About Elizabeth

Hello! I'm glad to meet you! My name is Elizabeth. I am a wife and a stay-at-home mommy to three beautiful girls; I am a musician and a writer. I would love for you to visit with me at MadeSacred.com where I write and try to thoughtfully engage life and culture as a way of loving God and loving others. After all, God has made everything to be sacred, things in our daily lives and things in the world around us.

Living in the Dark

Posted on December 23, 2016 by Elizabeth

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Christmas begins in the dark.

Advent, this season leading up to Christmas, is for us. It is for we who live in the dark.

This season seems to amplify pain. Those who are lonely feel more lonely, those who are grieving feel their grief more deeply, those who are hurting seem to suffer more.

And that’s okay.

It’s okay not to feel happy this time of year.

After all, Christmas doesn’t mean much if we don’t need it.

Mary understood. Her angel visitation led to a rift between her and her beloved, a painful journey on a donkey, and giving birth next to a chicken.

Even as she clutched her newborn son, she heard the prophecy of a sword piercing her heart and wondered.

Even after her Christmas, her beloved son grew farther and farther away from her, uttering such things as Why would you look for me? Don’t you know I must be about my Father’s business? and, when she came through the crowds to see him, My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.

Yet Mary stayed close. She trusted and held on to her faith in her son no matter how distant he seemed, even when he died. She stayed close. Everywhere we look in the gospels we see Mary, hovering on the outskirts, still showing up, still coming back to her son again and again.

Can we do the same?

Can we hold on to our faith in the Son no matter how distant He seems, even if He seems to be dead?

This world is dark and we live in a continual Advent.

Don’t run away from the bitter-sweetness of this Advent season. You don’t have to pretend to feel joyful.

Don’t hide behind the tinsel and lights. Neither should you ignore the colors completely.

Linger as you abide with the sorrow and the joy, the hurt and the hope that are woven together in this season. Stay close to the Son however far away He may seem.

Settle into the knowing of how desperately we need Christmas, how desperately we need God-with-us.

Our Father promised that Christmas would come

and it will be all the more beautiful for having lived through the darkness of Advent.

Art credit: Pieta by Michelangelo; all other photographs copyrighted by Elizabeth Giger

Longing and Hoping He Will Come

Posted on December 16, 2016 by Elizabeth

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Advent is a time of waiting. A time of light and of dark, a holy season of expectancy.

Advent means arrival and we are waiting for your arrival, oh Light of the world.

We sing our beautiful songs of longing and of hope and we pray that you will come.

Kings and prophets of old prayed, Come!

All my life, I have prayed, Come!

Yet has humanity gotten any closer to you in these thousands of years of our existence?

Have I gotten any closer to you in my few decades of life?

Or is the distance to you always the same no matter how far we travel?

When our bleeding feet have apparently covered a part of the distance to your eternity, don’t you always retreat twice as far away from us, into the immense reaches filled only by your infinite being?

You tell us that you have already come, once upon a time, as a baby in the straw. You tell us that you have come, have settled in among us and shared our drab and ordinary lives, but to be honest, it is hard to see you in this place.

To be honest, your arrival often feels more like a departure.

You came as you promised, but you did not change our poor and finite sort of life as you lived it. Instead, you became like us in every regard.

You lived every moment carefully, not letting any sort of torment slip from your cupped hands. You felt deeply every drop of this life and suffered it all, right to the bleeding end.

You, too, felt death coming for you, steadily, relentlessly. You, too, when you looked up to the One who is called Father, begging for comfort in your pain and dread, were met with deafening silence.

Is this why you came? Is this birth in Bethlehem and death on Golgotha the coming that is to redeem all of us from our human misery? Are we to be comforted simply because you also wept and met your end?

No, now I begin to understand that we sing and pray this Come of hope and longing because you are still in the process of your coming. Your appearance as part of the very dirt you created was only the beginning of your coming.

You chose to rescue us from our misery by taking on our very misery and bringing it to the triumphant ending we could not have found. You alone are able to take the cross we all bear and change it into a triumphant banner of victory.

