Tuesday, August 19, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Forty-sixth
The angel of the LORD came and sat under the terebinth in Ophrah that belonged to Joash the Abiezrite, while his son Gideon was beating out wheat in the wine press to save it from the Midianites.
We have never had a terebinth tree in our front yard. But I’m pretty sure angels of the Lord have visited us time and again. Margaret and I have been married awhile, since 1979, long enough to raise three kids who are now in or near their 40’s, with five grandchildren 16, 13, 8, 6, and 5 months. We’ve lived in Illinois and Texas in five homes at different times in different cities. Over the years we have stayed in touch with our families in Illinois, Texas, Indiana and Kentucky, and with countless friends around the world.
Most every year of our married life we traveled some, especially on vacations with Chris, Marc and Andi to camp at Turkey Run or on the Michigan shores of Lake Michigan and the Outer Banks, even to Scotland, France and Italy. Our friends Don and Pat opened their Wisconsin lake home to us twice a year, and as our children grew our families became very close. Chicago and St. Louis and Indianapolis beckoned to us often, for Chinese meals, art museums and an occasional baseball game.
Our family helped rebuild Waynesville Christian Church, starting with the old grade school building and moving on from there. Experiences there with that church and its village community felt like Mayberry from the Andy Griffith Show, because everyone looked out for each other, finding ways to help. We got together to sing and pray much more often than once a week. For awhile on Saturday nights we began our 24 hours of Sabbath with a family meal and blessing, then walked to church on Sunday morning.
In 1989, married ten years, the five of us moved to Urbana to work with Christian Campus Fellowship and Don Follis, the campus minister at the University of Illinois. He helped us find a house, which has stood up well over the years since it was built in 1910. Students and friends put a new roof on which still looks pretty good. We added amenities and it is still a fine place to live when we’re back in Illinois.
I think of Margaret’s and my life together in its own separate cereal box, lived alongside all the other cereal boxes situated in time and space from the beginning of the world. We strive to come out of our box and visit other families, other friends … other boxes in the seasons of our life. God’s desire for us to be Christian citizens of the world matters to us.
The Lord is with you, O champion! Be calm, do not fear. You shall not die. So Gideon built an altar to the Lord and called it Yahweh-Shalom. The Lord proclaims peace to his people, to his faithful ones and to those who put in him their hope.
It’s easy to celebrate our anniversary today thinking of Gideon, star of today’s lectionary, who lived in his own small box until God got in his face and insisted he become a leader. The stories of Gideon’s life – of the fear and intimidation he felt, the fleeces he cast, God’s insistence that he reduce the Israelite army from 32,000 to 300 and their consequent victories which made him (and God) famous – ring in my ears on this 46th August 19th since we were married in Mt. Pulaski, Illinois by Al Morehead as part of our Sunday church service.
Born into the smallest of Israel’s tribes, Gideon was one man with one family who found a way to become Israel’s most effective judge for 40 years, led by God to become a leader of his people. Last week Steve Garnaas-Holmes posted a poem which brings today’s moment, todays culture, today’s experience into a longer perspective. God’s time neither begins nor ends with ours.
His poem opens my eyes to glimpse Gideon’s time and place, along with our own brief married moment, as part of one long, constant whole, what Steve calls an “eternity of grace,” all of it and all of us made with love by our Father.
The Present Time
Oh, we see the orange blades of fascism
knifing out through the leaves.
We feel that autumn edge to our easy days,
the coming frost of fear.
We know what we’re seeing,
the erasure of truth, the hoarding of power,
soldiers in the streets
and neighbors disappearing.
We know how to interpret these.
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But there are other signs hidden in the present moment:
the great tidal movement of compassion,
strangers holding hands,
the tilting of the earth toward light,
the buds of God swelling,
the hands of Love on the clay as it turns on the wheel.
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The present moment is not just these minutes.
(Relax; you will arrive in time.)
It’s not just these days, or even years.
(Yes, this will get harder before it gets easier.)
The present moment belongs to the eternity of grace;
this moment, this year and this eon are enfolded.
The final resurrection is also today.
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The Suffering One is already present,
who inhabits every tragedy with mercy.
The end, in which all is made well and whole,
is also in this moment.
The present time isn’t just one phrase,
but the whole story.
Eyes open, friends.
Even now the Mystery expands. – Steve Garnaas-Holmes
 (Judges 6, Psalm 85, 2 Corinthians 8, Matthew 19)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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