his special robe, throw him into a pit, and sell him into slavery. The story is especially powerful because Joseph is isolated and outnumbered. His brothers use their collective power against someone who cannot defend himself. Eventually, they choose to sell him rather than kill him. Bullying can become especially destructive when a group turns against one person. Jealousy, resentment, and the desire to belong can turn ordinary conflict into cruelty. Bullying is easy to recognize when one person hurts another, but it can become more troubling when it becomes a group activity . One person makes a cutting remark, someone laughs, another adds to the story, and others remain silent. Before long, people who might never have acted so cruelly alone have become part of the crowd. Why does this happen? People may join in because they want to belong, fear becoming the next target, or simply don't know what to say. Sometimes silence feels safer than standing alone. Yet silence can have consequences. When no one objects, the bully may see silence as acceptance. Laughter becomes encouragement, and the audience becomes part of the bully's power. I recall times sitting around a table when someone begins talking about a person who isn’t there. The first comment is unkind, someone laughs, and another adds something even more hurtful. Soon, the conversation takes on a life of its own. Then someone quietly says, “I don't think we should be talking about her this way.” Something changes! One voice has interrupted the crowd and reminded everyone that a human being is on the other side of their words. Most importantly, that person has shown that courage can be contagious, too . Just as cruelty can invite others to join in, one person's kindness can give others permission to stop. Today’s scripture warns us about the danger of simply following the crowd. Paul offers us an entirely different way of living : “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others .” (Philippians 2:3–4) Perhaps the question is not simply, “Am I the bully ?” but “What happens because I am standing in the crowd?” Am I laughing when I should be silent? Silent when I should speak? Do my words make someone smaller so others and I can feel bigger? Or will I step outside the crowd and stand beside the person being diminished? On this Bullying Prevention Day , let’s remember that Jesus modeled a community where worldly metrics—like power, status, and appearance—hold no value. Instead, every person is treated with the dignity of a child of God. Living out this faith requires everyday courage. Sometimes it looks like speaking up to say, “That’s not right!” Sometimes it is the silent resistance of refusing to laugh along. And often, it is the simple, life-giving act of extending hospitality to the isolated: “Come sit with me.” The crowd may carry numbers, but one compassionate person refusing to go along carries the very presence of Christ. PRAYER God, give me the courage not to follow the crowd when the crowd is causing harm. Help me recognize the person who is being pushed aside, mocked, or diminished, and give me the compassion to move toward them. May my words, my silence, and my actions reflect the love of Christ and remind others that every person is precious in your sight. Amen. DEVOTION AUTHOR David Sims, Deacon

SCRIPTURE  Galatians 5:13-14 Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. WORDS OF HOPE I have not always thought of Paul as being humble, but in this scripture, I see him stripped of arrogance and proclaiming his limitations. He admits he does not understand everything Jesus was teaching, yet he is committed to living and teaching as much as he does understand. He is a work in progress, but he presses on, staying true to the life to which God has called him. I think this is a mighty lesson. I too, believe that I don’t have to understand everything or everybody. I can comfortably leave the unknown in God’s capable and loving hands, while I concentrate on that which is the work God has given me to do: Love God with everything I’ve got, and love everybody always! PRAYER Dear God, I know I don’t always get this right. Sometimes, I struggle to understand my world or even my neighbors, and I find myself worrying or trying in vain to fix something over which I have no control. So, I ask that you help me remember to leave the big stuff to you while I seek ways to be a blessing to everybody I meet each day. I pray for those too far away for me to reach. May I accept your love and spread it far and wide. In this, may I experience your divine peace. Amen. DEVOTION AUTHOR Carole Anne Sarah

SCRIPTURE  Jude verse 22 Be merciful to those who doubt WORDS OF HOPE The book of Jude is a single-chapter letter, so the chapter from where this comes is the whole book. And while Jude was very eager to talk about salvation in this one-chapter epistle, he instead spends time warning the reader about the immoral teachers that were circulating among them, sowing a message that was contrary to the talking about the extravagant grace of God. Jude was writing to a community in conflict. And like any community in conflict, there were insiders and outsiders. Jude was not concerned about the disagreement and didn’t pick a side. Instead, Jude spoke to what happens when people become disconnected from the Spirit. He did not say, ‘stay away from those who think differently’. He effectively says: Stay rooted in love. Then he says something incredibly captivating: Be merciful to those who doubt. Doubt is not treated as something deserving punishment. The response to uncertainty shouldn’t be condemnation. Doubt doesn't require punishment, humiliation, or expulsion. The response to uncertainty is mercy. Read that again: The response to uncertainty is mercy. When people are deconstructing theology, reconsidering what they were taught in Sunday School, struggling with institutional church, or even wondering if they still believe, Jude tells us to leave room for the wavering person and meet them with compassion. Christianity loses something essential when enforcing certainty becomes more important than love, mercy, humility, and care. Anne Lamott may have said it best: The opposite of faith isn’t doubt. It is certainty. Christianity becomes dangerous when certainty replaces faith, power replaces service, and contempt replaces mercy. Jude offers another way: stay rooted in God's love, make room for those who doubt, confront what causes harm, and above all, practice mercy. An Episcopal priest I know had a sign on his desk that read: God does not send us to save God. God sent not his Son to condemn the world, and God certainly didn’t send us to do it either. Jude doesn't say, Make everybody else live according to your understanding of God. He tells believers to attend to their own faithfulness . Rather than giving us a list of enemies to subdue, Jude offers another way. Stay rooted in God's love, make room for those who doubt, confront what causes harm, and above all, practice mercy. PRAYER God of extravagant grace, keep us rooted in your love when certainty tempts us toward judgment, power, or contempt. Give us the humility to make room for doubt, the courage to confront what causes harm, and above all, the grace to meet one another with mercy. Amen. DEVOTION AUTHOR Thomas Riggs

