Meister  Eckhart says, ” Every creature is a Word of God”.
and N.T.Wright says in his new book “Surprised by Scripture,
               ” The resurrection of Jesus is the reaffirmation of the goodness of creation, and the gift of the Spirit is there to make us the fully human beings we were supposed to be precisely so that we can fulfill that madate at last.  What are we waiting for?

                     Jesus is coming.
                     Let’s go plant a Tree.

                     

Even when we don’t sense God’s presence, His loving care is all around us.

by achristianpilgrim

Jakarta, 14 April 2015

A Christian Pilgrimage

 

Daily Dig for April 14 Eduardo Galeano I don’t believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person and learns from the other. I have a lot to learn from other people. Source: Louder than Bombs Daily Prayer for April 14 Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” John 11:25–26, NIV Dear Father in heaven, to you we entrust everything, for you have given us life and will call us to resurrection. You will help your children, your humankind, to reach what you have called them to. Protect your Church on earth. Let her soon see your glory. Let her see Jesus Christ intervening in people’s lives and destinies until, shaken and trembling, they have to recognize that they should love and honor Jesus alone, to your honor, O Father in heaven. We thank you for all you have given us in your Word, which enables us to become your children and to find your way for us on earth. Bless us and give us the Holy Spirit. Protect us this night. Protect us so that nothing evil can harm us. Amen. www.plough.com

Daily Dig for April 12

Simone Weil

I cannot help wondering whether in these days when so large a proportion of humanity is submerged in materialism, God does not want there to be some men and women who have given themselves to him and to Christ and who yet remain outside the church. What frightens me is the church as a social structure. And not only on account of its blemishes. Insofar as the church is merely a social structure, it belongs to the prince of this world… I do not want to be adopted into another circle, another human milieu. I want nothing else but obedience – even unto the cross. That is the true haven, as you know: the cross. Source: Waiting for God Simone Weil was a Jewish person who was drawn to the Catholic Church but never entered it. She loved it from afar. Daily Prayer for April 12 Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body. Philippians 3:20-21, NIV Lord our God, draw us to yourself. Draw us into the quiet that you give, where something can happen to us and to our hearts. Help us to discern your kingdom surrounding us and in our spirits to live in this kingdom. Then our life will be as if in heaven, where we need not worry or torment ourselves, where your power is everything to us, penetrating our earthly life, which so often weighs us down. We thank you that you have made a way of strength, full of power to hold us firmly, so that even when we stumble, we cannot be turned from the goal. We thank you for all the good that comes from you, which we cannot see in earthly things but which can invade our hearts with such mighty and uplifting power. Amen.

Resurrection life dwells—abides—in us. Rob Bell says that “Resurrection means God has not given up on the world because this world matters”:

This world of dirt and blood and sweat and skin and light and water. This world that God is redeeming and restoring and renewing. Greed and violence and abuse—they are not right—and they cannot last. They belong to death and death does not belong.
Resurrection says that what we do with our lives matters…in this body the one that we inhabit right now. Every act of compassion matters. Every work of art that celebrates the good and the true matters. Every fair and honest act of business and trade. Every kind word. They all belong and they will all go on in God’s good world. Nothing will be forgotten. Nothing will be wasted.

Jesus expects us to have faith amid the darkness. As Christ pulled the hand of Thomas toward his sacred, transfigured wounds, he said to him “Put your finger here, and look at my hands. Put your hand into the wound in my side. Don’t be faithless any longer. But believe!”
“My Lord and my God!” Thomas exclaimed. Then Jesus tells him, “You believe because you have seen me. Blessed are those who believe without seeing me.”
John Updike, a contemporary American writer, was one of those who, like us, never saw the resurrected Christ for himself and yet he believed.
In 1960, as a young man, he entered a poetry contest at a Methodist church in Massachusetts. He won the prize: $100. And he gave the money back to the church, but the real miracle is the poem itself, “Seven Stanzas at Easter”:

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

Now that’s a description of Easter. It’s material and it’s supernatural all at once.
And so, with Updike and with the Magdalene, through tears—even as we suffer and rejoice and believe and expect a miracle in this space between Holy Saturday and Easter—we find ourselves once again on the road to Bethany and, with Martha, we encounter Jesus, and we hear the words of the Teacher:

“I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me will live, even after dying. Everyone who lives in me and believes in me will never ever die. Do you believe this?”

Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/imagochristi/2015/04/keeping-it-real-an-easter-sermon/#ixzz3X0bK8kMq