God's Job Description--December 2, 2019

God's Job Description--December 2, 2019

"We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies." [Romans 8:22-23]

Whatever else we can say about God, this much seems sure: God is constantly bringing things to life.

People--humans in all our great diversity, across spectrums of color, race, gender, language, tribe, and culture.  God calls them to life.

Animals, too, in all of their varieties: wolves and lambs, bears and cows, blue whales and krill, killdeer and kangaroos.  

The tiniest quark and the vastness of the whole universe--all of this creation, we believe, has been given existence as a free gift by God whose self-chosen job-description seems to be something like "Giver of Life."

From the opening verses of the creation poem in Genesis 1 to the dream of a new heaven and a new earth in the tail end of Revelation, we are introduced to a God who brings life where there is no life--whether there is nothing there to start with, only chaos swirling around in the dark, or even where death is present. God is about the business of bringing life.

Honestly, we sometimes forget just how big and beautiful that job-description of God's is, and we end up imagining that God is simply our personal finder of lost keys and good parking spaces, or the distributor of warm and fuzzy spiritual feelings, or the mascot for my personal political platform. Those are all far too small, honestly. Let the parking spaces and partisan politics go on the back burner--God is up to something infinitely more compelling.The God we meet in the Scriptures is always about the vast and deep mission of bringing us to life: life out of nothingness, life out of death, life out of desperation, life in its fullness.

Now, at the beginning of the story, we call that giving of life "creation."  When there's nothing but swirling chaos and a void where not even space exists yet, bringing things to life is an act of originality.  Each blade of grass, each photon of light, each pebble on every shore, is a brand new thing.

But that's not where we find ourselves in the story.  We live in the midst of the ache.  We live where that once-beautiful creation groans.  We live amidst the relentless doggedness of death, in a world where wildfires rage, species go extinct before we even have the chance to lay eyes on them, shooters go on near-daily rampages (yesterday's was in New Orleans, in case you are still able to keep track), and where, as Thoreau once remarked, most of us "lead lives of quiet desperation." Turn on the news for a hot minute and the rottenness and crookedness come shouting off the screen. We live in the midst of a world suffering from sickness-unto-death.

And what we long for--what we groan for like a pregnant mother in the delivery room--is for resurrection.  We long for creation to be brought to life again.  We long for every nook and cranny of the universe where death and decay and entropy reign to be brought to fullness of life again.  The whole shootin' match, born all over again.  We are desperate--and not even quietly so--for the God who spoke the cosmos into being at the first to call our names out of the darkness like Lazarus in the tomb.  Nothing less will do.

That, and nothing smaller, is what the Gospel is all about.  Resurrection--when God calls the dead to life again--for this whole aching universe.  And that is why we start here, as the more liturgically-minded (read: "church-nerd") among us start the season of Advent.  We start the seeking here with a reminder that the Christian faith is about nothing smaller, nothing less significant, than a whole resurrection of all creation.  Any time we shrink it down to lessons about respectable behavior, proper formulas for prayer, or life-coaching tips for "your best life now," we are selling God (and the universe God loves) terribly short.  God is about the work of bringing life, and Advent reminds us that it is the whole world aching for that newness of life.

So we start this season with the twin gifts of honesty and hope: honesty about the mess of injustice, violence, enmity, and death that the world is... and hope about the mosaic of justices and healing, peace and life that God has promised to resurrect from the ashes.  Advent--and indeed the Gospel itself--requires that we be truthful about the many ways things are broken, so that we can be honest about all the places we are stuck in the grip of death... and then be set free from them.

Don't let these weeks of anticipation be just about setting up your manger scene or getting your Christmas cards out in the mail. We need to take the time before we get to the angels and shepherds to remember just how big a project God has undertaken, since it is nothing less than resurrection and re-creation of heaven and earth themselves.  We need the time to steep, like tea leaves, in the idea that God is raising all of creation from death into new life.  Let it take the time.

Today, maybe it is not a bad idea to begin to make a running list of the places in our lives, in our communities, and even as wide as our whole world, that are in need of being brought to new life... so that we will have a sense of just how wide, how deep, and how specific God's mission really is.  Because God is committed to bringing all of it--every square inch of the universe--back to fullness of life in God.

Yeah, let's put the worry about finding a parking space on the back burner.  We are embarking alongside God in the work of resurrection.

God of life, for all the many ways we are settling for death, call us into your marvelous resurrection light.