The focus of these devotions is switching to Walter Wink’s book “The Human Being.”
My deepest interest in encountering Jesus is not to confirm my own prejudices (though I certainly do that), but to be delivered from a stunted soul, a limited mind and an unjust social order. No doubt a part of me wants to whittle Jesus down to my size so that I can avoid painful, even costly, change. But another part of me is exhilarated by the possibility of becoming more human. So I listen in order to be transformed. Somehow the gospel has the power to activate in people that “hunger and thirst for righteousness” of which Matthew 5:6 speaks…
Truth is, had Jesus never lived, we could not have invented him.
Yesterday I spoke about being dried up and how we can sometimes be so dried up deep within ourselves that we know only how to fight…go to war…persecute…hate…and destroy what is not like us. This notion of a “stunted soul” is for me quite like that and only the Prince of Peace can deliver us from that wasteland within us so that our internal and external life will be refreshed by the living water of our God who invites us to be truly human as God created us to be. Jesus takes us beyond what we are able to imagine for ourselves - for I know my imagination is always biased – and lovingly pulls us into a vision for life that we…alone...or in a small group…could never have imagined. For example, who would have thought of a cross as a way to enter into life more fully!?!
Connection: There may be some moments in this day in which the simple task of listening may provide us with the gift of life transformation…and who knows what that will mean for life tomorrow!
Take us up into your domain of peace, O Lord, and deliver us before the gracious throne of our God who calls us beloved and promises to raise us up to new life as God’s children even as we live within an alien time and place. Amen.
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