Dried Up
Exodus 17:1-7
3rd Sunday in Lent
24 February 2008
All in all, I think the wandering Israelites get a bad rap. We think of them as lacking faith, preferring slavery to freedom, answering God’s grace with grumbling. We hold them up for ourselves as examples of how not to respond to God’s liberating love.
But considering the circumstances of this morning’s story, I’m not sure that is an altogether fair portrayal. They are traveling through the wilderness, going the route that God has set out for them under Moses’ leadership. They set up camp and find there is no water there. They say to their leader, “Give us water to drink.”
Wanting water seems reasonable, doesn’t it? The people have been traveling by foot in the desert. There are children in this group. Pregnant women. Old men. Probably some sick folks, too. How much further can they make it without water? To say that they are complaining is not the whole truth. They are thirsty. Not the kind of thirsty that happens after a little exercise or during a hot afternoon. This is a deeper kind of thirst, a more desperate kind. They need water to live. They need water to keep going.
“Give us water,” they say to Moses. His response is less than satisfying: “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?” But the people need water, so they keep asking. And their need turns to despair: “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?”
Have you ever experienced that kind of thirst? Most of us have no idea what that sort of desperation must feel like. We turn on our faucets, and out the water comes, just as we expect. We flush it down every time we use the toilet – two liters at a time. We let it run down the drain as we brush our teeth, take long baths or showers whenever we choose. When there are occasional water restrictions, we feel deprived because we can’t water our lawns or wash our cars when we choose. All of this is to say that we take one of the most elemental forces of life for granted. It is our right. It is our expectation.
Now imagine turning the faucete and nothing coming out. Imagine crops and cattle dying in the field because there is no water. Imagine everywhere you look, life is drying up, because there is no water. If we cried out about that, would that be called a mere “complaint”? Would we simply be “grumbling”? Or would we be desperate, despairing, dying of thirst.
Water has not only physical life-and-death implications; there are geopolitical dimensions to the issue of water as well. How many conflicts has this world seen, over water? Some have argued that water will determine the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and, by extension, the issue of conflict or peace in the entire Middle East. (1) Some say that water is at the core of the massacres in Darfur. A study just came out of Columbia University this week, confirming a causal relationship between drought and civil war outbreak in Africa. (2)
Our own country also struggles under a severe drought now, in the southeast. Al Gore recently noted that if we named our droughts the way we name our hurricanes, this one would certainly have a name, and we would declare it a Category 4 and we would see that it was headed right for Atlanta. (3) Southeastern states are arguing over who has possession of which water sources, while the land continues to wither. [What can we do in the face of impossible natural conditions?] Peace and security and well-being all turn on whether or not we have enough of what we need to survive. We tend to take water for granted, but it is at the core of life and death.
The wandering Israelites lived in constant awareness of that. The desert was a harsh and terrifying place, even for people traveling under God’s providential promise and protection. When faced with the possibility of death, people are willing to accept all kinds of circumstances they wouldn’t otherwise choose. So the Israelites bemoaned their freedom as a death sentence. They would rather be in slavery and survive, then be free and dying of thirst.
Have you ever found yourself in such a place? You have finally, impossibly, moved on, been freed in some way you’d been longing for. Maybe free of a relationship, or a job, or some burden that was crushing you. You get free and suddenly you find yourself in frightening new territory. No longer shackled by your old circumstances but not quite sure how you are going to make it now. You look to either side, you look ahead of you, and all you see is a great expanse of nothing – no shape to it, no security. Just one long freedom from your old life, and nothing yet to take its place. In such a place as this, isn’t it natural to look back to the old prison your life used to be and wonder, “What if?” What if I had stayed with him? What if I had kept that job? What if I still let myself have a smoke, or a drink? You don’t know if you can make it as this new person you’re becoming. You don’t know if you can keep going without the old structures, oppressive as they were. Because they were structure, at least – they were something to count on. An addiction, a compulsion, a relationship, an obligation, a self-definition – whatever it was that imprisoned you, at least you knew its contours. There is a strange security to such enslavements.
But one day, you got set free. It was grace, nothing else, though it may have come in ways you didn’t choose. You find yourself in this new freedom staring into the vast unknown, and if you’re trying to be faithful then you keep stumbling forward. You “journey by stages” as the author of Exodus says the Israelites did. You manage to keep following.