It is said you will come again, but again is misleading. It is said that you will appear again, and perhaps this is a better way of understanding because you have never really gone away. In all of our human existence you have never left us.

Behold, you come. Now it is still the one single hour of your Advent, at the end of which we too shall have found out that you have really come. O God who is to come, grant me the grace to live now, in the hour of your Advent, in such a way that I may merit to live in your forever, in the blissful hour of your eternity.

~ all quotes are from Karl Rahner (1904-1984), German Jesuit priest and theologian. Many of the ideas in this essay are also from him.

Be Still

Posted on December 9, 2016 by Elizabeth

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Be still.

Wait.

Be still and wait for God.

Be still and wait for God to come.

Advent is waiting and so we become still while we wait for Him to come down and rescue us.

We pause in our fighting and our striving, we rest from our grieving and our mourning, we stop to breathe in our busyness and our too much.

Just for a moment.

It doesn’t take any of it away. Yet.

But we become still like Moses with the Red Sea before and the Egyptian army after and we wait for God to fight for us.

We who have lived with the pain for far too long, we who have just received the phone call and sit at our kitchen table in stunned silence, we who can’t see how we will put one foot in front of the other much less get up from our beds in the morning, we who hide in our closets and weep our wracking sobs while we rock back and forth,

just for one moment we become still.

We remember that God is and that He is fighting for us.

It doesn’t solve or heal any of it. Yet.

But it will.

Oh, how it will.

We become still and we wait for Emmanuel. We wait for Emmanuel, God-with-us, to come down.

We wait in this season and we wait in this life for our Emmanuel to come down and fight and make it all okay again.

So for just a moment, take a breath and remember how He already did this once to show us that He will do it again.

Be still.

Wait.

edited from the archives

Finding the And

Posted on December 1, 2016 by Elizabeth

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

What is this proclivity of ours to divide ourselves? What is this propensity to force a choice, to say it must be either-or rather than and?

The more I read and listen to church leaders in other countries, in other faith traditions, in other times, the more I see our especially American tendency to eschew the middle of a continuum for the outer reaches.

We do this in religion and we do this in politics. Fundamentalism vs Liberalism. Republican vs Democrat. Often we confuse the whole thing completely and mix both religion and politics all up together in an inseparable soup of extremes.

Why can’t it be and?

Why can’t some of what fundamentalists teach and some of what liberals teach both be true? Is there truly no middle ground, no and?

N.T. Wright, a bishop in the Church of England and a respected theologian/historian who specializes in studying and writing about Jesus and 1st century Judaism and Christianity, spoke at a conference in America of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.

Wright described how the Roman Catholic church made the Lord’s Supper more and more mystical and ritual, almost turning it into something magical that had to be done with just exactly the proper rites in order for the bread and wine to become body and blood, and how the Protestant church reacted so strongly against this that they turned the Lord’s Supper into merely a symbol, a sign of something that happened a long time ago and nothing more.

Wright suggested that perhaps it is both. Perhaps instead of either the Catholic view or the Protestant view, it is and.

The Lord’s Supper, as Jesus gave it to the disciples and instructed them to continue to practice it, was simple. There was no formula that had to be done in order to make it work correctly. Yet it also was more than a symbol.

In some mysterious way, when we take the bread and the wine, we are taking into ourselves the body and blood of the risen Jesus. We are taking into ourselves the presence of the living Lord which then gives us the power and strength we need to go out into our community and meet the needs of those around us.

This view harmonizes with the other things that Jesus did and said, such as his imagery of the vine and the branches, saying that we must abide in Him and He must abide in us, otherwise we can do nothing (John 15).

Of course, God can find other ways of giving us the power we need to bring His kingdom here on earth, but this is the primary, continuous way that Jesus gave us.

If we open our hearts and minds, there are so many more and‘s to be found. There are many more ways in which the theology insisted upon by fundamentalism and the social justice insisted upon by liberalism are essential to each other rather than pressed up hard against one another.

If we find them, perhaps we can move one more step closer to the unity that Jesus prayed for us to have.

