We will continue to base the devotions on “God for a Secular Culture” by Jurgen Moltmann.
Here’s what happens when we apply the principle of likeness to “other people, other things, and the Wholly Other God.
1. If only like and like know one another, then I recognize in other people only that which corresponds to me myself in my own nature. I do not perceive what is different in kind and alien in other people. I filter it out. I perceive only the things in which we are alike, and only this can become the foundation of community between us… If friendship is based on likeness, it has an exclusive effect… The result for ‘the insider’ is deadly boredom, because they have already heard the stories and jokes with which closed societies are accustomed to amuse themselves a hundred times over.
Much of the anxiety of our culture and of the Church seems to brew around just such a need for likeness and an inability to “play” with what is not like me. I find that the drama over the union/blessing of Gay/Lesbian couples is one example of those pieces of ‘other’ over which so many are stumbling and bumbling. Anxiety is high…we manufacture things over which we can whip up fear – even if they are not real or if they are merely a stereotype. We can do this for any issue or any practice or any thing that is perceived as being a part of the ‘other.’ It is important for me to notice that the only peace I am able to find is when I step back into the most basic statement about our God…the fact that our God loves beyond all our knowing and all our prejudice and all of our expectations. Our God is this eternal Lord who rules with a love that cannot be contained or be turned into some sort of biased word.
Connection: Can we let go of the filter and experience that which is not like us today?
Deliver us, O Lord, from the many ways we try to rule this day so that our way will be honored above you. Deliver us. Amen.
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