I don’t know
what it’s truly all about,
or why it had to happen;
but, if nothing else,
I light this candle
out of respect
for a man who died a horrible death.
And I pray
for all those today
dying a horrible death -
whether from disease
or torture
or hunger
or whatever the cause.
Jesus,
You have been there,
You know what it’s like;
be with them.
And I pray too
for all the grieving relatives
who must watch,
helpless,
while their loved ones die.
Mary,
you watched your son die;
be with them.
I light this candle
and pray that all darkness
may be banished forever.
Amen. May - it - be - so.
5th April 1996
Picture from Google images http://visitaiglesia.net/2012/?p=390
Who are you Jesus?
What are you all about?
Are you really God
as well as man?
“Of one being with the Father”
- so do we worship you?
Or is that bypassing God?
Yet you continually pointed us to the Father
as the one to worship.
So did the worship - Jesus - cult
come afterwards?
Did the first church worship you?
Or just follow your teachings?
They proclaimed you Messiah -
the Anointed One -
the Christ.
Did they expect the Messiah
to be God - as - man
or a special leader?
But they expected someone
to rule on earth
in an Israel earthly kingdom,
and you said it wasn’t like that.
Does ‘Emmanuel’, God-with-us,
mean physically with us as a man
or spiritually with us through a man,
as through many other men and women?
Are we all potential ‘emmanuels’
if we allow God to be in us
and work through us
to be in the world?
It’s so hard to find the real Jesus
since we don’t know
how much of the Gospels
is what he actually did and said,
and how much has been added
or changed
or interpreted.
Yet we all interpret God
in terms of our own experiences
and learning -
how could it be otherwise?
But I do sometimes feel
that we lay so much emphasis on Jesus
that we miss God the Father
whom Jesus himself worshipped.
It’s 2,000 years
since Jesus lived on earth.
We’ve allowed so much clutter
to build up in all that time
that it’s sometimes hard to tell
what God wants
from what tradition and history
and Church want.
O God whose name is Love,
True God who lives behind all the clutter,
help us to see who you really are
and what you really want.
Forgive us
when we allow ‘good things’,
‘nice things’,
‘decent things’,
‘holy and church things’
to get in the way of God things.
Help us to be brave enough
to clear out the clutter;
and help us to see clearly
what exactly is clutter!
Let Love bring us all together
in a big embrace
of common purpose,
the purpose of life itself,
LOVE.
31st May 98
Picture found by Google search from http://davidwilliamson.blogspot.com/
