Monday, January 2, 2017

Those Preposterous Promises

Today is the Ninth Day of Christmas. If Love is at the heart of all things, we just might hear an annunciation.  An annunciation is simply God announcing to you and to me, one of those preposterous promises we have heard about in every Christmas season we can remember and bidding us do our part in bringing them to reality. 

Those promises sound so silly. They are so hard to believe, much less bring into being.  Like the promise about the calf and the lion eating together, whoever heard of such a thing?  Or the promise of “peace on earth, goodwill to all?”  Or the announcement that the poor and downtrodden shall inherit the earth?  Such promises seem preposterous because they are so far removed from the usual. 

We have no idea how these preposterous promises can ever come to be reality.  The truth is that most of us resist them and do not want such promises fulfilled anyway.  Who wants the calf and the lion eating together?  Who wants to be neighborly with their enemies?  Who wants the poor and downtrodden to be in charge? 

Hearing our annunciation changes all of that and calls us, in love, to play some small part in making the preposterous reality.  “Christianity is not a creed, not a way of thinking about life: it is the I and Thou of a God who addresses us; a moment of meeting, a moment of hearing and becoming.”  It is an annunciation!

No comments:

Post a Comment