Practice Resurrection.

Isaiah 25:6-9

I.

            The resurrection of Jesus gives us the summary of the message of the Bible.  Just as the Biblical story was set in motion and determined by the event of Passover, when the Israelites were liberated by God from slavery in Egypt, now, in Jesus’ resurrection, that liberation is extended and applied to the whole creation and all people.  Beyond being freed from bondage, now it is release from death itself, the ultimate bondage and slavery in human existence.  Indeed the resurrection reveals to us the meaning and destiny of human life, and all life, and creation generally.

            In other words, the deliverance of God’s people from Pharaoh’s tyranny in Egypt is a sign, a symbol, an image, a foretaste, and a representation of this even bigger and more inclusive and comprehensive deliverance in which all people are freed in the end from all tyranny.  All inequality, all bondage, all disease, all oppression, and even death itself, is swallowed up, overcome, defeated by the unstoppable, inevitable goodness and love of God. 

            Throughout the Scriptures we are occasionally regrounded in this fundamental heart of the story, that it is all about life, deliverance, healing, redemption, and joy.  No matter how grim and destructive the imagery gets – or our lives get – there is no question about the deepest truth on which we are to rely.  And that is the ultimate blessing and goodness at the core of everything.

            If a story begins well and ends well, it completely reframes whatever else might happen in the middle.  Human beings will repeatedly, out of ignorance and fear, do things and develop systems that are so out of synch with God’s love that they collapse in disaster.  Human history could be seen as the succession of these catastrophes.  And after each one, God emerges again, coming to restore and deliver us, and call human beings back to this vision of reality of freedom, plenty, and justice. 

II.

            This great banquet, this “feast of rich food,” that Isaiah prophesies, will take place “on this mountain.”  He means

Jerusalem and the hill upon which the Temple was built.  It is to this place that Isaiah says “all peoples” will come.  This banquet is for everyone, people of every nation.  

            Of course, the first thing we notice is that the people who are welcomed by God extend beyond just the chosen Jewish nation.  As far back as Abraham, and even to Noah, the Bible recognizes that God is intending to bless and gather together all the families of the Earth.  No nationality or ethnicity is excluded.  God chooses one family to be the conveyer of this blessing, but it is the whole planet and everyone on it that will receive and participate in it. 

            When Isaiah says “all,” he means all.  The banquet recognizes no divisions or hierarchies among people.  It is not just for rich, privileged, powerful people.  It is not just for healthy, beautiful, and popular people.  Neither is it just for the poor and the infirm and the outcast.  It is not just for religious people, or people who call themselves “Christians.” 

            You know, Isaiah’s vision is not about heaven or the end-times.  He expects this to happen in real time.  That’s why he mentions a particular, solid, physical, temporal mountain.  He expects God’s people to live now in light of this vision and create a community that reflects these conditions.  This is in fact what Jesus comes to do; and we who follow him are to continue his work, by the power of the Spirit he gives us.

            So if we are going to be faithful to this vision, it means we will have to learn how to be a wildly inclusive community, without superiors and subordinates, without haves and have-nots, without these categories of difference we impose on people.  At this banquet we are all equal before God.

III.
            Isaiah describes this banquet as characterized by “rich food” and “well-matured wines.”  He says that twice.  So Isaiah talks about this vision as one of spectacular abundance.  There will be no scarcity.  There will be no limit to God’s blessings and provision.  There will be more than enough for all.

            Jesus lives this way as well.  He feeds thousands from just a few loaves and fish.  He never tells someone coming for healing that he has run out of power, or that he doesn’t have enough for them.  He is ridiculously generous.

            Isaiah and Jesus witness to the astounding goodness of God in providing us with a planet which is more than able to produce plenty of food for everyone.  God created the Earth as a place where scarcity is unheard of.  Life is ridiculously, almost absurdly, abundant.  How many acorns does one oak tree produce? 

            It is not God’s fault that there is hunger in the world.  It is the fault of the systems we humans invent to grow, process, and distribute food, which invariably create scarcity and huge inequality for various economic and financial reasons.

            What we are called to do, if we want to anticipate this vision of the banquet, is to work to build a way to feed everyone, starting, of course, in our own gatherings and communities.  Then extending it into the whole world.  God wills and gives us incredible abundance.  There is more than enough for all.

IV.

