Friday 9 October 2009

In referring back to the last two posting about Job, Willimon writes this:

I take this as a kind of parable of the way salvation is sometimes experienced. some people are terribly and undeniably battered by life. It is only natural that they should feel enmity toward the giver and author of life. They want answers. They yearn for vindication. Rarely, from what I have observed, are they given answers. They are given God. The gods of the Greeks, when things get bad, drop down occasionally from heaven, deus ex machina. This God saves by being there, with us. Salvation is no mere tallying to determine guilt or innocence. Salvation is finally being with God, God coming to us in our need, and then our wonderment at the greatness of God, reveling in the mystery. The mystery that previously was a threat, a dilemma, now, in salvation, in the presence of God, is a great joy. This is what Wesley called God's "darling attribute" - "universal love."

There is a wonder-filled place called the mystery of God. It is a mystery, in some ways, because the love of God is so dramatic and so intense and so eternal, we just cannot come to grips with it all. Therefore, we often run from it. We run from it because it is the power the transforms us into loving beings in the image of God. Yikes! Sometimes it feels safer to be just who we are. When we are just as we are, we can bitch and gripe and tear at one another and merely talk of this love that will not let us go. No wonder I know I do a lot of running away from God. Do you work, like me, at keeping dividing wall us...at least some of them? Well this God present with us and for us keeps shaking us to help us see that any and all of our walls must tumble so that we will see the wide open spaces of God's salvation of all. Geez...that's radical stuff...alarming stuff...and...often threatening stuff when I am damn sure I know how thing should be...for all. The mystery of God - a love that really does hold on and on and on...whether we agree with it or not.

Connection: So how do we live with such a God so present - so loving? It is a present reality in which we are urged to enter and enjoy and share.

Come, O God of Unbounded Love. Come and take us by the hand again to liberate us and bring us into the land of your joy. For we are not going to be there when we keep thinking we can find the way and make it ourselves. Amen.