Genesis 1
H,
I know that it may sound simplistic and to all
our pretensions it may even seem a little bit off but it is like this: you take
your medicine or you die. Also, you take your medicine and then you die. The latter
has life at the end of the tunnel. The former, well, I do not know. Some claim
it does. I do not know. I have not been there yet. We both know that the human
ailment is sin. Some call it self. It is much the same thing. Sin or self is
when we seek our own way over God and others. It is living in the now even if
the ‘now’ is a sixty year plan. I know that your catholic soul will protest, as
my Pentecostal soul does too, and say: what about lying, stealing, the old slip
and slide, fornications, adulteries, murder and so on and so on. It seems that
for a quite a long time, we have mixed up the symptoms with the disease.
The things we do are the symptoms of the
disease and the way we are is the disease itself. Are we not told that it is
what comes out of our hearts that it is the problem not the heart itself? Are we
not told to guard the metaphorical heart because out of it comes everything
else? We are told that a man is as he thinks he is from his own heart. We are
told that things we do not out of actual belief are pointless. We are told,
finally, that what we do without love is useless. All these things together
paint a picture of life as not a series of events but one whole thing that
comes from an inner state of being and not an outer state of doing. The light must
lead to acts from the light and the dark will lead to acts in the dark.
I know that it is time to put our hands up and
say, how about all the things we do? Are we always in the light? Well, we go
back to the thing about taking your medicine. All of us have the disease of
self or sin. We have had it for a while. When we accept the light we have
agreed to go to the hospital and to take our medicine daily. That is what Christianity
is. This is what discipleship is. We are not really here for the acts of power
but to receive the heart of God. The bible tells us exactly what happens to
those who think acting for God is living for God, who have mixed up what the
hand does with who the heart must be and
who want to be conduits but not friends with Him. It is not a question of
hypocrisy. We are human. We will fail. It is a question of being honest, open, and
teachable. It is when we admit that we are sick and we are in repair in the
face of God that our message of hope and life truly has any significance. We will
be in treatment till the end of our earthly lives because we believe that this
life is not the end of the story. Whoever we will be is marked by how we accept
the forever cure of self and wake up to the certain more of God.
There is a new humanity rising from the ashes
of fallen man and that place where we “slip the surly bonds of earth...to touch
the face of God” is now open to receive us and turn us into true daughters and sons
of original intent.
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