Fragile is Human, Becoming Real is Divine
Title: Fragile is Human, Becoming Real is Divine
Sub Title: The Dividing Line
Potential Blog and/or Teaching: Based upon 3 days devotional readings
Scriptures:
7/28 II Peter 1:1-2,
7/29 Matthew 5:3-12 & Romans 8: 18-27
"To those who through the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ
have received a faith as precious as ours:
have received a faith as precious as ours:
Grace and peace be yours in abundance
through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord"
II Peter 1: 1b-2
The Dividing Line
07/28-29/25
One of the gifts of living in-between is the ability to see nuance; the core truth inside every side.
When 16, on the back of our small rural church was signage from our Naz denomination showing the picture taken from the moon of the earth by one of Apollo missions. It read: "Science is discovering 'how'. The Bible tells us 'Who' and 'Why'.
It was an artful way of framing the raging philosophical debates about the Authority of the Bible and Creation verses Evolution. Except for Cosmology, I have little interest in Science. (Yes, I realize that is as foolish and ignorant statement one could make. It's like saying, except for heaven and hell I have no interest in theology.)
In today's epistle, Peter is writing from within prison, Rome A.D. 65 as 'The Way' is blamed for Rome's fire and Jesus followers are considered enemies of the state.1 It is absolutely audacious to write "grace and peace be yours in abundance" (II Peter 1: 2a) unless Peter is rooted in a reality that lives within and beyond the political, cultural, social environ of the moment.
I have had the privilege of taking both enlightenment rationalism (modernity) and the post-modern world views as true--at least in significant ways--and experienced living the gospel narrative from within two competing and overlapping world views. The gospel as told in each shares the Story in common, but the focus of each is radically different. If either is lost, something important is missing.
I grew up at the height of the American 20th century and enlightenment rationalism and the fixed lines of personal salvation; nuance be damned. Yet I came of age at the beginning of the communal age of the post-modern world which celebrates nuance and emphasizes salvation as the renewal of all things.
Were it not for having my feet planted in both I genuinely believe that:
1. I would never had made my way out of addictive sin and back to Jesus, and;
2. I Would have missed critical insights that have kept me rooted in a gospel narrative larger than my times, in historic, including 1st century narratives, among them;
a. The Trinity of God and the universe are not in fact co-eternal, the universe being dependent upon and a living reflection of God's Communal Reality, and;
b. God is greater than the universe (or a thousand-billion universes) and yet lives embedded within it's pulsating time and mass, the universe reflecting the very communal inter-woven nature of the Trinity of God, and;
c. The universe is thus directly affected by the rebellion of sentient persons within its time and space, and
d. God the Father and Spirit, like the universe, experience the changes that an open Heart and Spirit receive in the Eternal Son's (Cosmic Christ) redemptive creation within time and mass, and;
e. One of God's essential purposes in Creation is to create from within multi-Trillions of Moments sentient persons who, like God emerge within time/space as actualized, eternal, moral, loving and who in Christ, will outlive a thousand universes, and hence;
f. God is knowable.
Clarity Indwelling All Mysteries
Ultimate Reality is the Trinity of God--Three unique Persons so interwoven in the Mystery of the Sacred, of Love as to be One in essential nature; who from within creation are Emergent Eternal Persons, those whose existence is congruent with and dependent upon the Trinity of God. Such that:
Whatever time and space processes, God is the Creator of All and not, simply, the Cohabitating and Most Powerful presence in and with an Eternal Universe.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
...Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth."
Matthew 5:3,5
'Creator' is fundamental to humans becoming, for we are delicate, vulnerable creatures whose very reason for existence requires humility (Matt 5: 3), a relational dependence; communal in nature, aware of our Divine origins yet emerging from the dust of the Stars, the mud of the earth.
We are vulnerable by design, in a universe of movement; the stars and planets swirling above us, the earth beneath in a constant state of shifting, the mystery of the seas teeming with life we have not yet discovered. Every moment is a 'becoming' or 'entropy' depending upon our choices in response to a world abundant in creative tensions and unintended, creative tensions.
The Garden's Dilemma
We are called to take up a portion of the Creator's nurturing purposes in this ever teeming, chaotic, yet rhythmed plain of existence; just as Adam and Eve did as the first environmental biologists, ever reflecting a degree of God's expressive radiance--The Trinity's dance of love.
Within God's knowing embrace we partake of the actual communal nature of God's beauty, power, Spirit, charisma, love. If ever, we look outside or beyond God's heart we introduce into ourselves and the environ a chaos, without the dna rhythm of The dance. Thus, our vulnerability is etched within God's designs and purposes.
"I consider that our present sufferings
are not worth comparing
with the glory that will be revealed in us.
For the creation waits in eager expectation
for the children of God to be revealed.
For the creation was subjected to frustration,
not by its own choice,
but by the will of the one who subjected it,
in hope that the creation itself will be liberated
from its bondage to decay
and brought into the freedom
and glory of the children of God.
Romans 8: 18-21
We, who are human, also enjoy the freedom to define ourselves apart from or within God's love and glory (purposes). As our experience of 'surrounding glory' grows in what appears to us to be concrete, real mass with technology and provision enflaming our desires, we tend to forget our 'creatureliness', the very reverence for God, processes of life, the environ, cosmos, and persons with whom we interact and relate. Glory, in this case has set us up to taste the fruit of a tree, succulent from creation, whose sweetness turns bitter in desires focused lust.
Finally, we also live on the edge of chaos and realities unseen, perhaps parallel with all created life. These entities are sentient, powerful and either moving with the Creator or away; If away, the necessary result being ever increasing confusion, demonic orientation, at war with themselves and God.
We, humans, a little lower than the angels (at peace or at war), and birthed from within a reality of exploding light in waves of sub-atomic particles framing our individual and communal mass of events; billions of them. Before we achieve the dullest inkling of our potential as selves God has already entombed us in our mothers womb as she cuddled, spoke to us in a language only our spirit could capture. Each feeling, every word or poke awakened us as totally dependent persons 'becoming' only in relation, never apart.
"we know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth
right up to the present time.
Not only so, but we ourselves,
who have the first fruits of the Spirit,
groan inwardly as we wait eagerly
for our adoption to sonship,
the redemption of our bodies.
For in this hope we were saved.
But hope that is seen is no hope at all.
Who hopes for what they already have?
But if we hope for what we do not yet have,
we wait for it patiently.
In the same way, the Spirit helps us
in our weakness.
We do not know what we ought to pray for,
but the Spirit himself intercedes for us
through wordless groans.
And he who searches our hearts
knows the mind of the Spirit,
because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people
in accordance with the will of God.”
Romans 8: 22-27
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