If we can only seek out the and.

Art credits: Eucharist relief; Catholic Eucharist; Protestant Eucharist; Eucharist tapestry ; Eucharist in Prayer Book

My Confession and Repentance

Posted on November 25, 2016 by Elizabeth

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I am prejudiced.

Perhaps not overtly. I am not prejudiced in a way that anyone outside of my head would notice. I don’t consciously try to think poorly about those who are different than me or treat them badly.

The judgments, the assumptions, are there, though.

My own prejudice is not related to race. I am grateful to have had many friendships with people of other races. These friendships allow me to see similar people I do not know through the eyes of those friendships.

My particular prejudice is related to economic and educational status.

What is yours?

When I see someone who speaks or writes as though they have not even made it through high school, I don’t treat them poorly, but I make assumptions. I make assumptions about their character, about the way they think, and therefore assumptions about what their future actions might be.

Some of the time I catch myself. I give myself a mental shake and try to see the person for who they really are.

I don’t always catch myself.

For this I repent.

I will take responsibility for my own failings and take the first step towards making the Church a safer place for those who are not like me.

Repentance involves change. It is not simply apologizing and then continuing on. One must go in a different direction.

And so I repent.

I repent for making assumptions about people based on their appearance.

I repent for judging people’s character based on the way they speak.

I repent for thinking myself better than someone who has not had as much education.

For truly? Truly, I am ashamed for valuing knowledge more than kindness. I sorrow over my valuing learning more than gentleness. I lament over my valuing schooling more than servanthood.

I confess and I repent.

Will you join me?

May God have mercy and heal me of such things.

May Christ have mercy and heal the Church.

May the Spirit have mercy and heal our world.

What I Saw

Posted on November 18, 2016 by Elizabeth

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Let me tell you what I saw on Sunday.

Let me tell you what I saw as I sat on stage with the worship band at church.

I saw a miracle. A miracle of hope.

I saw a parade of different, a line of people as disparate as could be walk to the front of our church and choose Jesus.

This week the internet has been crammed full of articles and blog posts that tell me that within our church, which identifies as evangelical, the people should be sharply divided. That the white men should be seated on one side and all the rest of us should be seated on the other side, both groups shooting looks of anger and disappointment toward the other.

That’s not what I saw.

I saw, instead, person after person, so many people, walk to the front to be baptized.

I saw Caucasian American, African American, Asian American, Latino American, old, young, men and women all die to their old life and begin their new life in Christ.

And I saw Caucasian American, African American, Asian American, Latino American, old, young, men and women all come to their feet and clap and cheer and whoop and holler for them.

I wept.

All while trying to play a complicated part on a B-3 organ. Not the best plan for playing well.

Yet I couldn’t take my eyes off that baptistry.

Because what I saw on Sunday?

What I saw was hope.

Not perfection. Until Jesus comes back, there will never be perfection here on this earth.

The Church has been responsible for so many atrocious acts over the centuries. Nothing has changed. We are all still human and I know there was still a lot of pain and grief inside of the people in our church. We will still hurt each other and have to apologize and forgive. But there was also a lot of healing.

I saw people set aside, just for that moment, how differently they viewed the world and instead choose to cheer each other on toward Jesus.

I know we often do a horrible job of loving people, but every once in a while we get it right.

This Sunday, I saw us get it right.

I saw that parade of different and I saw the Church urging them on. I saw people focused on Jesus. I saw a miracle of hope.

So don’t give up on the Church.

Take a step back for a moment if you need to and take a deep breath.

But don’t give up on her. She is still the Body of Christ.

She needs us. She needs us to keep reminding her how to love those who are different.

Keep praying for her. Keep standing up against her when she becomes hurtful and standing up for her when others try to hurt her. Keep serving and worshiping with her. As a part of her.

Just keep taking one step at a time, one more step alongside this Church that is loved by Jesus.

After all, if Jesus hasn’t given up on us yet, perhaps we shouldn’t give up on each other either.

