Today’s readings: Click on today’s date at http://www.usccb.org/bible/
Shaped in joy
Sunday, March 15, 2015
Fourth Sunday of Lent
Ephesians 2:10
For we are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has prepared in advance, that we should live in them.
When we vacationed in North Carolina many years ago, our daughter Andi took an opportunity to work with a potter’s wheel. We treasure the photograph of her whole body smiling while she made her first pot.
Later she took university classes in sculpture, and now we’re proud owners of some of her work. She continues to teach art and create amazing things that she sells on Etsy (google “Andi Tomita”). She is God’s daughter, shaped in joy, shaping her own works with joy and sharing them with the world.
In her daily life Andi is practical and down-to-earth. Efficient. And when she becomes artist, her imagination soars. She sees photographically, beyond the visible, into what might be. Or rather, what is, but just isn’t YET.
I think that’s the way Paul sees when he writes about God. His ideas about human intercourse and society are practical, down-to-earth and straightforward. Then when he turns to thoughts about God, he writes of the mystery of our relationship in headlong rushes of mystical joy. He does this over and over, in all his letters.
I see him as a little boy so excited about catching his first fish that he doesn’t just jump and down; he tumbles. He turns and jumps and falls and does a somersault in the dust, and laughs and laughs and laughs. His happiness knows no bounds.
And his words know no bounds, pure prose poetry in whatever language we read them. He is talking about God’s great gifts to us, and his integration of himself with us, and the eternal-ness of this gift, and how happy God is about it, and how happy we, his handiwork, can be. We can LIVE in the works God creates for us.
At the end of his conversation with Nicodemus (in John 3), Jesus also was caught up in unity with his father: “Whoever lives the truth comes to the light, so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God.” It only remains for us to follow Jesus and Paul into this thin space of the world, where we find God closer than our own faces.
Lord, teach me to be confident and see your goodness in the land of the living. I want to learn to wait for you, to be strong and take heart, and wait for you. Your love sustains all there is for me to do and be, day by day.
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http://www.christiancounselingservice.com/archived_devotions.php?article_id=1359