The desert is that place that comes after you’ve been freed from the enslaving structures that used to define you, but before the promised land of a whole new life has come into sight. It’s the place where you follow by faith and not by sight. And if you are stuck there long enough, in a freedom that doesn’t look like what you expected and isn’t yet what you think was promised, then you may wake up one day and realize you no longer have what you need to keep going. Your own resources are tapped out. You can no longer make sense of your new reality. Your faith has dried up, or it feels like it. It is not a “complaint” to ask for what you need to survive.
That’s what the Israelites did. “Give us water to drink.” The very request implies some sort of faith, an expectation that something can be done about their desperate circumstances. And so Moses takes it to God. “What am I going to do?” he asks. “The people are ready to kill me.” And so God did what God always does. He answered need with grace.
“Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders with you. Take your staff, the one you struck the Nile with, and go. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” So that’s what Moses did. And the water flowed from the rock. And the people drank, which means they survived - and more than survived.
Maybe you’ve never been as desperate for real water as the Israelites were in the desert. But haven’t you ever felt desperate for something? Maybe even something you can’t name? We come to church, and do the things we think we’re supposed to do, and maybe we take for granted that we have everything we need to keep moving in the right direction, like people who turn on the faucet and never once wonder if water will come out. But maybe in our souls, we are just as thirsty as they were.
Such a thirst is far easier to ignore than the physical kind. Just keep moving, keep going, keep doing. But if you stop long enough to take a look at yourself, you might be surprised at how dried up you really are. How stuck. How desperate. How much you really need what you cannot provide for yourself.
Lent is a time for getting honest about that. For taking stock of your soul’s thirst. For getting in touch with how needy you are – which is not how we like to think of ourselves.
What would happen if you took a good long look at the state of your soul? What if what you saw was shriveled and dry, dying from lack of nourishment? What if you’ve been trying – going through every spiritual motion you know how, but nothing seems to work. You still feel yourself drying up. You still feel stuck. You still have a bottomless pit of need that you cannot fill, no matter what right things you try to do. What do you do then?
If the Israelites are any example, there is only one thing you can do. Only one thing you should do. You turn your voice in God’s direction and make a demand: Give me water to drink.
You can say it as a complaint. You can say it with your fist in the air, lamenting that you ever followed. You can say it with a wistful look in your eye, longing for all you left behind by choosing the freedom that comes with following God. The only thing is: say it. Demand it. Give me water to drink. You may feel like your faith, your hope, your soul have all dried up, but the very act of demanding what you need from God shows you have faith enough for now.
What are you thirsty for? What are you dying for? What do you need most of all right now, to get you through? If it feels like complaining, that’s all right. If it feels like quarreling, that’s okay too. Just tell God what it is you need. Tell God the things you’ve finally realized you cannot give yourself. And if you can’t even begin to name what you need, tell that to God too. Just say, “I need.” And “I don’t know what.” And, “I don’t know how I’ll get it.” Just say it all, to God.
God will answer with a grace you cannot predict, define, or explain. What you need most of all will come from places you would not expect. Like water from a rock, God’s provision will flow to you and for you.
It’s okay if you can’t believe that, or cannot see how it is possible. It’s okay. You don’t need enough faith to believe it. You just need enough to ask.
(1) http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2643
(2) http://consiliencejournal.readux.org/
(3) I heard Al Gore say this in a speech on January 31, 2008, at the New Baptist Covenant in Atlanta, Georgia.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Eyewitnesses to Majesty
Eyewitnesses to Majesty
2 Peter 1:16-19
Transfiguration Sunday
3 February 2008
Today is the day when the church observes one of its strangest celebrations of all. We call it “Transfiguration,” and I’m betting most of us would be hard-pressed to say what that means or why we celebrate it. Yet here it comes again, just on time, as it does every year the Sunday before we begin our journey into Lent.
Perhaps you remember the story. Jesus takes Peter and James and John to the mountaintop. Suddenly, he is transformed – transfigured – before them. His face is shining like the sun, his clothes become dazzling white. And there appear with him Moses and Elijah, and they talk with him, though we are given no clue as to what the three have to say.
