Barbara: Hi everyone- welcome to 40 minutes of faith. My name is Barbara Cox and I host this weekly podcast to explore God's word and our relationship with God.
I'm offering two prayers, one morning prayer at the beginning, and one evening prayer at the end of this episode, in addition to our regular prayers, to support and encourage you. They were written by Martin Luther 500 years ago, but I still find them relevant and comforting. Morning Blessing:
Let us pray. I give thanks to you, my heavenly father, through Jesus Christ, your dear son, that you have protected me this night from all harm and danger. I ask you that you would also protect me today from sin and all evil so that my life and actions may please you completely. For into your hands I commend myself, my body, my soul, and all that is mine. Let your Holy angel be with me so that the wicked foe may have no power over me. Amen.
I'm trying something new today, and that is to provide a completely unscripted episode. This makes me a little bit nervous, but I find that when I write things out ahead of time, which I like to do to be organized, I don't like how I sound when I read texts that I previously typed out. So I wrote down three things and I looked up three Bible verses and I accidentally found a fourth Bible verse that's really fantastic. And I could have kept going. So today isn't about just one Bible passage, but about three different situations and four passages that I believe are relevant to all of us and perhaps more so at different times.
Today is the one-year anniversary of us getting a truckload of furniture and belongings from our move. We moved from Germany to upstate New York. I had learned when we first moved to Germany in 2015 that I wanted to be able to just let go of our stuff. And one example is that there's websites that say, don't forget this, don't forget that. And one place said, make sure you take all your photo albums with you in your luggage, which sounds like a good idea.
And for a military move, you're allowed to have two suitcases, and that might need to last you for two months, depending on where you're moving to and when your stuff is coming. That's what it turned out to be last year. Everything that we could have in our two suitcases had to last us for two months.
Now there is a small shipment that hypothetically you get more quickly, but that doesn't always happen on time and it doesn't always happen, period. So I thought to myself, you know what, I would love to carry my 15 full-sized scrapbooks in my luggage, and that's just not going to happen because I need to bring clothing and personal items.
And the cats had their own little carry on suitcase. And shoes, it was winter time, warmer clothes. So I just prayed to be at peace because If something had happened to the container or the ship or the transport or whatever, and we never saw our stuff again, I just prayed to be at peace with that because the stuff didn't really matter, even though I was incredibly happy to see it.
I don't think that I'm a materialistic person, but I'll tell you, the temporary furniture provided by the military for which I'm very grateful is tremendously uncomfortable. Even our cat just jumped right up on the couch as soon as the movers left. And we got all our photo albums. Of course there's always things that get broken, but having today be the anniversary of getting our stuff, I just felt, again, such a sense of gratitude as I did that day. We moved out of our house in Germany on October 26th, and things were packed up on the 27th and following. And then we flew over and we were able to borrow some furniture from some friends and we had intentionally purchased some new furniture so that we didn't have to live in a hotel for quite so long, which might sound kind of glamorous- you get to live in a hotel! Well, maybe it's a little bit glamorous, but it's not really tremendously glamorous to my experience, having three cats in a hotel room and housekeeping won't come into the room unless the cats are in their cat carriers. And if you're going somewhere, I didn't want to leave them in their cat carriers all day long.
So really that's a first world problem. I know that, and just listening to your neighbors, making noise and things like that. So I'm incredibly grateful for having a place to live, even though you feel a little homeless when you're moving. We really we're never homeless by any stretch of the imagination.
So some Bibles have a topical index and you can also go online. If you want to look up a verse, say, for example, if you're worried about something or you're stressed, or there's all kinds of different lists of Bible passages that you can find if you're in a certain situation and you'd like to find a Bible passage to go with that.
So I found a passage in Philippians, the fourth chapter verses six to seven. Philippians is a very small book, almost all the way at the end of your Bible. It's written by Paul to a community in Philippi and the people who live there are called Philippians. And at the beginning of my Lutheran study Bible, there's a little background information.
I took a summer Bible study on Philippians, but I didn't take any official classes on it. I wanted to just share one sentence from the Lutheran study Bible about this particular book. It says Paul's thanks are combined with his belief in God's grace for both himself and the Philippians and therefore God deserves ultimate thanks.
So here is Philippians chapter four, verses six to seven, and I'm going to be reading it today from the new revised standard version. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with Thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
So, first of all, I want to say that this does not come easily to me at the beginning where it says, do not worry about anything. I was kind of brought up by professional worriers. So it just makes a lot of sense to me to worry about stuff and try to anticipate things. And that has been a pretty common theme to my observation in the military and military family community.
