Blogging Towards Sunday
What do you spend most of your days talking about? I'm a habitual complainer - on the inside of course, I'd never want to come out of my sarcastic, cynical and passive-agressive closet. Ironically (or not) the more I complain the worse I feel because I allow myself to be consumed by my narcissistic anger, bitterness, and malcontentment.
Deuteronomy 6 tells the Israelites how to transmit and mature faith, how to pass it on to others - through dialogue, discussion, conversation - not just at a weekly Bible Study or regular coffee date - but in every moment and activity of life: rest, recreation, work and travel. It seems to affirm that we talk ourselves into faith through story-telling, testimony, dialogue and relationship. They're to remember who God is, the living God who brought them out of slavery in Egypt to a new life in the freedom of the promised land.
In John 20 Jesus tells his friends and followers that as God has sent him, so Jesus sends them. It's a promise that extends to us. Jesus was sent to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim freedom to the prisoner, recovery of sight for the blind, release the oppressed and announce the moment of the Lord's favor. (Luke 4:18-19). We - as those that follow him and call him master - to be about the same business. To talk about it when we walk and when we sleep, when we work and when we eat.
I asked someone how they share their faith today. They told me that they do it with their children, but that otherwise they're not much of a preacher, that's your [meaning me] job. But that's not what these two scriptures teach. It's all of our job. And it's not as difficult as we make it out to be.
How do we see Jesus in our world - through the actions, presence, work, words and relationships of others. We talk ourselves and each other into faith, not in a proletariat-dupping sort of way, but in a dialogue-discussion, have another beer or latte way. It's in those conversations that we are open to being changed in the way that we see the world, see each other and see ourselves. It's like the funny picture above. You have to change the way you look at it to see Jesus in it. You have to take in the whole thing, not just a part of it, in order to grasp the big picture.
1 comment:
I spend my day worrying, trying to piece together unrelated things, believing everything has a meaning, and searching for my destiny. Sometimes I manage to do it all at the same time.
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