Peter is overcome by the moment, and he has a great idea. “It is good for us to be here!” he calls out. “Let’s set up some tents and stay awhile.” And before he can finish speaking, a bright cloud overshadows them all, and there is that voice, the same one that spoke at his baptism. “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” The disciples are terrified; they fall to the ground. Jesus comes and touches them, saying “Get up. Do not be afraid.” And when they look up, they see no one except Jesus, alone.
The story may be a bit strange, but its meaning is surprisingly straightforward. Its meaning is a promise. Jesus will be despised, rejected, and crucified. But after all of that, he will be resurrected and exalted. The transfiguration is a glimpse of what is to come, given to the three disciples to strengthen them for the sufferings that lie ahead, to stoke the fires of their hope, that it might continue to burn even in the darkest hour.
From a fairly bizarre story comes a fairly uncomplicated message: we have good reason for hope, even when times are dark. Figuring out the meaning isn’t the hard part. It’s the laying hold of it that can be so hard.
We live on the other side of the resurrection, and still many of us find it difficult to live in any kind of ongoing hope and faith. We find ourselves in an in-between time, after the good news of Easter but before the good news of a brand-new day. In a world of bleak news and broken lives, we keep trying to proclaim that another reality exists, that another reality will someday completely take hold: love and faithfulness will come together, justice and peace will embrace, every wrong will be set right, every heart will be made whole. Each week we gather, and try to proclaim that to each other, and to anyone who will listen. But much of the time, we can scarcely believe it ourselves.
Maybe this story doesn’t really help us all that much. Who of us has gotten to go to the mountaintop with Jesus, to see him there, in the flesh, and blazing with God’s glory? In Peter’s letter that we read from this morning, he asserts that he and the others are able to make known the power and the coming of Jesus Christ because they had been eyewitnesses of his majesty. But what about us? What in this story is remotely similar to our own life experiences? What are we eyewitnesses of? Where do we look for his majesty? Or are we even trying to look anymore?
-----
I went to a kind of mountaintop this week, and as an eyewitness of a sort of transfiguration, I have to tell the story. As many of you know, I spent the last few days in Atlanta, along with 15,000 other Baptists from 30 different Baptist groups, white and black, from all over the continent, for an unprecedented event, initiated by Former President Carter and called the New Baptist Covenant. His idea was that Baptists of all stripes needed to meet together to bridge our historic differences and work together on the difficult things that needs to be done in this world in the name of Christ. Not to form a new organization, another bureaucratic structure, but to create a movement, committing to put aside differences over theology or social issues and follow Jesus’ command to reach out to the poor, the hungry and the oppressed.
A lofty idea, and a worthy one. But I have to admit, I was cynical. First of all, there is the old saying, based on experience: wherever two or three Baptists are gathered, there’s a schism. Secondly, I have seen many attempts at “unity” before within groups that have profound differences, and oftentimes that unity ends up being so superficial as to mean almost nothing and to accomplish even less. Finally, I was suspicious that this gathering was mostly a reaction against the Southern Baptist Convention and the image it projects to the world of what it means to be Baptist. Any movement that starts as a reaction, any group that founds their identity on what they are not, or on who they are against, is destined for breakdown.
I have to say that my cynicism was not just overcome, it was completely blown to bits. We had many, many differences, on all manner of things, but over all of that, there seemed to be a startling unity. This gathering was not a reaction, it was an initiative, and it was not superficial, it was as real as anything I’ve seen. It might’ve even been the beginning of a transfiguration.
Let me give you a little history. 163 years ago, U.S. Baptists cracked into two pieces. The issue was slavery. Baptists in the south thought that missionaries and ministers should be allowed to own slaves. Baptists in the north thought they shouldn’t. The groups split, with the Baptists in the south calling themselves Southern Baptists and the Baptists in the north calling themselves Northern Baptists, later changed to American Baptists (that’s us). That was just the first fracture of many, because it seems that splitting is what Baptists do best.
163 years ago, we broke apart over race. The breaking continued over gender, theology, politics, social issues. Our own branch of the Baptist family, the American Baptist Churches, has not been untouched by such fractures and debates. We are more racially and theologically diverse than any other denomination – Baptist or otherwise – in the nation, but diversity is meaningless if there is not some deeper identity and mission that holds us together. [?]
