Monday, January 26, 2015

Mercy; God Reaching Into The Muck 1 Peter 1: 3-5 or so...


By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, 5who are being protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.

 “By his great mercy…”  This is the reason for all God has done for humanity.  It has been done out of mercy.  If not for mercy, there is condemnation.  This is the black and white (to use an outdated metaphor), good and bad, the absolutes of God’s perfection.  Obey or die.  It is that absolutist mentality that has led many to despair that God doesn’t care.  It is that same mentality that has led many others to believe they can kill in God’s name in some warped sense of God’s justice.

The experience of life is an experience of shades of gray, between good and evil.  For we, the broken sinners who make up humanity, we are coming from the evil side and seeking justification that all our bad behavior has shades of goodness within.  Systems of sacrifice, codes of behavior, obligations, these are all means by which we, as humans, seek to reach levels of goodness, higher levels of acceptance, trying to achieve ever lighter shades of grey. 

God’s mercy flips that on its ear.  God comes to us from the good side, mercy reaching down into the broken, sinful lives of people.  We act from desperation, God acts without expectation.  There is not a code to follow, there is simply acceptance of His mercy.  He reaches down, will we take His hand?  He shines a light into the darkness and the darkness does not overcome it.

Sidebar: Are we really so bad and broken?  Well, we’ve tied the metaphor of “white and black as good and evil” to our racial profiles.  Slavery, murder, and genocide have all resulted from it.  We cannot even talk about ‘shades of grey’ without snickering comments about there being 50 of them (I rewrote this section three times to overcome my own amusement at the word play). 
Thank you Lord for reaching to us because we are never going to reach You.

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