4th Sunday of Lent
God is filled with grace and forgiveness and
reconciliation. In Christ, God is reconciling the world unto God. There is
unconditional love, boundless grace, inspiring beauty, and heart-melting
compassion. When any of us find our way to God, we find there a place with
greater expanse then we were led to believe or understand.
When any of us find our way to God we wonder, where did I
get the idea that you were the God who condemns? Who punished? Who hated persons
who were different than us? When any of us find our way to God, we recognize
the beauty and grace found in all peoples, all ideals and faiths promoting the
ways of faith, hope, love, compassion, peace. We wonder how any government can
invoke the name of God to wage war? We wonder how any religion or ideology can
invoke condemnation upon other religions and ideologies? We wonder how any
tradition or system of belief can believe that they hold the exclusive truth
and revelation of the divine and cosmic mysteries? We wonder who created that
God who hated the gays, the western ways, the eastern philosophies, the liberal
perspective, the conservative platform?
Who is this God of political power and abundant wealth? Who
is this God that favors the dominant cultures and powers that inflict
segregation, discrimination, and down-right oppression upon the vulnerable
peoples they govern? Who was that God who rejected those who could not and
would not accept a belief in such a God? Who rejected those who suspended
belief and trust in anything beyond their own understanding or reason? Who
promoted the highest accountability upon humanity, not for the sake of
religious zeal, but for the sake of a better world?
Why did I grow up being taught that Christianity was the
only true religion, a gay person was sick, white people are privileged, and men
should be in charge? These are all cultural ways that work well for those they
favor but that does not mean these ways are the ways of God. In God, through
Christ, the whole world is being reconciled, brought forth into the ways of
compassion, wellness, equity, and beloved community.
In God, I see how BIG God is. I see God greeting all God’s
creation coming home from their ways of squandering the riches of God on
bigotry, pride, arrogance, greed, discrimination, hatred, and judgment. I see
hearts melting for those once hated. I see the right hand shaking the left,
both embracing the other in mutual affirmation for a broader view. I see the
children of Abraham sharing community together. I see the West affirming the
depth of the East, I see the East affirming the wisdom of the West.
I listen to the news about chaos in parliament over Brexit,
hunger and revolution in Venezuela, nuclear warfare threatened between
superpowers, our own government crippled by partisan ideology and politics. And
I hear some proclaim that God is in this restoring the ways of yesterday. It is
hard for me to see God in governments, ideologies, or dominance. I don’t see God
in great wealth or in poverty. I don’t see God only with us and not with them.
I see God reconciling the world, the whole world, in Christ, NOT IN
CHRISTIANITY, but in Christ, the One in whom all live and move and have their
being. In Christ, the one who laid down his life for the whole world, not just
our part of the world! In Christ, the one who loved his neighbor as himself and
included those who were not of his own. In Christ, the one who said do not
judge, do not live only for yourself, but love one another as I have loved you.
In Christ, the healer, the teacher, the wounded, the redemptive.
We are living through contentious, judgy, factious times. The
internet promised world unity but we have made it the voice of contention and
hatred. These are not the times to proclaim our own righteousness. This is a
time to leave the ways of pigs and self-indulgence and make our way back to the
arms of God, the arms of compassion, of forgiveness, of grace, of
reconciliation. The only arms big and wide enough to restore beloved community
amidst the broad diversity that is the world, the same world God is reconciling
in Christ.
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