This week, for the first time in over 160 years, a major national gathering of Baptists came together, undeterred by issues of race, theology, or anything else, to worship, to pray, and to have dialogue about things that matter – like how to work together in Christ’s mission for the world. President of Mercer University, Bill Underwood, who co-chaired the event with Carter, told us that first night:
Forty-five years ago, a native son of Atlanta, a Baptist pastor, shared with all of us his dream: One day, on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners would be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. Today, here on those red hills of Georgia, Baptists have come together to take a step in the long and difficult journey towards achieving Dr. King’s great dream. After generations of putting up walls between us – separation, division by geography, by theology, but most of all division by race – a new day is dawning. … Today, we all sit down together at the table of Christian brotherhood and sisterhood.”
And we did sit down together at that table on the red hills of Georgia. And what we talked about was Christ’s actual call on our lives together – to promote peace with justice, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to shelter the homeless, to care for the sick and the marginalized, to welcome the strangers among us, to protect the children, to care for the earth, to promote religious liberty and respect for religious diversity, to preach release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind. All these things don’t depend on having all the same opinions. They depend on Christ, and on our willingness to be his followers, together.
I could tell you about the eloquent and persuasive speakers we heard from – Marian Wright Edelman, who implored us as the church to be the locomotive and not the caboose in doing something about the plight of children in our country, and especially about those born at the “dangerous intersection of poverty and race”; Tony Campolo, who reminded us of Christ’s call on all of us, as individuals and as churches, to give ourselves away in ministry to the poor; Al Gore, who declared the possibility that “we who are Baptists of like mind and attempting in our lives to the best of our abilities to glorify God, are not going to countenance the continued heaping of contempt on God’s creation” ; John Grisham – of all people! – who exhorted us to “spend as much time out on the streets in ministry as in the church” ; William Shaw, president of the National Baptist Convention, [the largest Black Baptist denomination in the country] who asserted that we “can’t embrace the mission of Jesus and not encounter the reality of injustice. He came not with actions of charity. He came to change…. Justice says we need to change the structures of victimization”; Charles Adams, pastor of Hartford Memorial Church in Detroit, who proclaimed, “We are filled with the Spirit only to empty ourselves in the liberation of others. We are loved only to love others. We are free only to accept the responsibility of setting others free.”
I could tell you about all of that, and maybe you would be skeptical as I had been, or maybe the skeptic in you would take a break for awhile, like the one in me did, and maybe something like hope would start to rise in you, like it has in me, and like it seemed to do in thousands of other people. And the hope was this – the love of God in Christ, and what that love sets us free to do, together.
I was an eyewitness to majesty this week, and that majesty did not look the way we tend to think it does. No purple mountains. No royal robes. No velvet thrones. No angels or archangels. No ecstatic visions of heavenly light. That majesty was regular women and men, black, white, and brown, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, and sometimes hand-in-hand, seeking transformation and transfiguration towards Christ’s purposes, together. Brought together by Christ and in Christ, and sent out by Christ and in Christ to do the work of Christ – to care for the poor, and the earth, and the dispossessed, and the stranger, and the sick, and the prisoner, and the children. This, after all, is his majesty – his work, his call, his mission, his giving himself away for the last, the least, the littlest, and the lost. His majesty was his sacrifice.
This is how we can see him now, and make him visible now – by giving ourselves away, in his name. There is no separation between his glory and his sacrifice. There is no separation between his humility and his exaltation. They are all a part of the whole Christ. If we want to see his majesty, this is where we look – at his cross, at each other, at the world out there, at whoever is right in front of us, at the work he gives us to do. He is in all of it. His majesty shines through it all. We just have to open our eyes. We just have to give ourselves away, and together.
Peter wrote in his letter, “You will do well to be attentive to [the message of Christ’s power and coming] as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.” It is very, very hard, given the state of our world most days, to keep tending to the lamp that shines in our dark places. If it is hard for us, who try to seek Christ and his majesty, imagine how hard it is to see such light for those who don’t know where to look, who don’t know where their help will come from. We tend the lamp of our faith not only to keep our own hope alive, but to shine a light for the world, that the morning star might rise in their hearts too.
2 Peter 1:16-19
Transfiguration Sunday
3 February 2008
Today is the day when the church observes one of its strangest celebrations of all. We call it “Transfiguration,” and I’m betting most of us would be hard-pressed to say what that means or why we celebrate it. Yet here it comes again, just on time, as it does every year the Sunday before we begin our journey into Lent.
