Monday, October 14, 2024

Gospeling Your Life ~ Deconstructing

 



Read John 9-10 ~ These two chapters are rich in metaphor and meaning, worth reading a few times.  Chapter 9 is a narrative of a beloved son of God who is blind from birth.  Notice how the disciples want to explain (even blame or shame) who is at fault for this brokenness.  I don’t know what hurts more ~ the fact that this is in the Bible OR that we keep doing this today?!  We keep blaming and shaming people who are hurting, telling them that they didn’t pray enough, believe enough, follow our instructions well enough.  This adds salt to the woundedness of the world.  To be sure, Jesus saying the blindness was for God to work through this beloved, could be taken several different directions.  We should be clear that Jesus is breaking down the accepted theological explanation of the day ~ that if you had a disease, it was from the divine.  You made God angry.  Jesus is pushing against that.  I wish that he had said this a little clearer ~ that illnesses/pain/grief are not punishment!!  And I don’t want to miss how Jesus is deconstructing bad theology equation of the day that a bad event was caused by something you did.  As the story unfolds, the Pharisees (that is, good religious folk) want to figure this out.  So do we today.  We want, almost demand, reasonable and rational reasons for why bad things happen to good people.  The Pharisees cannot accept mystery and ambiguity.  The question is, can we?  Are we willing to enter a realm where our brain won’t be able to come up with witty, cynical, thoughtful, well-argued reasons?  Are we willing to be mystics who hold life loosely, or do we keep treating life as a problem to be solved?  Do we keep erasing the chalkboard pushing ourselves to understand everything.  Do we let grace confound and confuse us?  Do we let joy disrupt and disturb us (that evokes laughter at the absurdity of it all)?  One final note, I love how the medicine in 9:6 is mud – soil – earth.  This echoes Genesis 2 where God makes humans out of the earth – mud – soil, breathing in us the breath of life.

 

Breathe in the breath of God.

 

Breathe in the One who longs to shepherd your life through these words you’ve been reading for the last 40 plus days.

 

Breathe out the prayers of your heart ~ what is life giving right now, what is life draining?

 

Breathe out the voices that want to criticize and critique and throw tomatoes at you because you are daring to let your light shine and follow the voice of our Shephard/Savior.

 

Breathe and be.  Breathe and be.  Breathe and be.  Amen.


No comments:

Post a Comment

Searching for and Seeking out

  Love is continually searching for and seeking out the sacred, which is where we find our hope and peace and joy.   In some way, maybe we s...