15 September 2005

More from Kazoh Kitamori in the "Theology of the Pain of God."

The death of Christ is "death of death". The Lord was unable to resolve our death without putting himself to death. God himself was broken, was wounded, and suffered, because he embraced those who should not be embraced. By embracing our reality, God grants us absolute peace. But the peace has been completely taken away from the Lord who grants us absolute peace. "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

Are we going to be saying here that as we follow Jesus to the cross we too will lose our peace for the well being of others? I didn't expect that I would ask this question because we are hearing about what God has done - how in Christ, God embraces a reality that is not God's but ours. In that action by God - where death loses it power over us - God loses the distance that God could have maintained as God. And yet, God steps through the distance and faces the loss of that disconnection that, I suppose, some people would call peace. But "absolute peace" is peace in which we do not have anything to lose because nothing can be taken from us. God grants us that place in the death of Christ. We then, as followers of Jesus, are invited to step across the peace that comes from keeping distance from one another and begin to walk within the peace that is ours even as death theatens us when we become vulnerable and seek the welfare of others so that they to might have this peace. There is no pain that our God does not know - even death - and there is no peace that is not ours for the living even when death shuffles in and tries to destroy what has been handed to us.

Connection: It is tempting to move away from others and claim to have entered into a place of peace. But in our storytelling, peace comes in the midst of the experience of the fullness of life that is engaging others and risking the peace we claim to make for ourselves and taking hold of the peace that is handed to us as we follow the way of the Christ who takes on the power of death. Today will you find yourselves moving away or moving toward others?

There is no place we can hide from your love, O God. No pain will send you out of the room as though we are abandoned by you. When we hide, you are there in our hiding and you bid us to be free to live in the openness of your gracious Reign. We will deny the power of your presence because we have found other ways to live through our days, but you still remain...you still go through the cross to come to us through all we might have to endure in life. Praise to you, O God. In your availability we are surprised by the life that come to us. Amen.