Statements of Faith ~ Week 3

 

O God, embodied in a human life, we believe and trust in you. Jesus our brother, born of the woman Mary, you confronted the proud and the powerful, and welcomed as your friends those of no account.

 

Talking about God is riskier than walking a tightrope across the Grand Canyon, because beneath our confident words is the inconvenient question: do we really know God’s actions in this world?  It isn’t like ChatGPT or some AI program can definitively tell us what God is up to in the world.  Rather, we are given glimpses, traces, of God’s grace.  Like footprints left in the sand where the Sacred has already been.  Then, we let loose our inner Sherlock Holmes meet Jessica Fletcher in the great mystery of faith.  What is God up to today?  I don’t know.  So, I search for the clues in scripture, past experiences of the holy in my life, moments of quiet, and movements of my soul to open to God in the present.  The words above claim that God’s love could not be contained, but came to us in flesh, breath, and bone of Jesus the Christ.  Jesus, born a vulnerable infant, is so counterintuitive to the brash bullying of the world today that values only prestige, power, and privilege.  Jesus welcomed the least, lost, lonely, and left out both because that was his experience as a baby and what Scripture commanded (see Exodus 22:21, Leviticus 19:33-34, and Deuteronomy 10:18-19).  Jesus walked prophetically with one foot just inside the religious system and one foot outside to reach the marginalized.  Jesus could confront the religious with love and then extend God’s love to all who felt forgotten by religion.  This is true not only then and there, but here and now.  We are called to both stand alongside the immigrant, oppressed, hurting, and forgotten and stay open to God’s work inside the body of Christ called “the church”.  The church is a very human institution.  We have foibles and failings.  God is reforming, refashioning, and re-storying the church again and again.  We claim our brokenness of the past.  The harmful, even hateful, actions of agism, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism, and silence on mental health.  Yet, these problems will take more than throwing money at them to fully reconcile and restore right relationships.  I take heart that Jesus didn’t change everyone’s heart.  It wasn’t like on Easter Sunday everyone realized what God was up to.  Truth is, I often miss God in my life.  Yet, I prayerfully seek to love God with all my mind, heart, soul, and strength; to love my neighbor as myself…knowing there is no finish line for this work, but it is the holy calling of my whole life.  Amen.