Monday 15 June 2009

I want to take a couple days to finish up this section from William Willimon on the "gospel of salvation" before venturing on into more of his work.

"This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you" (John 15:12). and as 1 John puts' it, "We know love by this, that ihe laid down his life for us - and we ought tolay down our lives for one another" (1 John 3:16). Jesus was "in the form of God...taking the form of a slave...he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death" (Phil. 2:6-8).
This way is the way? This puts in context Jesus' words that he is "the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6).
"This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent" (John 17:3). what the Savior revealed is not just God in general, deity in the abstract - that is, a God without soteriological punch - but a very particular, very peculiar kind of God, a God who is, in a number of essential ways, most "ungodlike." Here is no "god" who divinely floats above the grubby realities of this world but rather a God who, in love, locates pro nobis.

Our God is "for us and for our salvation" (pro nobis) and that means alongside and never outside of our history like a god long off waiting for something else to happen. Our God reaches in, takes a seat next to us, goes through hell as we go there, and in, with, and under that engagement, our God becomes more fully known to us. This is why the surprise of the Reign of God is not something outside the ordinary. The extrordinary is something in which we expect to see something or experience something strange. But our God comes within the ordinary and the common that is so much of who we are. In the middle of that...in the middle of God for us in the thick of what can so often bind us and hold us back, we are taken back and can re-engage within our everyday life because it is here that we are so close to the Reign of God that breaks into this day to make the day new even as we wander through the "grubby realities of this world." I need that promised presence to help reshape me and the world.

Connection: Today, within all that is ordinary may come the surprising news of how God will be on your side - even when you were not anticipating it.

Be present with us as you have promised, O God. Be present with us so that we will not fear being present within this day no matter what we face. Just as you Spirit has continually opened up the lives of your people in every place and time, send your breath of life around us. Amen.