            So, to this banquet everyone is invited, and there is plenty for all, and finally God “will destroy on this mountain
the shroud that is cast over all peoples,
the sheet that is spread over all nations; 
he will swallow up death for ever.”


            The picture of God somehow opening his mouth and devouring death is kind of weird.  But the point is that God is bigger than death and the Lord of death.  The fact that is the greatest power in our lives, death, is to God merely… lunch.  God controls and consumes death; death is not an alien power but something within God, it is now part of God’s system for goodness and blessing.  Death is no longer a source of fear or terror for us; its violence and grief and emptiness and loss is not a perpetual shadow hanging over God’s banquet, like it hangs over all our existence.  But this shadow is devoured by the light of resurrection. 

            Death was the source of the fear that caused our divisions and exclusions.  With death deactivated, we can sit with all other peoples without fear.  Death was the source of the fear that caused our hoarding and stealing, leading to scarcity of resources.  With death immobilized, we can all have abundance.

            And that is the message of resurrection.  Death is swallowed up.  Death is de-fanged and domesticated.  Instead of the yawning horror at the end of the system, the source of all fear and sin, death is now defeated and incorporated into life.  As Paul famously says in Romans 8: “Neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  The resurrection means that all has been gathered under God’s love and life, revealed in Jesus.

V.

            This resurrection season, let’s remember that in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, God is giving us the power to anticipate the vision of this great banquet in our own lives.  Because he has defeated death, we are free from fear, and therefore even from sin.  We are free to welcome everyone with joy to our table.  We are free to express and celebrate and provide for all the abundance that God intends.  There is no scarcity at God’s table!

            Death has been swallowed up. There will be no tears of grief, sadness, or pain.  There will be no disgrace.  And the One for whom we wait will come, and will find us sharing together in a community of love, forgiveness, discipleship, and joy.

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Sustaining the Weary with a Word.

Isaiah 50:4-9a

I.

            How would the ability “to sustain the weary with a word” lead someone to have to endure suffering and persecution?  Wouldn’t sustaining the weary with a word, that is, being able to give comfort to an afflicted person by speaking to them, working as an effective counselor, wouldn’t that be something that would be valued in society?  Isn’t this at least part of the jobs of therapists and physicians and pastors and parents and teachers?  In what kind of situation would sustaining the weary with a word be an offense punishable by physical abuse?  Where is it against the law to say nice things to someone who is exhausted and downtrodden?  What kind of society could that be, I wonder?

            Well, it depends on who “the weary” are.  If the weary are people whose existence, activities, or hopes offend the powerful, or the majority, then it very well may be a crime to comfort them.             

            I used to serve on the board of the jail chaplaincy in Somerset County.  I would meet people who criticized what we were doing because they thought that to make the lives of prisoners any more comfortable would detract from the deterrence quality of their incarceration. 

            During Jim Crow in the South, making the lives of African-Americans any more comfortable was inviting them to actually start thinking of themselves as equal.  And they couldn’t have that. 

            Giving any kind of comfort to “undocumented” people is actually a crime in many States of our own country today.  This is the case even if they are women and children.  People can languish for years in secret detention centers; people who want to minister to them can hardly get in.  Families are split up by deportation. 

            My wife just got back from the Middle East where it is extremely frowned upon to bring comfort to Palestinians who are having to live under oppressive Israeli policies in their own homes and towns.  These are not terrorists, just families trying to live in peace where they have lived for generations. 

            In Nazi Germany you could have been executed for comforting Jews, or any of the other many groups the government hated. 

            Isaiah is getting into trouble for comforting the Jews in exile in Babylon.  If he is going around telling the captive Jews that Babylon is about to fall, and the people will be released to go back home, that could not have been very popular among their Babylonian overlords.

            So, “sustaining the weary with a word” is a subversive activity if the weary are oppressed, rejected, victimized, marginalized, and hated people. 

            “Sustaining the weary with a word” is an activity that invites horrible abuse like that Isaiah describes.  Insults, spitting, having your beard pulled out.  (The beards of Jewish men may have been offensive to authorities who believed men should be clean-shaven….) 

II.

            This work of comforting the afflicted is something the prophet learned from God.  He says it is the Lord God who has taught him and made him a teacher of the downtrodden and the victims.  No doubt, his sustaining the weary with a word has to do with retelling the story of God’s faithfulness and liberation of the people.  The whole Torah is about just this: God intervening in history to save and restore the Israelites.  Usually this happens in spite of their sin and complaining.

