Weekly Meditation for Nov 22nd

www.HopeandHelpCenter.org

Weekly Meditation
By Ron & Christine White

Revelation 1: 4-8
Grace to you and peace from the One who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before God's throne, and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings and queens of the earth. To Christ who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving God and Parent, to God be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.

Look! Christ is coming with the clouds;
every eye will see Christ;
even those that pieced Christ;
and on Christ's account all the tribes of the earth will wail.
So it is to be. Amen.

"I am the Alpha and Omega," says God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.

What does it mean to have a God who does not have a noun for a name - a God who isn't a person, place or thing, a God who tells us that God is beyond our comprehension? In many ancient cultures, a name captures the essence of a person or thing. The God of the Hebrews whom we claim today as our God is a God of "being" or "presence." The Old and New Testament writers testify to a God who was personally active in their midst, in Israel and the early Christian community. Today, some of us recognize God's presence, albeit in different ways, some of us more deeply on a personal level, some of us less intimately. Whatever our personal circumstances, most of us understand our God to be the ultimate presence throughout the entire universe. Many of us believe that God is personally present with us. And we believe that our Creator desires to be in a very personal relationship with us just as we do with our Creator.

So how do we recognize God's presence in our lives? Ron would say that God's presence is the consonance (harmony) in the world, while human will is the cause of dissonance (disharmony) in the world. Some consonance/dissonance examples are peace/war, justice/violence, sharing/greed. Perhaps you can imagine how the dissonance in your own life, whether self inflicted or inflicted by others, is at the root of pain in your life and is the cause of feelings of separation from God. Jesus the Christ, whom scriptures tell us is God personified, is presented in the scriptures as the example of how we are to live a life in consonance with God. Interesting to note is that the consonance in Jesus' life lead to his crucifixion. Consonance with God is not something that the powers of this world can easily tolerate.

The Spirit of God that lived within Jesus and enabled him to live a life of consonance, also lives within each of us. This Spirit is described in Isaiah 11:2 as:
"the Spirit of Wisdom and of understanding,
the Spirit of counsel and of power,
the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord."

How will we know when we are living in consonance? To paraphrase Isaiah 11, verses 3 and 4: "We will not judge by what we see with our eyes, or decide by what we hear with our ears; but with righteousness we will justly deal with the needy, and with justice we will give decisions favoring the poor of the earth."

As we enter the Season of Hope, may God bless us in our efforts to bring peace and justice to a world sorely in need. Amen.