If you know you're going to be moving, let's get going, let's get things organized. In the olden days we had huge ring binders. Probably some people do everything electronically these days, but there's still a lot of paperwork generated- like actual physical pieces of paper. So maybe some people still do have ring binders. I sure did last year.
So I had selected this first for today because. Not worrying about anything does not come easily to me, but sometimes I can.
So when we moved to Germany, I just decided that I had to be at peace with never seeing our stuff again, because I just couldn't pack everything in our suitcase. We sent a couple of boxes ahead to us and we did get our first quick shipment. But again, I'm not going to put 15 scrapbooks in the first quick shipment.
That's kind of for pots and pans and bedsheets and stuff like that, that you might need. But what I also am comforted by in this passage is the reminder to pray and have thanksgiving and let your requests be made known to God. So I think that's really great, and elsewhere, it talks about having our prayers be in alignment with God's will, so I can pray for something wild and outrageous, that's welcome. But at the same time, am I looking to pray for my life to be in alignment with God's desire for my life? And I also really like verse seven, the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding. That is so amazing to me. I do feel God's peace sometimes. And then there's other times where my own worries or fears or nervousness get in the way of myself.
And then to finish the sentence, the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. So I don't have a big speech prepared about explaining this verse. I just have it here to share as part of the thought about moving and “stuff”. And I was thinking about materialism and I'm certainly not the greatest example of living a minimalist life, but most of the military families that I've talked with, when you move, you end up giving a bunch of stuff away, you kind of clear through your stuff, if at all possible, often end up discarding, just throwing away things that you kind of think, okay, do I really need this where I'm going? Can someone else use it?
Can I donate it? Or is it something that I've just been holding onto? And I don't need to hold onto it anymore. I don't need this where I'm going. And then we also found, we often end up donating things on the way there and also when we arrive- our kitchen in Germany was smaller than our kitchen in Massachusetts.
And I just realized we don't need all these drinking glasses that you collect randomly- the plastic ones, the ones with logos on them. And even the glassware ones, we just don't need this much stuff. So, let's share it with some other folks who might be able to benefit.
I also have an example of how people take care of each other, because I'm so grateful every time we've moved, people have supported us who in two cases were complete strangers. When we got to Germany, we attended a chapel service and someone had asked my husband, are you here by yourself? And he said, no, my wife is home, but she isn't feeling that great.
And we didn't have a car. We were just walking everywhere and that's fine. You know, it's not the end of the world, where we were in that location, but I had just walked several miles during the day to run different errands. And I just wasn't up to walking to the chapel that evening for a few different reasons.
And the person literally said to my husband, come on, let's get in my car, let's go get your wife and bring her back to chapel, and someone will give you folks a ride home. And I was so incredibly grateful for that. It was probably only a 30 minute walk, but I just wasn't up to it that evening, in both directions, even though I walk that long routinely, it's no problem at all. Just on top of everything else.
And another family invited me over, another woman to have tea with her at her home, which was a really quick walk from where we were staying before we had a car and just an offer of friendship that has felt like a universal experience. Now, not all the experiences have been positive. That's another episode. But in terms of God providing through both material needs as well as friendship. And when we got here to New York, I had mentioned that we stayed in a hotel. I attended a yoga class at the gym and another military spouse said, Hey, I haven't seen you before, are you new? And I said, yeah, we just got here this week.
And she said, I need you to tell me what I can lend you so that you can get settled in better. And I couldn't believe it. We literally just met five minutes ago. Well, maybe it was at the end of class. So an hour previously that same day. And I thought, well, I didn't remember to pack scissors and we own a bunch of scissors. So yeah, I can go to the store and buy more scissors, but I said, do you have an extra pair of scissors that I could borrow for a couple of weeks because you're trying to open things and unpack things. So she lent us a card table and some blankets and I just was so incredibly grateful that literally complete stranger would say, she was very insistent- you have to tell me what you need so that you can settle in better. And we also had the wonderful experience of three families, believe it or not, from Germany, now in upstate New York. The timing has been a little different- one family got here ahead of us and they're already gone, but they were able to lend us some camp chairs and some other things even just a trash can- you can hang a trash bag off of a doorknob, but it's really nice to have a trashcan. So I interpreted those as examples of God just providing for us in different ways. And we would've been okay without those people, but our lives felt so much better.
