Monday, 11 October, 2004

This week's devotions are written by Vicar Steve Bond.



For these next two weeks, we'll be drawing from Marva Dawn's 2001 book, Powers, Weakness, and the Tabernacling of God as a starting point. The central thrust of the selected passages is that God in Christ is most clearly seen in weakness, and that the church-the very body of Christ-is called to embody that weakness for the glory of God. So without further ado, let's jump in…



Through his astheneia [the Greek word for "weakness"] Christ gave himself up to death-totally emptying himself and becoming obedient to the worst of deaths, as the letter to the Philippians asserts (2:5-10). Such a totality of weakness, of perfect submission to the will of the Father (as frequently recorded in the Gospel of John) makes possible the perfection of God's tabernacling in the world through Christ.



The Christian story is in many ways the story of God coming to be with people. The outright absurdity of this story's claim is that God seems to have a penchant for coming to be with people in foolish and weak ways-from dwelling in a movable tent, the tabernacle, in Israel's wilderness days, to roughing it and camping with the dejected and deflated exiles, and then most clearly to pitching that same tent in the fragile human flesh of Jesus. And amazingly, impossibly, God wills to be found not so much in the majestic and pristine heights of heaven or speaking as a muse through beautiful art or music, but in the weakness and ugliness of that human Jesus dying on a cross.



The upshot of this claim - if it is true - is that all our worries that we have to be good enough, all our juggling acts keeping work and family and status up in the air and on track to "success," all our fears that there is a minimum holiness requirement in order to "get in" to meet God, all of those are brought to an end since we have been embraced by God as we are and without pretense. We can be honest about where our limitations and weaknesses are, because ours is a God who seems to find us right there in our failings, dressed up in weakness just like us.



Connection: What if today, I could be honest with myself about my failures and mistakes? What if I were freed from posturing with my peers and pretending that I've got it all together? What if I didn't have to put on a smile for the world today, but could trust that I am loved even in sadness? What if God saw me as I really am-and still loved me? The audacious claim of faith is that those are all realities - no more "what ifs." And that's the gospel truth.



Gracious God, you come to find us in our weakness and fragility. Give us the courage to come and meet you there.