Modern Lesson “If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.” ― Thomas Merton Words of Hope Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, was a most thoughtful interpreter of God‘s word. While he does not cite a specific section of the Bible in the above quote, he does express something that, for me, is it the very heart of Jesus’s message. He is dealing here with the external in the first part of his statement. These are the things we typically ask someone when we first meet them. Where do you live? Do you know of any good restaurants around? Where do you get your hair done? (Those of you who have met me know this last question is one you never need fear I will ask.) But then Merton says you should ask him what it is he lives for and what stops him from living fully for the thing for which he wants to live. And there’s an implication here for all of us. Because in order for Merton to to be identified by what it is he’s living for and for what stops him from doing that very thing, it means he must have examined that within himself. It means he has done the necessary reflection on his life, on the things he lives for, and for the things that stand in his way. Because only then can he look at someone and say “ask me about these things, I’m ready to tell you”. As a Trappist monk we know that at least a good part of what he lived for revolved around a strict obedience to the rule of Saint Benedict. But we also know that he used many of the meditation techniques that come out of Buddhism as a way of living fully. He was also a prolific writer not only of religious interpretation, but of poetry. He also kept an ongoing diary. So for your own devotion and meditation time today, you should stop at some point, as I plan to do, and prepare yourself to be asked the questions “what am I living for?” and “ what is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for?” Because although you may not be directly asked those questions, the way you live into the answers will be apparent to all meet you. Prayer Loving God, we pray that we can come to realize what it is we are living for in service to you. Open our hearts and our minds and our spirits so that we may overcome any of the things that keep us from living fully into the way you would have us live. Amen. Devotion Author  Weber Baker Order of Saint Francis and Saint Clare

SCRIPTURE Matthew 11: 28 Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. WORDS OF HOPE The other day I realized just how heavy my mind was. How much I was carrying. Recent deaths, imminent deaths, terrible diagnoses. Relationships ending. Friends with aging parents in crisis, and adult children learning to walk again as a strange disease attacked their body. And, dear God, the world we live in—where every day the powers that be slap us with another outrage, another violation of dignity and justice without a drop of mercy. “Stop!” I said, to my mind. Even writing part of the list of concerns weighted consciousness once again. Memory took me back to a time I taught Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carry,” an acclaimed collection of stories of the Vietnam era. In telling detail he unrolls the contents of a group of soldiers’ backpacks—can opener, pocket knife, candy, dog tags, love letters, the finest marijuana, and much more. But two common items bound them all: a thick compress bandage in case they got shot and a green plastic poncho for cold and rain but also to wrap bodies of the wounded before transport. It was a time the young women I was teaching were laden with their own heavy loads of academic work and anxiety over college choices and other personal issues. I could read it in their eyes, so we paused class and did a guided meditation where they went to a beautiful place in nature and set out on a hike with a backpack, which over the course of the journey, got heavier and heavier. As they paused for a drink of water, they considered if there was anything they could leave behind to lighten their load—or if they could even temporarily leave their pack, knowing they could retrieve it when they returned. Lightened, refreshed, they became more mindful of the pine and spruce, the cascading waterfall, the tiniest purple flowers on the forest floor. They breathed. They sat on a large boulder and felt the morning sun on their face. A sacred pause.  The recollection suggested that I too needed to put down my backpack of cares and turn again to the practices which restore my soul and help me see beauty again. Writing it out. A morning walk. Singing the song given for the day: “O Love which will not let me go.” Hearing Jesus’ words: “I will not leave you [them] comfortless.” Another ritual practice arose at a grief retreat. In my room the evening of the first night, after 15 people had begun to share the stories of their loss, it took shape. I stretched out my arms, with hands cupped upward. I called out and placed the names of the persons grieving and the loved ones who had died into those hands. Then I drew in my hands to my heart, holding them there for a moment as tears fell. Afterward I opened my arms wide and released this shared pain to the wide mercy of God, imaged as the then gentle- flowing Guadalupe. Each time I perform this ritual, casting my burden upon the God who sustains us, it releases the weight of sorrow. PRAYER “God of the gathered and the scattered, thank you for people who check in, who show up, who remind us we don’t have to do life alone. Bless our mutual care. Bless shared meals, shared tears, shared laughter. Make us brave enough to ask for help and generous enough to offer it….Let our connections be a shelter, our compassion a healing balm. Band us together in ways that honor our limits and multiply our strength, so that no one among us is left to carry their burdens alone. Amen. Ase.” (Excerpted from a prayer by Rev. Dr. Winner Laws.) DEVOTION AUTHOR Dr. Pat Saxon