The second topic that I had written down for today is that I'm facing a wide open future right now. And I wonder how many other people feel like their futures are wide open? And what does that mean? And how do we react to that? For me right now, that means that I have finished my master's degree coursework and I'm going to be job searching and I don't know how that's going to turn out.
So I am trying to wait prayerfully. And also, proactively, I need to send out my resume and apply for jobs and things like that, but it's just a mystery to me about what's going to happen. So I have for you today Proverbs chapter three, verses five to seven. And Proverbs in my Bible is to the left side of halfway. So if you go halfway and then go a little bit back it's after Psalms.
And I had actually been going somewhere else in Proverbs that I had gotten from this list that I had mentioned of different Bible passages related to different topics. I was so happy to see that I had verses five to seven underlined from some other time when I had read it. I have lots of passages underlined in my Bible, and I just thought that they were really terrific, even though it wasn't where I was going in the first place, it was really great. It just jumped out at me.
So from the message version, Proverbs chapter three, verses five to seven: trust God from the bottom of your heart, don't try to figure out everything on your own. Listen for God's voice in everything you do, everywhere you go. He's the one who will keep you on track. Don't assume that you know it all. Run to God, run from evil.
So I can clearly see why I underlined it at some point in the past. And that is just my prayer that I can trust and know that it's going to be okay. Not having any idea what's going to happen, and being grateful that one full-time job in this household right now is enough to cover our living expenses.
And another example of trusting relates actually to the previous passage- when we were house hunting last year, many of the homes actually that we looked at in this area had Bible verses either on the walls as framed artwork or wall stencils - there were a lot of Bible verses, which is totally fine with me, obviously I was happy to see them. And the house that we ended up buying had guess what Bible verse on the wall in one of the rooms? I'm looking at it right now, it says: pray about everything. Worry about nothing. So it's not a direct quote, but I just thought, Hey, that's really cool.
So facing a wide open future, my prayer for you would be that this is able to in some way be comforting and that it's not terrifying, cause I know a lot of people have lost their jobs, lost their income, lost their health, haven't been able to see their families in many, many months in this time of our pandemic.
And I know that that's hard. So I'm not trying to gloss over any of the unhappy situations or very real stresses that people do experience.
I just wanted to read the Proverbs passage from the inclusive Bible for it's gender neutral tone. So here's Proverbs chapter three, verses five to seven from the inclusive Bible. Trust Yahweh with all your heart. And don't rely on your own understanding, acknowledge God in everything you do, and God will direct your paths. Don't be wise in your own eyes. Revere Yahweh and avoid evil.
And the verse goes on to talk about some of the good things that we may experience when we do those things and it's in the Bible, so I absolutely honor that. But for those of you, in case you're reading, and then you see some more stuff, or you're familiar with these passages and you know what comes next, I thought the part that I read that's enough. FYI, the Bible does say in many places, if you do these things, then these good things will happen to you. And some people interpret that to mean that if you have good things happening for you, then that means that you must have either been good or pleased God, or God is blessing you as a reward.
And that is a possibility, it's not my place to say what God is doing or not doing, but I always want to point out that in the Lutheran faith, we are not earning our salvation. So I am doing things, of course, to please God, but not to try to get my way to heaven to earn points or anything like that.
And also I know that sometimes bad things happen to good people. And that's something that I'd be happy to have another podcast episode about- why do bad things happen to good people? That's a huge conversation. So that's another reason that I stopped reading where I stopped reading, because I don't believe that if bad things are happening in your life, it means that you have done bad things to displease God that's between you and God. That's none of my business. But just to affirm that sometimes there's very real struggles in people's lives. People who are faithful and who love God and who trust God. And sometimes it doesn't make sense and we can't see the end of it or understand what's happening. And maybe sometimes later, We can understand what happened and why, but not everybody agrees with that, either, to always kind of look back with rose-tinted glasses.
So I'm just talking about where I am prayerfully right now. Just looking to trust God and looking to be grateful and looking to be thankful.
Finally, I have some passages about life as I experienced it this fall. My mother passed away. And many of you are in the same situation. You haven't been able to see your family members possibly at all since March. And that was the case with me. So that was hard because people who have dementia probably don't remember that they got a phone call a few minutes later. So there's no consolation then for the loved ones of someone who has dementia because you can call them and then they forgot that you called them, where at least if someone remembers that you called them, wouldn't it be nice to think they don't feel as lonely because we just had a nice phone call and then we'll be able to have another nice phone call soon. So that was sad. And then there's also a sense of release, I suspect, among people who have had a loved one with dementia pass away. My belief is that she's now free from pain. It was my impression that she was just confused about what was going on around her. And I do worry that she felt lonely and in physical pain as well. So again, I don't have any for sure way of knowing that, but that's just my sense.
