Cyril of Jerusalem writes:
“Wherever Jesus appears, there also is salvation. If he sees a tax collector seated at the counter, he makes him an apostle and an evangelist; if he is buried among the dead, he raises them; he gives sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf. When he walks around the pools, it is not to inspect the buildings but to heal the sick.” (Homily on the Paralytic by the Pool, translation by Edward Yarnold S.J.)
The nature of God is healing. The nature of God is reconciliation. The nature of God is wholeness. What else is holiness other than God being God? What else is our holiness called to be other than our true state, that of a relationship with God? Holiness is about living a sustainable relationship with the creator of life. In other words, it is living life the way life is meant to be. Jesus Christ is Gods answer to our severed relationship. Because God alone is whole, he alone can extend the invitation to reconciliation. His presence is reconciling; his presence is saving.
This Sunday 5 youth are being confirmed in our church. This is an incredible moment with the potential for powerful impact on their lives as well as those of the church. It is a moment when Jesus appears, when healing takes place, when lives are made new. It is a moment, I fear, we too often take for granted and lose sight of what God is doing.
Our history, which extends to the beginning of time, is immersed in baptismal theology. Our origin story is one that begins with God surveying chaos; troubled waters, troubled land. God speaks and his word penetrates confusion and brings order, light, and life. When the word of God appears, there is also salvation. It is through troubled waters that the old identity of brutality and brokenness are destroyed and a new image and purpose are created.
What I find incredibly amazing is that God uses that which was chaos to make beautiful order. In other words, one’s old self is not exiled but transformed. The Israelites were a people of slavery whose existence was guided by tyrants and were baptized through the sea of reeds and found themselves a free people on the other side. They were the same people with a new nature, a new purpose. They were a people called to live instead of die.
The Gospel of John records no new message and no new word, but a new form. John tells us that the “Word of God is Flesh”. The word appears and there is salvation. The word of God is Jesus Christ. What waters must we cross now? It is a living water that transforms our nature by reconciling us with truth, by healing us with the only reality; God is the only truth and his truth is love. His truth is relationship. We stand on one shore with chaos, brokenness, even in our presumed orderly lives. Our lives may be orderly, but so were the Hebrews when they were in slavery. But when Jesus appears, the waters before us call us to something dangerously wonderful. We are called to drown and in that drowning, be raised to a new life. We are the thief who is now an apostle, the dead who is now alive, the blind who sees, the deaf who hears. In our baptism we are made alive with a new reality: a reality of life, wholeness, and one of striving with God. In our baptism we are called to no longer live from a place of darkness and chaos, but God has hovered over our waters and penetrated us with his word and brought forth order, light, and life. Let us live from that into that relationship.
In the so called name of inclusiveness, tolerance, and being "politically correct" we have become a people who no longer stand behind any opinion we might have because we are afraid of those who might label us. We end up being a people who almost say something important.
Can you imagine Dr. MLK saying, “I have a dream?” Without conviction and speaking with the authority that convictions bring, we would absolutely go nowhere and believe anything. Are we an open-minded society? Yes, but for some reason we never close our mind enough to have a personal set of values and convictions to speak with clarity or live intentionally.
The other thing that bothers me is the question of who gets to decide what is closed or open minded. If I am always ceding authority and conviction to someone else, I am essentially saying your opinions about things that affect me are more important than my own experiences. I am also turned off by the assumption that because I speak and act with conviction that this in someway diminishes the opinion of another if they happen to disagree.
However, and there is always a however, this does not mean that convictions mean bullying. As a matter of fact the more secure we are in our convictions the less likely we will be to use our opinions to wound others.
I might also argue that for many the lack of speaking with conviction can lead to more harm than good. Take the minister who never has a definitive word. His relativity leads to a relative truth that leads to a relative God. What kind of good news is that? How will people ever know where you stand? Oh, but what if I offend someone with my interpretation of the truth? Well, there is no insult like truth, but the truth sets us free, and as a minister my job is not about relativity but about declaration with a grand caveat… I am called to speak the truth in love. Jesus offended but he loved. Thank God he never said, “Love one another as I have loved you? Seek First the Kingdom of God? Take up your cross and follow me? Truly I will see you in paradise today?”
The Difficulty with starting a new blog or recreating an old one is that there needs to be a beginning. Where else would one start? But beginnings are difficult, as no one truly begins at the start of a thought. A new thought is simply a scion of an older thought. Those thoughts which inspire other thoughts are simply, or rather quite complexly, our processing of experience into order and vision. How we comprehend and order our vision has a great deal of impact on how we live our lives.
It is to this living that I hope to blog about in months and years to come. But this is no linear task, for linear thinking is (much to the chagrin of indoctrinated society) a grand mythology. Sure, we have story lines and structures that are ordered in "point 'a' to 'b'" format, and this is something that is necessary... sometimes, but the grand picture of life is a majestic weave of our experience of the seemingly random and providential minutia and milestones of our day to day living. When reflected upon we sometimes stumble into mosaic order.
Mosaic order may be the reason this blog exists. I will be reflecting on art, music, theology, comedy, dreams, junk, and basically the things we come into contact on our daily journey through life. Hopefully there will be the occasional thought provoking spark and glimps of order in the delightful world of the non-linear.
All of this to say is that this blog simply does not have a beginning, nor does is simply not have a beginning... it simply just might be what it is. One more blog in this blog eat blog world.
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