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| “Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.” ― |
God loves you.
Read that again.
God loves you.
Not only that, but God keeps the oath God made to you. We may turn away from God, but God never turns away from us.
Why? That's the mystery—especially to the text above. We don't get an answer—except that God loves God's people.
Throughout Lent, the Old Testament lessons will focus on covenant. The God of our faith is not concerned with God's self—like the other gods. No, the God of our faith is concerned with creation—including us. God embraces all—wraps us in hugs of mercy and love. God moves towards us, not from a place of anger—which so many insist is the case. When we turn away from God, it grieves God. From this grief, God moves towards us to restore us to our relationship with God and all that is good and beautiful in life.
We are transformed by God, and God is transformed through our embrace. The other gods are only interested in their own triumph. But the God in Scripture hears the cries of God's people and responds with their liberation. God wants us to live—to know God's glory and enjoy God forever. We do this—we are fully alive—when we do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.
Or, to paraphrase Jesus, we are to love God and neighbor as ourselves.
In living to love, we know God. We see God, experience God. In the songs we sing and the prayers we pray, we breathe God. In each note, we write or care we send or poem we pen—we write God.
Take time now to listen.
No, really. Listen. Turn off your TV. Put down the phone—mute all electronics. Listen. Do you hear it? Silence. Wind. Sunshine. Birds. Your breath. God.
Are you sitting? Good. The covenant God makes with us—with you—is to never forsake or abandon us.
Remember that flood story from the first week of Lent? What is it about? It isn't about the water or the animals or whether or not the unicorn was too stubborn to get on board—it is about something else. Something deeper.
It discloses the nature of God—a God who chooses compassion…who sees us for what we really are and moves us towards renewal. In the Noah story, we see what pain and isolation, and separation do to humanity, creation, and God.
Here is my take away from the flood: I can resist God all I want; I can ignore the invitation to co-create with God as long as I want; I can pursue all the small 'g' gods I want—but nothing will change the truth that God will still move towards me in mercy and love.
Because the thing about the flood story is this—it is a narrative rooted not in anger but in grief. The crisis is not the water, but the grief we cause each other—and God. The narrative is centered on the grief of God, whose heart knows about our hearts.
Our pain, our suffering, our grief impacts God. The theological significance of this is—the Holy One is not
static.
Rather, the Holy One is Dynamic. God enters into our story because God loves us so much.
How does order come from chaos? Not by some tyrannical, angry god who is a puppet master. It comes by way of the anguish and grief of God, who enters into the world's pain and fracture. God gifts us with creative love but does not force us to live into it. God longs for us to turn toward God, but God does not commandeer it.
We mess up. When we do, we have to name how we mess up, address it, confess it even, and then return to God--this is what repentance means. We can recognize how we miss the mark while also embracing the new creation we are in God through Christ. Or, as Walter Brueggemann says, "The [flood] narrative concerns the grief of God and the emergence of new humanity amid the old, judged humanity."
The story isn't about all that water, how all them animals got into that boat, or the scientific data surrounding this story. To focus on such things will miss the point of this covenant story.
Which is what?
Where we expect destruction by the hands of an angry God, we get new life from the heart of a tender God. In the end, we know this from the flood—God resolves that God will stay with, endure, and sustain God's world, notwithstanding the sorry state of humanity. We can do our best to anger God—but not even our worst attempts will sway God from God's grand dream for creation.
Here's why I want us to paint rainbows—because it makes us deal with the truth that God loves us. In that first stroke of the paintbrush, we bear witness to the Creator's compassion and love for us.
In the simple act of creating—dipping our brush in water and then dabbing it in the paint—we are taking our first step towards our own liberation. We become who we are at our core—creators! The invitation to paint is an invitation to embrace our wildness—to embrace the movement of the Spirit—to allow the Divine Creativity to intersect with our imagination.
The essence of the flood story is that of vulnerability and possibility.
The essence of our story is that of creativity and hope.
God is about goodness and creation, and love.
At our core—in our image and likeness of the Wild—we are, too.
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