So I have a couple of Bible verses to share with you not knowing what your situation is, your family situation. People either who are having memory loss or dementia or people who have passed away. I have a passage from second Corinthians, which is towards the end of your Bible. Another letter to people who lived in Corinth, and this is going to be from chapter five, verse seven. And I'm going to read that from the inclusive Bible.
I have a pretty good sense of Bible passages, but I don't remember where they are. So I can't quote you chapter and verse, even though I have seen this verse many, many times, I actually have a postcard with this verse that I'll tell you about in a minute, that's kind of funny. So let me just read second Corinthians chapter five, verse 17 from the inclusive version: we walk by faith, not by sight.
And I found comfort in that verse because I don't understand always what's happened, what is God's timing? And I feel terrible that I wasn't able to visit with my mother, even though I had absolutely intended on buying plane tickets and going to visit her.
But I also respect the safety protocols around nursing home visitors. Of course, it makes sense that you can't visit in person and just hold someone's hand, which is another aspect in my experience of visiting with someone with dementia- for a while she could talk. And then after a while she could talk, but it didn't make any more sense. And then later on, she pretty much stopped talking, but when I held her hand, she smiled and that was of some consolation to me, even though it's not about me, but at least it felt like there was a connection. So I honor that for safety reasons, you can't hold someone's hand when there's a virus going around, that's killing a lot of people.
So I appreciate this we walk by faith, not by sight verse, and I actually have it as a postcard where it's set up like an eye exam. Where the biggest letters are at the top. And then the writing gets smaller as you go down. But when you're just sitting there looking at it, you can read all of the words.
And then my accidental bonus passage that came up was in my message Bible. I had a long passage underlined, and I'd like to read it to you because it was really meaningful to me. And I don't know when I underlined it, but it's a good one. Well, I mean, it's all good stuff, please don't hear me say that some of it's better than the other, I just meant to say that I don't have every single sentence in my entire Bible underlined. So in that same chapter, second Corinthians chapter five, I have verses 16 to 18 from the message version.
Because of this decision, we don't evaluate people by what they have or how they look. We looked at the Messiah that way once and got it all wrong. As you know, we certainly don't look at him that way anymore. Now we look inside and what we see is that anyone United with the Messiah gets a fresh start is created new. The old life is gone. A new life burgeons, look at it. All this comes from the God who settled the relationship between us and him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other. God put the world square with himself through the Messiah, giving the world a fresh start by offering forgiveness of sins. God has given us the task of telling everyone what he is doing. We are Christ's representatives. God uses us to persuade people, to drop their differences and enter into God's work of making things right between them. We're speaking for Christ himself. Now become friends with God. He's already a friend with you. How, you ask? In Christ, God put the wrong on him, who never did anything wrong, so we could be put right with God.
That is quite a passage, packed with so much information. And again, I don't have a big speech prepared about this passage. There is a class I believe called new Testament letters, but I haven't taken it, but it also speaks to my heart. And that's something that I feel comfortable sharing now, that the whole phrase relationship with God, I think is a little bit loaded because it might mean different things to different people. And I've also had conversations with several folks about, I grew up in what I considered to be sort of an intellectual or a less emotional, maybe faith where emotions are okay, but you don't see a whole lot of emotion among a lot of Lutherans. And if you want to talk with me about that, I'd be thrilled to talk about that. So I felt like I knew who God was and I knew who Jesus was and I sang the song what a friend I have in Jesus, but I didn't necessarily really feel it very strongly.
It was in my head. And I'm sure it was in my heart, but I guess I didn't really feel it. And then the first time I went somewhere where there was a little bit more sort of enthusiastic singing, enthusiastic preaching, and I heard great preaching growing up. I'm not arguing about that at all. But I was overcome emotionally the first time I was in a situation where people were really expressing their emotions very freely and in a very different way than what I had grown up with.
And I really came to enjoy having the opportunity to attend in different church service styles in the military chapels. And I know that there's conversations to be had also about different kinds of music, because I grew up with hymns and I love old church hymns that many of them are based on Bible verses. And then you have a bunch of verses and you're singing a whole bunch of words and that's great. And there's some conversations to be had about some music that's a little simpler that doesn't have as many verses with different words, that's a little bit more repetitive, but I absolutely love that kind of music, too.
