Pure Grace

 It has been sometime since I have had the need to write to all of you.  To say the least, last year somehow dampened my creative thinking.

However this morning I am thinking about the major dramas our nation — our world — have been living through. Between the pandemic and political attempts to eliminate the power of our democracy; many people have found themselves debating where God is in it all.

Have you ever wondered about how faith, faith in the Creator God, has stayed alive through all of history?

Thousands and thousands of year of wars, plagues, epidemics, political battles for power, pollution, oppressive attitudes towards justice and the welfare of all people. Through it all the stories of God, and God in Jesus’ skin, have not faded away in people's lives and hearts

Why do you suppose that is?

What is it that keeps faith moving down through history into our lives — our world-- today?

This most transcendent presence — force — seems to have a lasting power to move in, and through, the midst of all the physical factions of human life.

Transcendence is the “existence or experience beyond the normal or physical level.”  (Oxford Dictionary) 

God is beyond all of our knowledge, learned behavior, conditioning, intellect, reason or logic.  

All we seem to know, understand and believe to be true — the unprovable -- continues to  lives in very provable world.

And despite all of the information we are so tempted to value, or hold on to, God seem to make sense to billions of ordinary people; as well as some of the top scientist throughout world history.

Interesting.

We, who are of the theological mind-set, call it the great mystery.  

“By mystery I mean the infinite depths of being that we can never plumb, never know, never exhaust, given the limits of mortality, our finitude, our creatureliness....Our inherent sense of mystery is in our irrepressible longing for something we cannon name but intensely miss.”  (The Haunt of Grace p.15)

The fact that you are reading this blog, tells me that you are one who is searching for something outside of the physical world.

You have a sense of something more, something far beyond what we can see, and touch or even imagine.

We find God’s grace in his coming to earth as one of us.  God came, in Jesus' skin, to help us -- enable us -- to grasp the presence of the ultimate truth of his activity among the living.

So, I am thinking that without Jesus, who brought the pure truth of God, it would be difficult for anyone to believe in such an invisible elusive God.

Not that God could not have done it without Jesus.  But I believe that God knew us well enough to know that it would be easier for us to hear and see Him in physical form.

That is pure grace.