House of Cards

Posted on November 11, 2016 by Elizabeth

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Why are we so defensive on God’s behalf?

Why do we become so frightened of hard questions?

Do we think the Bible asks us to defend God’s character, or is it deeper than that?

Not all of the time, but all of us do harbor a bit of the recurring agnostic inside. A tiny voice that says, what if it isn’t true?

What will become of me if it isn’t true?

This flicker of fear lingers so insidiously that when someone asks a questions to which we don’t know the answer, when someone expresses a doubt we ourselves have thought, we tend to lash out, to push away, to shame.

If this piece of what I believe turns out not to be true, perhaps none of it is true.

Is God so fragile?

Is the God who flung the stars into space, who has the power to overcome sin and death so uncertain that one piece of the puzzle can bring the entire edifice crashing down?

Is our God a house of cards?

If your God is a house of cards, you need a new God.

You need a God who is big enough to cradle all our questions, deep enough to hold all our doubts.

You need the God who shows His power through the universe we see, who reveals Himself through His Son in Scripture, who speaks to us through His Spirit within us.

When you know this God, you can let go of your need to defend. You can rest easy with, even welcome the doubts and questions of others.

When you are safe and secure in the LORD Almighty, you become a place for others to find rest. You become a safe place where people can sit with their questions and doubts without feeling shamed or guilty.

What if we as a Church became a place where people could question and yet trust, where people could doubt and yet worship, where people could wonder and yet love.

What if we welcomed the not-so-sure rather than driving them away?

What if we could be comfortable with the hard spaces, acknowledging that not everything has an answer we can know right now?

It starts with you and with me. Can we let go of our fear and trust that our faith is not a house of cards?

Imagine a church where people could worship even when they don’t have it all figured out.

Imagine a church where people could love and serve even in the times when they aren’t quite sure about it all.

Imagine a church full of people like…

Well, full of people like us.

This One Is for the Ugly Days

Posted on November 4, 2016 by Elizabeth

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

There are some days when it is easy to love.

I am able to surrender to the Spirit which causes peace to fill me up and overflow into the hearts of my daughters, my husband. I have the supernatural strength to stay calm in the midst of tantrums, kind in the midst of misunderstandings, and joyful in the midst of hurt.

Then there are days like today.

Days when something ugly wells up inside of me. Days when I want to be mean. Days when I feel resentful towards those I love best.

I hate these days.

What is this darkness, this nastiness that overwhelms me and threatens to spill out into the hearts of those I love?

My daughters cry to be held, fuss about wearing clothes, throw tantrums because school is hard, and my desire is not to comfort them but to scream like a crazed woman with fire in my eyes.

My husband makes an innocent comment and my desire is not to hear his loving intentions but to deliberately misunderstand and hiss a disparaging remark.

I intentionally fight against the changing of my mood. I want to savor, to wallow in my blackness.

I hate these days.

I get so tired of fighting this battle within me. I get so weary of fighting my very self. I long for the day when I finally look like Jesus, when my desire is to love rather than hate, when my heart is all light with no shadow at all.

As ugly as my heart can be, I am grateful that God refuses to give up on me. I am thankful that He does not save me and then leave me as I am. I am astounded that He is filling me up with Himself, crowding out the ugliness until there is nothing left but Beauty.

I try not to feel impatient.

Yet I know. I know. I know that I belong to Jesus. He gave Himself for me and therefore sin has lost its hold on me. I can hold on to that knowing even when I cannot feel it. Little by little, sin’s grasp is slipping away because Love has taken hold and nothing dark can hold on in the light of this fiercest Love.

As the recent hymn, In Christ Alone, says, “No power of hell, no scheme of man can ever pluck me from His hand; ‘till He returns or calls me home, here in the power of Christ I’ll stand.”

No scheme of man. Not even my own schemes. Nothing can separate me from Love Himself.

But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope:

The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end;

They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.

Amen.

edited from the archives

Desperate for a Little Character

Posted on October 28, 2016 by Elizabeth

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site. (Also? I know I stumbled over/mispronounced a few words…but it was a really long blog post…and I just didn’t feel up to the task of re-recording it. I humbly ask for a bit of extra grace.)

