Vulnerability Part 2

 

This week, I am sharing some quotes from Maggie Smith’s work on vulnerability.  Yesterday, we explored and examined our own vulnerability.  If you felt yourself shifting uncomfortably in your chair as you read the words yesterday, if you felt a gnawing sense that something felt off, if you argued with me that God is all powerful, all knowing, and all present, thus saith that Lord, that points to the uncomfortable truth of how we’ve gospeled our lives.  Brian McLaren says we prefer a confident, simple lie to a complex/contradictory truth.  We want the microwave, drive-thru, instant and immediate resolution ~ not the wrestling and limping of Jacob who struggled with the sacred.  The gospel of our economy and world (that what we venerate, we emulate) says, to quote the Burger King commercial, “You deserve to have it way.”  This is our mantra and how we measure our lives.  And yet, in Christ we hear, “No greater love have you than to lay down your life for a friend/neighbor/those around us” (John 15:13).  How do we reconcile this? 

 

Right now, I am sure you might be thinking, “Thanks for this, Wes.  If I wanted to feel uncomfortable, I’d schedule an appointment with my dentist!

 

Faith stretches us beyond our confidence, control, and comprehension. 

 

Faith is not something we can keep confined or contained in a box, even as we try our best to do just that. 

 

Maggie Smith writes, “In the end none of it (all our plotting and planning and preparations) helps us feel any better about our ability….and the more desperate we feel, the more we try to mask how far in over our heads we are, hoping no one will be able to tell.” 

 

I realize this is not popular, probably won’t be liked or shared on social, but perhaps as we look toward the arrival of God incarnate in a baby born in a barn (cow shed or stable) to two unprepared parents (which is how every parent always feels because children don’t come with owner’s manuals and there is not a YouTube video to solve our own inadequacies), it is good to sit with the gospeling truths that compete for our attention and application and affiliation. 

 

Know that I sit with you in this uncertainty and uncomfortableness as someone who stands up on Sunday mornings trying to offer some words (any words) to help meet you in our human size lives.  May we remember that God incarnate in a baby sits with us, and shows us this truth as well.  May the light of God’s love meet us in the beautiful messiness of life today.  Amen.