            Even when the people’s sin is so great that it brings down disaster on them, God still shows up and pulls them out of it.  Here in the exile, we see the worst mess they ever got themselves into.  And Isaiah has the same message: God will bail you out.  God will restore you.  God is forgiving and renewing you.  You will all go home, and soon!

            This is not a message the Babylonians wanted them to hear.  Their idea is that the Jews should be learning to forget their old nation and religion and become good Babylonian subjects.  Spreading the message that God will deliver these deported Jews back to their homeland, and that this will happen because Babylon will lose a war, was sedition, and punishable as such.

            Jesus gets criticized for the same kind of thing.  “Sustaining the weary with a word,” and with even more than a word, but with actions of healing and liberation, is what he spends most of his time doing.  The pious and powerful would point out that these people – whether they were tax collectors or prostitutes – do not deserve to have sustaining words spoken to them.  The gospels seem to focus on these two groups intentionally to make a point.  One group, the tax collectors, is hated by the “left” as collaborators with Rome, the other, the prostitutes, is hated by the “right” as sexually immoral.

            The thing about Jesus is that he doesn’t go along with these judgments and prejudices.  All he cares about is the person’s suffering.  When someone comes to Jesus for healing, Jesus never asks whether they are undocumented aliens, or whether they agree with him politically, or whether they led a good moral life, or whether they got this disease through their own irresponsible behavior.  It doesn’t matter to Jesus whether they are rich or poor, male or female, young or old, good or bad, Jew or Gentile… he still heals them.  He even forgives the very people who just got done nailing his body to two pieces of wood and standing him up in the hot sun to die!

            The only thing that matters to Jesus is the fact of someone’s suffering.  The only thing that matters to Jesus is the person’s weariness, as Isaiah might put it.  Their exhaustion, frustration, depression, and sorrow.  Their pain and their grief.  That’s all he sees.

            It apparently doesn’t occur to Jesus that it could be good for society and for the economy if some people are rejected, excluded, incarcerated, sick, possessed, or oppressed.  It doesn’t occur to him that some people just deserve to suffer in this life, and that to comfort them is to undermine the whole social order.

III.

            Jesus and the Sciptures always see the world from the perspective of those at the bottom.  The successful society, in Jesus’ eyes, is the one that provides for the needy, the sick, and the alien.  And he is absolutely committed to this mission.  He expresses the truth of God’s saving love for the whole world in everything he does.  He is adamant and unwavering about this.  Even when people are standing over him threatening him with arrest, he still heals whomever needs healing.

            So it is with Isaiah.  Even when the authorities in Babylon devise these ignominious torments for him, he is undeterred.  He still preaches good news.  He still proclaims the imminent collapse and defeat of Babylon.  He still reassures the people that they will be going home.

            He is able to do this because he knows that God’s truth is way bigger and deeper and higher than the ideological fantasies that the conquering empire would have the people be bamboozled by.  God’s truth is stronger than propaganda.

            He is able to remain firm because of his hope and faith in the ultimate reality of God’s Word.  He knows that God is a God who delivers, liberates, redeems, heals, and saves.  This is God’s intention for the universe God created.  Redemption and rebirth are encoded in the very structure of reality itself. 

            Empires can come along and by force and violence make people believe and act otherwise for a time.  They can and have used cruelty, theft, and murder to enforce a different version of reality on people.  They play on our fears and our anger.  But eventually God’s truth overpowers the entropy of falsehood.  God’s law, not to mention the subordinate laws of physics and biology, eventually assert themselves, and the edifice of lies constructed by wealthy and powerful people always crumbles into ruin.           

            Where is Babylon today?  Where is Assyria?  Where is Pharaoh’s Egypt?  Where is Greece?  Where is Rome?  Where is Persia?  Where indeed are the more recent empires of the British, the French, the Germans, the Dutch, the Spanish, the Portugese, and the Russians?  They are all historical wreckage.  They have all fallen.  Their empires are now inhabited by other peoples.  This is inevitable and certain.  It will happen to the empire we live in as well, by the way.

IV.

