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October 08, 2006
> 10:26 AM
to be a christian > opening the connection  This is the skeleton of a "sermon" I taught in an All Saints regional gathering of churches here in Lexington a couple of years ago..."How deep are the riches and wisdom and the knowledge of God!" "...who has known the mind of the Lord?" "From Him, through Him, and for Him all things are." A few things... - We are not God. - We do not know everything. - We cannot do anything to impress God so that He then owes us something. These things all tend to give us perspective, to put us in our place, as it were. Taken alone, we might stay very quiet, thinking that we can know nothing of God and His ways. In other places we are told that we even, in Christ, share and participate in the Divine Nature - that "eye has not seen nor ear heard... BUT all these things have been revealed to us." What can we take away from this then? God is BIG! Infinite and altogether unfathomable. AND, that WE have been drawn into, in a very real way, that infinite Life of God, into His Kingdom, where His Life is active. There is a reality which goes beyond what we see, a dimension of existence that we, at this point, cannot fully comprehend or fully experience. That is not to say that we have no part in it though, that we cannot at all experience it or live in it. As I have come to see it, this is what it means to be a Christian - to be one who is reconnected with that eternal dimension, with the Life of the Universe, God, through Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Our goal - to continually cooperate with the opening of this connection - the connection between God's Life and us. There was ever meant to be a free-flowing passage between that realm and this. It was occluded. Now, through Jesus, it has been re-opened. Everything we do by way of connecting with God goes toward keeping that flow moving freely and breaking up blockage. _______________________________ I was skimming through old written journals and found this last night. These are recurring themes when I teach. Two years later, I still think this is the central thing, the very most important message we can hear and focus on. The part that can trip us up the most, I think, is this tricky bit about what we call humility sometimes. In a way, in some circles, we have been taught to be too self-abasing. Sounds funny I know. Listen, if St. Francis, for instance, never believed it possible to be one with God, he would have cursed any sign of it he saw in himself. He wouldn't have prayed as he did or lived as he did. If we only ever see ourselves as very lowly, dirt-covered, worm-like humans who are (and this is what we've been taught) inherently so far away from God that all we can do is grovel and eat crumbs - if we do this, we deny the creative and redeeming power of God. We will be denying His original intent for mankind. Our hand up, our heads in the dust, we will keep Him at arm's length and this is NOT what He wants. He IS our Father. Unless this, and everything that is logically concluded from it, becomes very real to us, we will never truly step through the opening. The spiritual plaque will remain in our veins. technorati tags > union with god, knowledge of god, christianity, christian mysticism, spirituality, kingdom of god 0 Comments:| permalink | e-mail me | 
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