Choosing Rescue
Today’s gospel from Matthew brings us from the birth of Jesus to confront the very difficult truth of why we needed Jesus to come into the world.
Our relationship with God has been fundamentally broken from the beginning of human consciousness because we use our freedom to choose against the Lord’s will. Not everyone all of the time, but everyone some of the time. Somehow, some way, sometimes, we all do. Paul wrote this to the Church at Rome, “…for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23) John put it more confrontationally, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” (1 John 1:8)
If you doubt that, think of it this way: what other creature on this planet routinely chooses to act against its own best interest and/or that of its community? We chafe against laws, rules, homeowners’ association covenants. We chafe against our own self-disciplines like diets. Sometimes we even chafe against our needs, like medication.
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Jesus Threatens our Way of Life
Jesus, a threat to our way of life.
Jesus threatens our illusions of happiness.
I suspect and I hope that when I make these statements something sounds wrong, perhaps even offensive.
After all isn’t Jesus supposed to make me happy.
Yet for many of us, the moment we encounter the real Jesus, we feel unsettled, disrupted, and even threatened. Not because Jesus is unkind, but because He challenges our deepest assumptions about what happiness truly is. The problem is Jesus does not come to improve our lives on our terms. He comes to redefine life itself. Because of that, we can be threatened. Jesus does not threaten joy. He threatens false happiness. When we meet Jesus, we cannot help but to be changed.
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Intimate and Cosmic
We’ve been blessed the last few weeks to have a couple of pieces of art on display in our parish hall. Both are by our member Paul O’Neill. One is a working model of the mural he painted on our Thrift Shop’s eastern wall. The other is an arresting image of Mary holding baby Jesus. If you have not seen these paintings in the parish hall and the Thrift Shop mural, you should.
I described the Mary and Jesus painting as arresting because every time I walk into or through the parish hall, it arrests me. Often that’s as I walk in from our office wing. It’s just on the edge of my peripheral vision and makes me think someone is there. When I’m coming straight at it, it pops out and dominates the view. And I find that its beauty and depth change with the light. It’s quite different in very low light, but you have to be here pretty early or pretty late to see that.
Its iconic style captures the intimacy of Mary’s love for Jesus and reflects the intimacy of his love for her. That is at the heart of the Christmas story. It is at the heart of our pageant. It is at the heart of our Christmas hymns. It is at the heart of God’s desire to draw us into the most intimate of relationships with him through Jesus.
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