Day Seventeen : 16th December

Zephaniah 3

On that day you shall not be put to shame
because of all the deeds by which you have rebelled against me;
for then I will remove from your midst your proudly exultant ones,
and you shall no longer be haughty in my holy mountain.

12 For I will leave in the midst of you a people humble and lowly.
They shall seek refuge in the name of the Lord—

13 the remnant of Israel; they shall do no wrong and utter no lies,
nor shall a deceitful tongue be found in their mouths.
Then they will pasture and lie down, and no one shall make them afraid.

froma 2003 sermon of Linda's.

"…Life for the world.

Wilde had tumbled from striding the literary stage to absolute rock bottom. He wrote about his sufferings that

"I could not bear them to be without meaning. Now I find hidden somewhere away in my nature something that tells me that nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and suffering least of all. That something hidden away in my nature, like a treasure in a field, is Humility."

So Oscar Wilde found humility in his prison cell...
humility, humus, the stuff of the earth.

and in the gospel, John talks of a god who has come down.

come down from heaven.
Humbled, become the stuff of the earth.
flesh.
flesh and bone.
flesh and blood.

this is not a safe god.
It is a god who is with us and beside us.
a god who will confront us honestly

We will try to keep god safely up in heaven,
the lord up there,
[religion is often about keeping us safe from god!]

god is here as well.

humbled and present

and that broken flesh is given to us to eat.
given for the life of the world.

we sing of the glory of the lord in highest heavens,
but Ireneaus says that the glory of god is a person fully alive."