Tuesday, February 23, 2021
Fire
Beauty
God Needs All We Can Be
To Bring Wayward Creatures Like Us
To Be Reconciled With God
Isaiah 6:8
Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I; send me!’
2 Corinthians 5:20
So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.
Words of Grace For Today
God’s Kingdom is never a static, accomplished, passive, settled thing. God’s Kingdom is God’s rule over God’s creation and all the creatures in it, including us very sinful and loving and stubbornly arrogant and gracious and cruel and kind and ….
God’s rule over us responds to our vagaries, pulling, twisting, diving, climbing, enveloping, releasing, disciplining, celebrating [and fill in everything God does in response to us] us.
God does not do this at a disinterested distance. God walks with us. Significantly God works in creation through us. God needs ambassadors of God’s will, as well as engineers, healers, teachers, gandy-dancers, architects, poets, and [fill in all we humans can be and do] of God’s will.
Always God is looking for volunteers. While God can easily voluntell us to go, God more often waits, patiently, for us to respond to God’s pleas ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’
The temptation for us is to ignore God, for history teaches us well that those who respond most often are disparaged, persecuted, and even killed for their trouble.
When we listen to God’s history told as a complete history of life, Creator and creation and creatures all together, then we begin to understand that there is no life with as much value and reward and joy and hope and love as a life lived in response to God’s call, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’
When we respond, ‘Here am I; send me!’, then we become ambassadors for Christ who entreat all people on behalf of Christ to be reconciled to God. In response … well the responses are all over the map of possibilities given our sinfulness and love and stubbornly arrogance and graciousness and cruelty and kindness, our success will appear to be minimal at best, and the demands Covid 19 places on us are nothing compared to those creatures and Creator will place on us.
And our all our hope will be fulfilled, our joy complete, and our love will be made whole … even as we sin yet again and require God to step in to graciously forgive us, redeem us, and send more ambassadors to us to teach us how to be reconciled to God.
God’s rule requires everything from us, especially creativity in being God’s gracious, unconditional, and unending love and joy for others.