Perhaps you remember the story. Jesus takes Peter and James and John to the mountaintop. Suddenly, he is transformed – transfigured – before them. His face is shining like the sun, his clothes become dazzling white. And there appear with him Moses and Elijah, and they talk with him, though we are given no clue as to what the three have to say.
Peter is overcome by the moment, and he has a great idea. “It is good for us to be here!” he calls out. “Let’s set up some tents and stay awhile.” And before he can finish speaking, a bright cloud overshadows them all, and there is that voice, the same one that spoke at his baptism. “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” The disciples are terrified; they fall to the ground. Jesus comes and touches them, saying “Get up. Do not be afraid.” And when they look up, they see no one except Jesus, alone.
The story may be a bit strange, but its meaning is surprisingly straightforward. Its meaning is a promise. Jesus will be despised, rejected, and crucified. But after all of that, he will be resurrected and exalted. The transfiguration is a glimpse of what is to come, given to the three disciples to strengthen them for the sufferings that lie ahead, to stoke the fires of their hope, that it might continue to burn even in the darkest hour.
From a fairly bizarre story comes a fairly uncomplicated message: we have good reason for hope, even when times are dark. Figuring out the meaning isn’t the hard part. It’s the laying hold of it that can be so hard.
We live on the other side of the resurrection, and still many of us find it difficult to live in any kind of ongoing hope and faith. We find ourselves in an in-between time, after the good news of Easter but before the good news of a brand-new day. In a world of bleak news and broken lives, we keep trying to proclaim that another reality exists, that another reality will someday completely take hold: love and faithfulness will come together, justice and peace will embrace, every wrong will be set right, every heart will be made whole. Each week we gather, and try to proclaim that to each other, and to anyone who will listen. But much of the time, we can scarcely believe it ourselves.
Maybe this story doesn’t really help us all that much. Who of us has gotten to go to the mountaintop with Jesus, to see him there, in the flesh, and blazing with God’s glory? In Peter’s letter that we read from this morning, he asserts that he and the others are able to make known the power and the coming of Jesus Christ because they had been eyewitnesses of his majesty. But what about us? What in this story is remotely similar to our own life experiences? What are we eyewitnesses of? Where do we look for his majesty? Or are we even trying to look anymore?
-----
I went to a kind of mountaintop this week, and as an eyewitness of a sort of transfiguration, I have to tell the story. As many of you know, I spent the last few days in Atlanta, along with 15,000 other Baptists from 30 different Baptist groups, white and black, from all over the continent, for an unprecedented event, initiated by Former President Carter and called the New Baptist Covenant. His idea was that Baptists of all stripes needed to meet together to bridge our historic differences and work together on the difficult things that needs to be done in this world in the name of Christ. Not to form a new organization, another bureaucratic structure, but to create a movement, committing to put aside differences over theology or social issues and follow Jesus’ command to reach out to the poor, the hungry and the oppressed.
A lofty idea, and a worthy one. But I have to admit, I was cynical. First of all, there is the old saying, based on experience: wherever two or three Baptists are gathered, there’s a schism. Secondly, I have seen many attempts at “unity” before within groups that have profound differences, and oftentimes that unity ends up being so superficial as to mean almost nothing and to accomplish even less. Finally, I was suspicious that this gathering was mostly a reaction against the Southern Baptist Convention and the image it projects to the world of what it means to be Baptist. Any movement that starts as a reaction, any group that founds their identity on what they are not, or on who they are against, is destined for breakdown.
I have to say that my cynicism was not just overcome, it was completely blown to bits. We had many, many differences, on all manner of things, but over all of that, there seemed to be a startling unity. This gathering was not a reaction, it was an initiative, and it was not superficial, it was as real as anything I’ve seen. It might’ve even been the beginning of a transfiguration.
Let me give you a little history. 163 years ago, U.S. Baptists cracked into two pieces. The issue was slavery. Baptists in the south thought that missionaries and ministers should be allowed to own slaves. Baptists in the north thought they shouldn’t. The groups split, with the Baptists in the south calling themselves Southern Baptists and the Baptists in the north calling themselves Northern Baptists, later changed to American Baptists (that’s us). That was just the first fracture of many, because it seems that splitting is what Baptists do best.
163 years ago, we broke apart over race. The breaking continued over gender, theology, politics, social issues. Our own branch of the Baptist family, the American Baptist Churches, has not been untouched by such fractures and debates. We are more racially and theologically diverse than any other denomination – Baptist or otherwise – in the nation, but diversity is meaningless if there is not some deeper identity and mission that holds us together. [?]
