3rd Sunday in Easter

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This is the Third Sunday in Easter, and in this Easter season, we celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus. Of course, we can celebrate the resurrection year round, but especially in this season, I hope you have been experiencing resurrection in your life and in the world around you.

Are you looking for the miracles of God?  Are you connecting the resurrection to other parts of your story? Is there something that needs to be resurrected in your life?

Remember…death (or loss) happens before resurrection…which means if you have experienced loss, you may be in a season of grief. Loss/grief is an opening where God wants to be with you.  Can you invite God into to that place?  Can you invite God into your grief, your sorrow, your heaviness?

The BIG QUESTION many Christians ask is, “Are you ready to meet Jesus when you die?”
If you say no, they urge you to be saved and to acknowledge Christ as Lord.
If you say yes, they are thankful, and  they rejoice – or they judge your “Yes” by your actions. They may say something like, “You say you are a Christian, but…”

That’s the BIG QUESTION – and what many of us feel is the most important question.
If that is the most important question, then shouldn’t our ‘being ready’ impact all of our life, not just what we think happens in eternity?

What we don’t ask is “How is ‘being ready’ changing your life today?”
How is ‘being ready’ changing your marriages now?
How is ‘being ready’ changing your relationships now?
How is ‘being ready’ changing your out-look on life now?
Are we becoming more flexible? Less rigid?
Are we loving more and becoming less controlling?
Are we more compassionate and less judgmental?
Are we less anxious?
Are you being weeded and plowed? Again and again – how open are you to it?  Are you resistant?  A little? A lot?
Are you still parading your achievements around as a sign of God’s blessings? Or do you realize they have been for your honor and recognition, your pursuit of excellence, your idolatry of reputation, and your addiction to esteem?
Are you led to repentance daily?
Are you plucking the tares out of your life or are you allowing them to grow up with the wheat as Scripture tells us to?
Do we allow these areas to be openings for God to come in and be with us?

1 John 3:16-24 MSG
16-17 This is how we’ve come to understand and experience love: Christ sacrificed his life for us. This is why we ought to live sacrificially for our fellow believers and not just be out for ourselves. If you see some brother or sister in need and have the means to do something about it but turn a cold shoulder and do nothing, what happens to God’s love? It disappears. And you made it disappear.
(How many times have I, you, we made God’s love disappear?)
When We Practice Real Love
18-20 My dear children, let’s not just talk about love; let’s practice real love. This is the only way we’ll know we’re living truly, living in God’s reality. It’s also the way to shut down debilitating self-criticism, even when there is something to it. For God is greater than our worried hearts and knows more about us than we do ourselves.
21-24 And friends, once that’s taken care of and we’re no longer accusing or condemning ourselves, we’re bold and free before God! We’re able to stretch our hands out and receive what we asked for because we’re doing what he said, doing what pleases him. Again, this is God’s command: to believe in his personally named Son, Jesus Christ. He told us to love each other, in line with the original command. As we keep his commands, we live deeply and surely in him, and he lives in us. And this is how we experience his deep and abiding presence in us: by the Spirit he gave us.

Let’s talk about Love – Self-love.  Self-love leads to acceptance of self. Acceptance of others. Acceptance of God’s slow work in each of us.  Self-love leads to loving others.

Richard Rohr:
When I started in ministry in the early 1970s in Cincinnati and worked with young people, it seemed like I spent most of the time trying to convince teenagers that they were good. They all seemed to endlessly hate and doubt themselves, often with a little help from parenting and clergy. Later, I saw it in adults, too, who were also well practiced in hating and fearing themselves. What the Scriptures promise us is that we are objectively and inherently children of God (see 1 John 3:2). And you can’t change that!  This is not psychological worthiness; it is ontological, metaphysical, substantial worthiness that cannot be gained or lost. When this given God image becomes our operative self-image, we are home free! Such a Gospel is just about the best good news anyone could hope for! I am convinced that so much guilt, negative self-image, self-hatred, and self-preoccupation occurs because we have taken our cues and identity from a competitive and comparing world. https://cac.org/daily-meditations/finding-ourselves-in-god-2021-11-29/

Teresa of Ávila envisioned God telling her, “If you wish to find Me / In yourself seek Me. https://cac.org/daily-meditations/finding-ourselves-in-god-2021-11-29/

Henri Nowen: “It is by being awake to God in us that we can increasingly see God in the world around us.”

Practice this: Create a rhythm of checking in with yourself. Where is God at work in you?  Where do you see God’s fingerprints inside of you?