            And, at the same time, where are the people of God?  We’re still here.  The Jews are still here.  The followers of Jesus are still here.  Those who obey God and live according to God’s law of nonviolence, simplicity, sharing, equality, generosity, healing, humility, forgiveness, gentleness, and love, these are the people who inherit the earth.

            The early church, following the Lord Jesus, consciously and intentionally became known for loving and serving people whom the rest of Roman society hated or feared.  They would willingly go into plague areas and assist victims.  They sent missionaries to nations that were Rome’s enemies.  They embraced foreigners, slaves, lepers, deserting soldiers, prisoners, sex workers, abandoned children….

            This is why the true church even today still follows Jesus’ example and ministers to and with those whom our society hates and ignores.  AIDS victims, undocumented workers, gang members, convicts, members of religious or ethnic minorities, the poor, the unemployed, the foreclosed on, addicts, even our own enemies… these are the people to whom the followers of Jesus Christ reach out with God’s love.       

            Look around and see who is most hated.  Think about who would be the least popular suffering people to help.  Whom would we be criticized the most for comforting?  That’s to whom Jesus calls us to go.  The weary.  The fearful.  The hurting.  The dying.  No matter who they are.  These are always the people who have made up God’s gathering of disciples.

            The church doesn’t give itself enough opportunities to identify with Isaiah here.  When do we do things for which we need God’s vindication?  When do we have to rely only on God’s approval because we’re not getting any from anybody else?  When have we had to be as steadfast as hard flint in doing what is right in God’s eyes?  When do we ever have to stand up to contentious opposition?  When do we ever have to say, “It is the Lord God who helps us.  Who can declare us guilty?”  When do we dare people to find fault with what we are doing?

V.

            Our reading from the gospel has Jesus doing just this.  He is not sneaking in to Jerusalem, but making a big demonstration out of it.  But neither is he victorious on a white horse followed by an army.  He is obedient to God and humble, riding on a lowly donkey as did his mother when he was on his way to being born in Bethlehem.  But he is also alarmingly in the face of the authorities.  And in case you don’t get the point he immediately goes to the Temple and creates a disturbance about the commercialization and commodification of God’s House.

            Jesus obeys God and tells the truth.  The truth is God’s love for the whole world and everyone in it.  The truth is God’s deliverance, salvation, redemption, healing, and forgiveness.  The truth is that God is bringing us from slavery to freedom, from darkness to light, and from death to life.  The truth is that this is the whole meaning and purpose of existence.

            This week we follow Jesus along the path that culminates in his death and resurrection.  This week he takes on the horrific consequences of our sin, our ignorance, and our bondage.  And in the end he reveals these consequences to be powerless to overcome God’s will to release us.

            This is a journey, not to the cross, but through the cross to the resurrection.  We will begin on Thursday evening with a celebration of Passover, and we will end on Sunday morning with a celebration of… Passover.  For Christians as well as for Jews, Passover is the center around which everything turns.  The truth of Passover is why Isaiah could preach good news to the exiles.  Passover is finally fulfilled in Jesus’ death and resurrection.  Through it we are liberated from death, and set free for life.   

The Covenant Within Everything.

Jeremiah 31:31-34

I.

            The prophet Jeremiah had a difficult career.  He heard God’s Word coming to him, clearly requiring him to convey to his people a message that they did not want to hear.  Jeremiah prophesied destruction and calamity for his country.  And he was received as we might expect him to be.  While some people respected him as a prophet, he was also almost universally hated.

            All the things God intended for the Israelites had, by the time of Jeremiah, soured into corruption.  The people of God had repeatedly and chronically fallen into exactly the kind of nation God did not want them to become.  In the commandments of the Torah, God gives them a pattern and model for a good and blessed community, based on justice, equality, and divine law. 

            God shows them how not to be like Pharaoh.  But over the next 500 years they are repeatedly tempted and succumb to idolatry, leading to injustice.  So that Israel and Judah were barely distinguishable from any other nation.  They followed after kings, almost all of whom were bad.  They allowed the rich to get richer and ignored the cries of the poor.  And they tolerated and even enthusiastically embraced the worship of idols of other gods.

            All this was connected.  It was the falling into idolatry that led to a centralized political regime and an unjust economic order.  God does not demand that they reject other gods just out of blind jealousy.  Following these idols was part of a whole social system which allowed power and wealth to flow mainly to the elites who were already wealthy and powerful.  The nation of the Israelites had become little more than a second-rate imitation of the corrupt and unjust regime they had escaped from in Egypt, half a millennium before.