Donald Trump is a crooked, underhanded con artist and…a spoiled, overgrown brat. – Matt Walsh on The Blaze

Trump mocks the disabled, calls women dogs, and advocates for the assassination of women and children. Hillary Clinton is a proven liar. They both have, in short, a lack of character. And people flock to them.

Why? Does it even matter? Is a person’s character at all important in this modern age or is it a relic of outdated morals? Character is more than merely important; it is vital to our society. It is important to people as individuals and it is important to society in its entirety.

When we can cheat and lie “just a little bit” and still think highly of ourselves, when we show our children that it is necessary to sometimes do insignificantly wrong things to get by, when it is more wrong to judge evil than to do evil, then we are in trouble. For our society to function well, we need people of character in leadership positions, from teachers and managers to mayors and governors.

What has happened in our world? Why do ordinary people care so little about acting in moral ways? Much of this dearth of character, this scarcity of virtue, comes from the rejection of the idea that truth is unchanging, that truth can be the same regardless of place or time. If truth is, at best, all relative and only a matter of perspective and, at worst, a social construct and simply whatever we make it to be, then why should anyone work to develop a character that may or may not be valid to anyone else? If there is no truth that we can deliberate over and discover together as a society (whatever that truth may be and wherever it may come from), we are left with, as Christian Cleric Richard John Neuhaus says, “power and propaganda and grievance and anger and caucuses and anti-caucuses and special interest groups and victims and vengeance.”

This concept of truth comes from our distinctly American philosophy of pragmatism (founded by William James, 1842-1910, who said that the true was only the expedient. Truth, in other words, is what works.). When society contains multiple competing ways of viewing the world, and when all of those ways are equally valid, then the only way to determine which viewpoint is most true is to determine which is most useful. If truth is simply what is most useful, then truth will change over time.

There is an assumption in much of society, in many of our universities especially, that we cannot keep society and relationships moving forward if we speak of one truth for all people because truth brings only conflict. Truth has become the loud uncle we are vaguely ashamed of, assuming that anything so divisive has no appropriate role in public life. When the biggest wrong that can be done in a society is to cause an argument, we are left with a society that vacantly agrees with every new opinion. When the biggest good a government can do is to smooth everything to the same level of truth, we are left with a government that changes policy for each group that shouts louder. When truth is sensible rather than stubborn, as trustworthy as a weatherman, we are left with a prediction for Snowpocalypse that leaves Walmart shelves empty but a reality of 60 degrees and sunny. Society is left to flounder on a foundation of shifting sand.

How did this happen? How did truth get hijacked and associated with the negative? How did truth become linked with religious totalitarianism and Osama bin Laden? How did it become shameful to declare a belief in truth, even simply the idea of truth, regardless of what that truth is? Part of the answer, I’m afraid, comes from us, the Church. We have a history of wielding the truth divisively, of tearing down and even destroying rather than creating and building up. We have used truth as an excuse for starting crusades and we have used truth as an excuse to look at our neighbor with contempt. Truth has become a weapon used to elevate ourselves by bludgeoning down all those we deem as “other”.

This becomes all the more baffling when we remember that Jesus, God in the flesh, claimed to be Truth. If we are condemning our neighbor with what we claim to be truth, perhaps it is not truly Truth we are wielding. Using truth as a magic wand to turn our neighbor into a stepping stone is a natural consequence when we who claim to follow Truth succumb to our world’s version of expedient truth. This is what Trump has done and this is why so many evangelicals support him. Trump is the embodiment of pragmatic truth, and when the Church has forgotten the words and life of Him who claimed to be truth, the Church is easily swayed toward truth that is useful, truth that serves a purpose, truth that turns character into a liability. As much as we might wish it, truth is not in our service, rather we who claim to be Christian are servants of the Truth in the person of Jesus.

