Monday, 14 June, 2004

We continue with another section of Walter Wink’s “The Human Being.”



I was raised in a very liberal church in which hellfire and damnation were never mentioned. But I still lived in dread of my parent’s displeasure and heaped myself with guilt for not being better. I can recall the tremendous sense of relief when, as a seminary student, I discovered that the “wrath of God” in Pauline theology was being forced to accept the consequences of my own actions. “God gave them up” in Romans 1:18-32 meant that God’s wrath was impersonal; God did not lose God’s temper and threaten us, but simply required us to reap what we sowed. Recognizing that made it possible to remove the parental projections of wrath that I had laid on God, and to decontaminate my God-image to that degree. And it also made it possible, gradually, to reconstitute my relationship with my parents on an adult basis.



It is simply amazing how many people are grasped by fear and threat and live as though that is the manner in which our God moves among us. It is amazing because as we look at Jesus, there was not a threatening character looking to “do us in.” Rather, we are confronted with a character whose love never lets us go even when it takes him to the cross. The “for us” of the Eucharist (body for us…blood for us) it how our God remains even when we run away and try to be the center of our universe or make something other than our loving God source of life…which it never becomes. To be walking away from the gracious realm of God’s love is to suffer greatly within the choices of our lives. That suffering is due to the fact that we are attempting to build a life on what we are able to manage or control or own. In the meantime, God waits, walks with us, touches us, and calls us by name…even when we keep saying “no” and keep turning our own way. The relationship is always in place. We are free to live within its eternal grasp.



Connection: Yes, there are many ways to live today…but to live within the power of God’s love for all is a bit of brilliance that the world and all of us can use…and celebrate.



Help us to see you abiding grace and how your love does not fade or run from us but continues to bid us to come and rest in you alone. Amen.