This week, for the first time in over 160 years, a major national gathering of Baptists came together, undeterred by issues of race, theology, or anything else, to worship, to pray, and to have dialogue about things that matter – like how to work together in Christ’s mission for the world. President of Mercer University, Bill Underwood, who co-chaired the event with Carter, told us that first night:
Forty-five years ago, a native son of Atlanta, a Baptist pastor, shared with all of us his dream: One day, on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners would be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. Today, here on those red hills of Georgia, Baptists have come together to take a step in the long and difficult journey towards achieving Dr. King’s great dream. After generations of putting up walls between us – separation, division by geography, by theology, but most of all division by race – a new day is dawning. … Today, we all sit down together at the table of Christian brotherhood and sisterhood.”
And we did sit down together at that table on the red hills of Georgia. And what we talked about was Christ’s actual call on our lives together – to promote peace with justice, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to shelter the homeless, to care for the sick and the marginalized, to welcome the strangers among us, to protect the children, to care for the earth, to promote religious liberty and respect for religious diversity, to preach release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind. All these things don’t depend on having all the same opinions. They depend on Christ, and on our willingness to be his followers, together.
I could tell you about the eloquent and persuasive speakers we heard from – Marian Wright Edelman, who implored us as the church to be the locomotive and not the caboose in doing something about the plight of children in our country, and especially about those born at the “dangerous intersection of poverty and race”; Tony Campolo, who reminded us of Christ’s call on all of us, as individuals and as churches, to give ourselves away in ministry to the poor; Al Gore, who declared the possibility that “we who are Baptists of like mind and attempting in our lives to the best of our abilities to glorify God, are not going to countenance the continued heaping of contempt on God’s creation” ; John Grisham – of all people! – who exhorted us to “spend as much time out on the streets in ministry as in the church” ; William Shaw, president of the National Baptist Convention, [the largest Black Baptist denomination in the country] who asserted that we “can’t embrace the mission of Jesus and not encounter the reality of injustice. He came not with actions of charity. He came to change…. Justice says we need to change the structures of victimization”; Charles Adams, pastor of Hartford Memorial Church in Detroit, who proclaimed, “We are filled with the Spirit only to empty ourselves in the liberation of others. We are loved only to love others. We are free only to accept the responsibility of setting others free.”
I could tell you about all of that, and maybe you would be skeptical as I had been, or maybe the skeptic in you would take a break for awhile, like the one in me did, and maybe something like hope would start to rise in you, like it has in me, and like it seemed to do in thousands of other people. And the hope was this – the love of God in Christ, and what that love sets us free to do, together.
I was an eyewitness to majesty this week, and that majesty did not look the way we tend to think it does. No purple mountains. No royal robes. No velvet thrones. No angels or archangels. No ecstatic visions of heavenly light. That majesty was regular women and men, black, white, and brown, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, and sometimes hand-in-hand, seeking transformation and transfiguration towards Christ’s purposes, together. Brought together by Christ and in Christ, and sent out by Christ and in Christ to do the work of Christ – to care for the poor, and the earth, and the dispossessed, and the stranger, and the sick, and the prisoner, and the children. This, after all, is his majesty – his work, his call, his mission, his giving himself away for the last, the least, the littlest, and the lost. His majesty was his sacrifice.
This is how we can see him now, and make him visible now – by giving ourselves away, in his name. There is no separation between his glory and his sacrifice. There is no separation between his humility and his exaltation. They are all a part of the whole Christ. If we want to see his majesty, this is where we look – at his cross, at each other, at the world out there, at whoever is right in front of us, at the work he gives us to do. He is in all of it. His majesty shines through it all. We just have to open our eyes. We just have to give ourselves away, and together.
Peter wrote in his letter, “You will do well to be attentive to [the message of Christ’s power and coming] as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.” It is very, very hard, given the state of our world most days, to keep tending to the lamp that shines in our dark places. If it is hard for us, who try to seek Christ and his majesty, imagine how hard it is to see such light for those who don’t know where to look, who don’t know where their help will come from. We tend the lamp of our faith not only to keep our own hope alive, but to shine a light for the world, that the morning star might rise in their hearts too.
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