If Jesus is, as He claimed to be, the Truth, we are given a truth that is unchanging, yet personal. We are given a truth that produces genuine, enduring character. When we follow Jesus as the Truth, living and speaking as He did, we find that God’s Spirit produces in us a character of love rather than a character of expediency. And when we are possessed of a character of love, we find that we are asked to proclaim this pure, loving truth to our world. More difficult, even, than proclaiming it, we are asked to live it out. Neuhaus tells us that it is now the Church’s task to learn how to assert truth in public “persuasively and winsomely and in a manner that does not violate but strengthens the bonds of civility”. He reminds us that it is our duty to do more than merely tolerate those with whom we disagree but to eagerly engage them, even pursue them, in love.

How? How do we declare and live truth without being divisive and unpleasant, causing strife, conflict, and wars? By remembering grace. Amazing grace. We can live out stubborn truth beautifully by remembering that we ourselves are unable to live up to our own standards and yet we are loved. When we despise or feel superior to anyone, when our goal is, as Trump claims, to “make America great again” by marginalizing the poor and disadvantaged, we derive more power from our own exalted sense of self-righteousness than from God’s grace. Living by this brand of truth that exalts ourselves is what poisons the truth with divisiveness. This is what Trump does: cause divisiveness by playing one group against another, by exalting us by means of demeaning them. Living out Jesus as truth can also be divisive, but a much different sort of divisive. Living out Jesus as truth produces a steady character of loving and caring for others. It is exalting others by humbling ourselves. This can be threatening, and therefore divisive, to those who have already exalted themselves, but it a way of living truth that is desperately needed in our world.

It is ageless, this genuine sort of character. It is what the early Christians did when they loved the poor, empowered women, and brought together the races and classes. It is how the early Church overran the Roman Empire when it wasn’t even attempting to gain political power. This is the sort of truth we need. The kind of truth that provides a firm and unchanging foundation for our society. One that will not allow people to helplessly flail but gives them the strength to build a society that lasts, one that cares for all of its members. Tim Keller says that this is the sort of truth that is “a God Who became weak, Who loved and died for the people Who opposed Him, forgiving them.”

Matt Walsh calls Trump a crook and a brat, essentially labeling him as someone who deceives others and who is himself deceived. It seems unbelievable, but this seems to be what many in our country are searching for. Someone like Trump or Clinton who does whatever is advantageous today, someone who manipulates and even creates truth to suit themselves and their supporters. If, instead, you are searching for someone who will lead by serving, someone who will follow Truth rather than create it, well, I’m afraid you probably won’t find that in the upper echelons of our country.

What, then, shall we do? Despair and give up on our country? Better yet by far than any vote you may cast, rather, become that sort of leader yourself in the world of your own influence. After all, presidents have never yet been able to save our country or her people. A country full of people who live lives full of Truth and Love, however? That sort of citizenry has been known to change the world.

When Are You Blessed?

Posted on October 21, 2016 by Elizabeth

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God.

What are you clutching in white-knuckled fists?

Blessed are you who hold your possessions loosely, knowing that they are a gift to be stewarded rather than a treasure to be hoarded.

What fear keeps you awake at night?

Blessed are you who are grateful for each year you grow older, knowing that old age deepens beauty and wisdom rather than bringing a loss of beauty or worth.

Which loss are you afraid would bring you to your knees?

Blessed are you who allow your beloveds the freedom to belong to God, knowing that He will care for them far better than you ever could.

Possessions, youth, loved ones. Some of you have already lost these things. All of us will eventually.

What will you do when your arms grow weary, when your hands lose their grip and these things you hold so dear are gone?

We are all already poor, whether we understand this or not.

If clutching what you love is not the way to possess it forever, what should you do instead?

Open your hands. Relax your grip.

Surrender it to God.

Whatever it is, whomever it is, surrender it to God.

Acknowledge what is already true, that you are poor. Acknowledge the reality that you are in possession of nothing.

When you surrender that which does not truly belong to you, God gives to you in return the most precious gift of all.

He gives you the gift of Himself, of His presence in that place where God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God.

Art Credit: Christ and Samaritan Woman by Siemiradzki