Monday, November 6, 2023
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Your touch is Christ’s touch
Brothers and sisters:
The gifts and the call of God are irrevocable.
Just as you once disobeyed God
but have now received mercy
because of their disobedience,
so they have now disobeyed in order that,
by virtue of the mercy shown to you,
they too may now receive mercy.
For God delivered all to disobedience,
that he might have mercy upon all.
Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!
How inscrutable are his judgments and how unsearchable his ways!
What do you think? If your loved one rejects God, you can be his surrogate, his proxy, and pray him back into the fold. She cannot be lost. What do you think of that?
This is not your normal missionary message. It emphasizes salvation, not lack of it. It replaces depreciation with appreciation, and not the imperfect appreciation of little old me, but the appreciation of God.
In his bestseller Holy Longing, Fr. Ron Rolheiser reminds us that the incarnation of God in the Body of Christ includes 1) Jesus, 2) the Eucharist, and 3) the body of believers (ourselves) here on earth.. It’s the us part that Paul is getting at, and that Rolheiser describes eloquently:
If a child or a brother or a sister or a loved one of yours strays from the church in terms of faith practice and morality, as long as you continue to love that person, and hold him or her in union and forgiveness, he or she is touching the hem of the garment, is held to the Body of Christ, and is forgiven by God, irrespective of his or her official external relationship to the church and Christian morality. Your touch is Christ’s touch. – p. 89
Many Christians have no idea that this could be true. But Christ does all this through us. We stand as a love-offering to God in order to allow his love to be sent to others through us.
Fr. Ron often heard, “This can’t be true because, if it were, it would be too good to be true!”
The response to that can only be: What a marvelous description of the incarnation. It is too good to be true. It is precisely because of this incredible, unimaginable goodness that we sing so joyfully in the Christmas carol: “Joy to the world, the Lord has come!” In Jesus’ birth, something fundamental has changed. God has given us the power to keep each other out of hell. – p. 92
After church we had lunch with new friends Tarina and Stefan from South Africa. We talked about the difference between unity through diversity (good) and unity through uniformity (bad). In their home country an Anglican priest, Desmond Tutu worked together with Nelson Mandela encouraging “Truth and Reconciliation” rather than traditional penal justice, as the country struggled past their history of apartheid, a word that simply means “apartness.”
This was a classic example of working toward unity through diversity. Blatant sins against humanity, perpetrated by the apartheid South African governments for most of the last half of the 20th century, called out for justice. But this new two-sided justice required that the bad guys speak truth and the good guys reconcile with them rather than punish them. No more eye for an eye. In many cases, the two parties were eventually able to accept and sometimes even embrace one another. Nobody is all bad, and nobody is all good. Can we agree on that?
God has given us the power to keep each other out of hell.
But our egos not only keep us from reconciliation with others, they also prevent us from receiving God’s grace and forgiveness for ourselves. We say we don’t need that kind of big-heartedness from God! There must be a catch. What does God want from me?
Turning God’s love upside down like that doesn’t hurt God, but it destroys me. I can’t keep my balance when everything I look at is upside down. I’m not headed for hell; I’m there already. And I’m not helping anybody else stay out.
Go directly to jail. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.
For who has known the mind of the Lord? Who has given him anything that he may be repaid. For from him and through him and for him are all things.
(Revelation 7, Psalm 24, 1 John 3, Matthew 11, Matthew 5)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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