            And what Jeremiah predicted was simply the natural consequence of that.  In fact, God sends numerous prophets over this period to warn the people that, if you do this, if you fall into idolatry, you will inevitably create a political economy that is wildly unjust.  And this kind of imbalance cannot last for very long until the system adjusts and rebalances itself.  These episodes were experienced by the people as some kind of catastrophe, whether it be a military or natural disaster.

            God made the world to work in a certain beneficial way.  God gave the people a detailed manual of how to live peacefully in the world as God created it.  The people reject that law and insist on living according to their own religious, economic, social, and political ideas, thus creating a system that is out of synch with the world as God made it.  That kind of regime is unsustainable.  It is not based on reality, and it inevitably collapses.

            Almost everything Jeremiah prophesied about was bad.  He knew that the biggest collapse, reckoning, rebalancing, and consequence was about to happen.  He also knew that, by this time, things had gotten so corrupt that there was no avoiding the coming disaster.  They have lived by the sword of injustice and inequality, and like every nation that takes this path, they will die by injustice and inequality, in this case at the hands of the Babylonians.

II.

            In chapters 30-33 of his book, the disaster has already at least started to happen.  The Babylonian army has come.  Jerusalem has been destroyed.  The Temple built by Solomon is burned down.  And the cream of Judah’s society is in the process of being deported far away to Babylon.  The people have endured horrors beyond imagination: the slaughter of babies and children, crushing famine, indiscriminate murder, forced relocation, enslavement, rape, comprehensive destruction of property, and so on.  There is almost nothing as horrible as losing a war.

            Into this maelstrom of catastrophe and death, Jeremiah still gets words from the Lord.  These words are never a smug  “I-told-you-so.”  There is no satisfaction about the fact that everything Jeremiah has been warning them about has come to pass.  In fact, I hear Jeremiah saying what Jeff Goldbloom said in the movie, Jurassic Park, when his dire warnings came true: “I hate being right all the time.” 

            In these chapters, Jeremiah begins to talk about the other side of this mess.  After the disaster, after the world has regained some semblance of balance, after the people have endured the horrific consequences of their centuries of messing up, after all that has blown itself out, then the people will be able to experience God’s love again. 

            Because God’s love is deeper and stronger and more pervasive than the storms we bring down on ourselves on the surface, as awful as they are.  God still made the world, God still created creation and sustains it in equilibrium, God is still in charge and still has a plan and a will and a model for us to follow and participate in.  God’s will is to save, and to heal, and to liberate, and to redeem.  Nothing will ever keep that from ultimately happening.  It is the deepest meaning of all creation.  It is the grain of the universe and we only experience catastrophe when we insist on going against it.

            Throughout this season of Lent our readings from the Old Testament have all centered on the theme of covenant.  We saw God’s covenant with Noah, in which God promises never again to destroy the Earth, and requires that the people respect life.  There was the covenant with Abraham, where God establishes a particular family through which all the families of the Earth will be blessed.  And there is the covenant with Moses, when the people were liberated and the law was given.  They are all the same covenant, the same agreement or deal that God makes with people, just with different levels of specificity and detail.  God never revokes any aspect of the covenant.

III.

            Here, God talks about a “new covenant.”  This is not a new covenant in the sense that the old ones are now defunct or overridden.  A better translation might be that it is a “renewed covenant.”  The original covenant is given another layer of specificity and focus.  In this case the covenant will no longer be exterior to the people.  Now God’s Word is going to be placed within them.  That’s how this expression of the covenant will “not be like” the preceding one, which the people broke.  It will not be “out there” in nature, as if nature were separated from us.  It will not be “out there” as words on a page or even inscribed on stone.  Those media require interpretation.  People have shown themselves to be brilliant at keeping the letter of the law, but shattering its spirit.  We know how to hear what we want to hear from anything “out there.”

            But here it says that, “after those days,” “the days that are surely coming,” that is, in the fullness of time, outside of our temporal alienation, then and there the keeping of the law and the knowledge of God will be something humans know interiorly, in themselves, in their bodies and hearts.  No more will people be able to claim that they didn’t get the memo.  The memo will be shown to be written inside them.