And it took me many years of Bible study from people of many different faiths to have a stronger sense of relationship. There was a particular example in my mind, and I don't remember what study it's in, cause I've taken a few Bible studies from the author, Beth Moore, and she talked about having a sense one day that God was really saying to her, I love you.
And my family is wonderful, I've just been talking about them and. They said, I love you. And then I said, I love you, too. But to imagine God saying, I love you. And then Beth talked about us saying back to God, I love you, too, God. And that absolutely blew my mind. That's not something that I had really thought about, even though I can sing the song, I love you, Lord. That's a great song, but just the way she was talking, like God is showing us love. And then we say, I love you, too, God. That was really neat.
And another example is that in some Bible translations, you'll hear the word Abba, which means father. And I know I've had a previous episode about inclusive and expansive language, but in this case, Jesus is saying father to God, his father. And when we were in Israel, We were walking through a marketplace and there were tons of vendors, all around, lots of different stuff for sale people saying to the customer here, come and try this. And people coming and going very busy place, and there was a younger guy who was carrying a box of some kind of product in their stall area. And. He called over to somebody who was out of view. And he was just carrying this box walking along and he goes Abba. And I almost started to cry right there in the market because it sounded to me like he was just calling to his dad, just everyday kind of business. And that totally changed my perception of hearing this Bible verse of Abba.
So anyway, I just wanted to share some of these different. Experiences with all of you. Because this passage is about our relationship with God. And it also talks about how we judge other people. And it talks about our old life has gone and a new life starts. And in this case, it's not talking about life after we died. That's a different passage, but it made me think that maybe my mom has had a fresh start. She believed in God, she brought me to church. She was the leader of our children's choir. And again, none of that made it so that she's with God now, but that she has a fresh start. And is free from pain. Now that's at least the way my human brain can think about it.
At the very end of this verse in the message version, it talks about become friends with God. And To me, that's a pretty amazing thing to think because I have been brought up to be respectful of my parents and my elders. Again, I know the song, what a friend we have in Jesus, but I wasn't necessarily thinking of God as my friend- sometimes we think of it as the old Testament God, the Hebrew Bible God, the God of judgment, the God of law, even though there's tons of grace and generosity and kindness and love in the old Testament as well. So it's not just a simple split, but to think about this invitation in this message translation, which I know it takes a little bit of liberty with the Greek language.
So I want to read the same passage in another translation and see what we get. And again, you could read a whole bunch of different translations and get a whole bunch of different passages. So let's take a look at second Corinthians chapter five verses 16 to 18 in the inclusive version.
And so from now on, we don't look on anyone in terms of mere human judgment, even if we did once regard Christ in these terms, that is not how we know Christ now. And for anyone who is in Christ, there is a new creation. The old order has passed away. Now everything is new. All of this is from God who ransomed us through Christ and made us ministers of that reconciliation. This means that through Christ, the world was fully reconciled again to God who didn't hold our transgression against us, but instead, entrusted us with this message of reconciliation. This makes us Christ's ambassadors as though God were making the appeal directly through us. Therefore, we implore you in Christ's name, be reconciled to God. For our sake, God made the one who was without sin to be sin, so that by this means we might become the very holiness of God.
I actually just realized, I read up to verse 21, which I didn't realize before, because in my copy of the message there aren't verses. I had just written down verses 16 to 18. So you just got a double dose. That's your bonus Bible verses. I'm just kidding. I'd rather make a joke out of it. And I'm not going to apologize for having a few extra verses thrown in there. So now you can see some of the differences, the message translation talks about become friends with God, but that's not how a different translation took it from the original Greek.
So that is enough for today. And thank you so much for walking this walk with me. And I'm praying for you for the world, for our faith journeys, for our physical journeys, for our life journeys.
Martin Luther's evening blessing: Let us pray. I give thanks to you, my heavenly father through Jesus Christ, your dear son. That you have graciously protected me today. And I ask you to forgive me all my sins, where I have done wrong and graciously to protect me tonight, for into your hands I commend to myself, my body, my soul, and all that is mine. Let your Holy angel be with me so that the wicked foe may have no power over me. Amen.
Martin Luther adds after that: Then you are to go to sleep quickly and cheerfully.
Resources:
Philippians 4:6-7
Proverbs 3:5-7
2 Corinthians 5:7
2 Corinthians 5:16-21