The Comfortable Words

Welcome to the Comfortable Words.

I’ve been feeling grateful this morning for the small sounds around me.

I can hear Eric making coffee. I hear the dog wandering around, chewing things up and then snoring. Even my phone buzzing has a sweetness to it because it’s with messages from people I love.

I think today about how the creaking of steps in a home is always to be cherished, even when it’s far too early to be awake. They act as a sort of witness, the whole house reminding me that I am not alone… and also that being alone comes sometimes suddenly without warning, like a tree falling when there was no storm on the horizon.

I have been thinking about loss and how fragile life is.

Feeling disoriented right now seems natural to almost everyone I know. And as we move towards winter and the light gets less, the news continues to boil.

So I would like to spend this time finding some bearings. Not as big people who have to hold the big world up, but as small creatures held in the care of God.

How do you feel today?

What are you noticing?

What cares do you carry with you as we begin?

And as you begin to name them, would you slow down and take a deep breath? Invite God to strengthen you.

The comfortable words this week are from Isaiah:

But now this is what the Lord says, he who created you, Jacob, he who formed you, Israel. Do not fear, for I have redeemed you. I have summoned you by name. You’re mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you. And when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned. Flames will not set you ablaze. Since you are precious and honored in my sight and because I love you, do not be afraid, for I am with you. (Isaiah 43:1-5)

When I was a child, we sang a song with this scripture and the refrain, “Child, you are mine.”

There are a few words in this passage that I have been chewing on for a while: that God created us and formed us, and he has and is and will redeem us, and he has summoned us.

The word summoned in its original form comes from a word which is more ontological than locational. Ontological, meaning having to do with being, with what it means to exist at all. In other words, I have been summoned into being. Not called to show up to a thing, but brought forth.

This is the same word used in Genesis, and for the ancient Hebrews, when God names a thing, that thing is actually established through his act of naming. In Hebrew thought, to name a thing was to create it and to own it. To be summoned, then, is to be named and made and called into being.

And so the question that I ask today is, what does it mean, Lord, that you’ve summoned me into being to love me?

Scripture says I have been knit together in my mother’s womb. I have been hemmed in. Every part and piece of me is known by God.

And here is the question I find myself asking today as a prayer: Lord, who is it that you summoned when you summoned me?

I used to find it odd to be asking that question in my fifties. But I sat with a friend who’s in her eighties earlier this week, and she said she asks the same thing over and over and over. Our life is found in that continual question and an ongoing, always unfinished answer: who did you summon, Lord, when you summoned me?

As best as I have been able to see from watching sages in my life, the answer to that always includes times of expansion and times of reduction.

God is summoning Christ in me.

Which, as my friend reminded me earlier this week, comes in the liturgy: let it go, let it go, let it go. And here is where I find the most difficult of spiritual disciplines, the letting of things go…

I feel like I’m still getting my legs under me, like a baby animal. I feel so inclined to draw away and to be small.

And I’m reminded clearly that it is not me, but Christ in me, that is the realest real, which is both nice and full of consolation and also very painful.

What comes to your mind when you ask the Lord: what does it mean that you have been formed and summoned into the particular place where you find yourself now?

When God is leading you, as Christ was led, into a time of self-sacrifice, it is dangerous to resist his summoning. When we resist the summoning of God, we are saying more of me. When you consent to less of me, you set yourself before God and trust him that even in reduction, even in erosion, what he is creating in you is a profound good. This is the way of holy consent, of holy cooperation.

And I wonder in your own life if there are spaces where you are being invited or summoned by God to holy consent.

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In Psalm 104, the psalmist gives us poetry that helps us find our smallness in the vastness of creation.

Praise the Lord, my soul. Lord my God, you are very great. You are clothed with majesty and splendor. The Lord wraps himself in light as with a garment. All creatures look to you to give them their food at the proper time. When you give it to them, they gather it up. When you open your hand, they are satisfied with good things. When you hide your face, they are terrified. When you take away their breath, they die and return to the dust. When you send your spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground. (Psalm 104, excerpts)

That we exist so small in such an infinite space is settling, but even if we are like dust, we are made of the stuff of the cosmos. Dust itself is a treasure. You are the dust of millennium and the dust of things that have been shaken off of someone else’s shoes, and the dust out of which creation was created, and we are all but dust, and to dust we will return.

I cannot bring down a mountain, nor can you. And no man or woman can raise one up.

This world and the needs in it is far beyond any of us.

Paul writes in Romans that all of creation groans, and that by the Spirit we cry out, “Abba, Father.” All creation groans for a summoning into the kingdom of God.

Every molecule and dust mite and meteor, every infant and every king…

just like the dust of my being, calling out: Abba, Father…

and probably today, just like the dust of your being… as you are summoned into the person that God has called you to be… through times of expansion and times of reduction… as you pray out, and hear his reply, “Child, you are mine.”

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As we end our time in prayer, you can place your hand over your heart as a sign of blessing, or make the sign of the cross.

God, you clothe yourself in light. These dark days help me to do the same.

God, it is you who scatters and cultivates and pulls up and prunes. Help me to consent to your will.

God, it is you who summoned all that is to be loved. Help me to hear your still small voice calling out to me, “Child, you are mine.”

God, it is you who gives and you who takes away. Help me have grace in both seasons.

God, you are good and your mercy endures forever. Help me know the depth of your kindness.

God, you lift up and you tear down. Help me find shelter in the shadow of your wings.

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Spirit.

Amen.