Friday, September 12, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
With this ring
Brothers and sisters, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Â
Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.
And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace.
Be thankful. Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts.
And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
Just a few lines further on Paul rinses and repeats:
Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.
These verses from Colossians (yesterday’s lectionary) ring in my ears and in my memory. Each wedding (and there are more than a hundred) I’ve officiated at Danville Correctional Center anchors itself on these words from Paul. I read and the couple hears, if their ears are open. And each time I read the passage I remember my own wedding, my own marriage, my own 46 years of obedience and submission, leadership and hope in the relationship God has given to Margaret and me, to our children and our grandchildren and in time, to their children as well.
Not that we are so wise and wonderful in all of this. We are more like the wizard of Oz, who sometimes hides behind a curtain so his people don’t have to look closely at his eyes. Much of Wise and Wonderful” is in the eyes of the beholder, which often don’t see reality the way God sees it:
Jesus told his disciples a parable:
“Can a blind person guide a blind person?
Will not both fall into a pit?
No disciple is superior to the teacher;
but when fully trained,
every disciple will be like his teacher.
Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye,
but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own?
Still, it’s a wonderful thing to have even partial vision. Paul knew this as much as anyone, after his experience on the road to Damascus. Blinded for three days, when God restored his sight, everything was new.
I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and an arrogant man,
but I have been mercifully treated
because I acted out of ignorance in my unbelief.
Indeed, the grace of our Lord has been abundant,
along with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.
This refresh comes when God sends it, and for me that was August of 1976. I’m on a plane returning home from three weeks at a retreat center near Boonville, California with the Creative Community Project, where we shared sandwiches, told stories and sang worship songs morning and night. Now, a few hundred miles away from the retreat, everything and everyone is bright and beautiful. Colors shine. Usually reticent with strangers, now I greet them and smile. Everyone I see looks like a child of God, and I want to love them. The world is new, alive with goodness and promise.
My eyes were opened. Fifty years later my theology has changed, but my joy in God’s salvation has not. Today’s psalm (16) sings in my ears.
You are my inheritance, O Lord.
You will show me the path to life,
  fullness of joys in your presence,
 the delights at your right hand forever.
(Colossians 2, Psalm 145, John 15, Luke 6)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
#