            I think the law was always written inside of us.  All the versions of the covenant were true from the beginning of creation.  God reveals them to us in sequence according to what we are able to handle and absorb.  The law is written inside of us because the law is the basic principle of creation and life.  It is already in the matter, the atoms, molecules, cells, and sinews of our bodies.  We are born with the knowledge of God within us, even Calvin says this in the famous opening sentences of the Institutes.

            This new and final manifestation of the covenant will ratify the egalitarian and democratic nature of the covenant from the beginning.  Remember how Noah’s covenant included everyone, even animals?  Remember how the law given to Moses did not accept the practice of having some people more equal than others?  Here it is the same thing.  Because the law is written inside each person everyone shall be equal before the Lord.  “They shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord.”  The least and the greatest are now equal where it counts, in the knowledge of God.  It is the ultimate leveling of society.  Everyone is welcome at the table.  Everyone has knowledge worth sharing.

IV.

            Jesus comes into the world to fulfill this passage.  He comes to unlock the knowledge of God that God has written on people’s hearts.  Did you ever notice how, when Jesus heals someone, he very often says to them, “Your faith has made you well”?  It is as if Jesus sees himself as the catalyst that activates something inside of people, something they already have.  He reveals and realizes their faith, their trust in God’s love and power to heal.  In his presence, people come into contact with their truest selves, and their truest selves are whole and healthy, blessed and good.

            Jesus comes to be the message here, where God says, “I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.”  For now, when God looks at us, God doesn’t see our sin.  God does not see our violence and selfishness.  God does not see our greed and corruption.  God looks at us and sees, deep within us… the One who is truly and fully human.  God sees the One whose humanity we share, who became flesh to dwell among us, who emptied himself to share our existence even to the point of sharing our death.  God sees Jesus Christ.  God sees the Son.  And in his name and for his sake, God forgives our iniquity and remembers our sin no more.

            In our gospel reading for today some foreigners ask to see Jesus.  And it’s significant that they’re foreigners, Greeks, because the standard view was that Gentiles were not included in the people of God and God has not written the law on their hearts.  But when two of them are led by the Spirit to come to Jesus, Jesus sees that God has put this knowledge within them as well.  And he takes it as a sign that his ministry has finally reached beyond the boundaries of the Jewish nation.  This ever-broadening inclusiveness was the purpose of God’s covenants from the beginning.

            So Jesus announces that, ”The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.”  And he goes on to describe his ministry:  “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.  Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.  Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also.  Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.”

            The Word, the covenant, the law that is written on our hearts is an open invitation.  And knowledge of the Lord means the realization that God’s love demands the giving up of our own agendas, our own hierarchies, our own exclusive theologies, our own bigotry even.  It is to set all that aside and enter into God’s healing forgiveness.

V.

            “The house of Israel” has a way of expanding.  It expands to embrace those who find within themselves God’s law, written on their hearts, written in the very substance of their bodies, of the flesh they share with the Lord.  It expands to embrace all who trust in Jesus and rely upon the love of God revealed in him.

            What is this renewed Israel?  What kind of community is Jesus forming, as he fulfills the passage among us?  How do we access and activate the law of God written on our hearts?  Where is the faith, the trust, within us that will make us well?  How are we going to be a gathering of disciples that understands the necessity to “die” like the grain of wheat in order to bear much fruit?

            “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life,” says Jesus.  It is not about our little individual life, but it is about all of life, it is about life itself, the power and direction God has placed within the creation from the beginning. It is no coincidence that the natural world so often reflects and expresses deep spiritual truths like resurrection.  That’s why Jesus uses so many illustrations from nature. 

            Jesus Christ is the Word of God by whom everything was created in the beginning.  He is the articulation of God’s love and he embedded that love, that transforming, redeeming, overcoming power, at the heart of all of life.

            The community he gathers and then sends out in mission into the world is one that knows the Lord.  It sees things from this wider perspective where all is included in the dance of God’s life.  From this perspective it’s all good.  There are no hierarchies, no one is least and no one is greatest.  From this perspective we can be a community of forgiveness where we don’t remember the sins of others, but cherish their blessedness, even if they don’t know it.

            We are to be a community of joyful obedience, trusting in Jesus and following him, so that in the end we may be with him, in God, with God’s law of love, justice, and peace written on our hearts.

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