Thursday, 2 September, 2004

This week's Devotions are written by Vicar Steve Bond



More from Hauerwas’ “Only Theology Overcomes Ethics”…



The God of Israel and Jesus, the God we find in Scripture, is a storied God. That we learn of God, or more exactly, that we learn who God is through narrative is not accidental but rather indicative of God’s nature.



It is not any old god who has claimed us—it is the God of Abraham and Sarah, the God of Miriam and Moses, the God whom Jesus addressed as Abba—“Papa.” So often, our culture offers us only a generic and abstract deity—a god so transcendent as to be uninterested or unwilling to interact with the world and yet so domesticated that we can hem the divinity into abstract principles of our own design (we assume that our conceptions of justice, truth, and goodness must be God’s). What grace it is to know that the God who has claimed us meets us in our particular stories and draws us into a story bigger than any of us, a story centered on a rough cross in 1st-century Palestine.



Connection: God loves us and knows us even in the details of who we are—God doesn’t just love the idea of us or the people we might become. Moreover, we are invited into relationship with a God who has a story, not just to follow a list of abstract principles. In this day, we can have communion with such a real, storied God.



Abba, take us—take all of us, in every detail, to be your own. Draw us into the mystery of knowing you more deeply this day, and free us to be open enough to know and be known by others.



1 Corinthians 15:3-4—“For I handed onto you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures…”