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Friday, October 4, 2013

the word made flesh, day 6

Come to Stillness: Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer:
Almighty God, who came to us long ago in the birth of Jesus Christ, be born in us anew today by the power of your Holy Spirit.  We offer our lives as home to you and ask for grace and strength to live as your faithful, joyful children always.  Through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen. (A Guide to Prayer for Ministers and Other Servants)

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 85

Scripture for the Day: Matthew 1:18-25

Reading for Reflection:

     God in Himself is the transcendent One.  As such he exceeds and explodes all of our human thought categories.  No human mind can capture Him.  He who is light in himself is darkness for the human mind.
     How, then, can he communicate himself to fleshbound human beings in a way calculated to grasp us and grip us and lift us up into a lifegiving personal relationship with him? 
     The first way God chooses to bridge the gap is creation.  He creates our universe, the bewildering variety of touchable, seeable, hearable, palpable beings, so that we can stand before star-studded heavens, before sunrise and sunset glories, before Yosemite and Coldwater, the might of the Pacific in storm, before the complexity of the atom and DNA and the human body, and know something of that Maker:  his majesty, his intelligence, his beauty, his power.  In a real sense, “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.”  Creation is the first preaching of the good news.  The universe is truly a sacramental universe, disclosing Him.  He is the radical secret at the heart of the universe.  And so it has been for me in my experience.
     But he chooses to bridge the gap in a more significant, personal way.  He chooses out of many nations one people and in the years of their history discloses—progressively from Abraham and Moses on, but most specifically in Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Hosea—his holiness, his desire for human beings, his longstanding, faithful love for his rational creatures.
     And yet this is not enough.  He must say it in a way no one can miss.  He must lay his heart open to us and give us the supreme argument of love.  He must pour out his inmost identity in an ultimate symbol worthy of himself which would convince us even in our cynicism.
     Thus the final way he gladly chose to reveal himself is in his own Son, existing before the stars, who would become a limited human being with a body like me, an emotional life like mine, a thinking loving spirit, and a developing identity—consciousness like mine.  So Jesus began life as an infant and grows up in a backwater town, takes up the carpentry trade, is called at the Jordan ford and teaches and heals and forms a small group of followers, dies and rises.  And precisely through this short life of carpenter and teacher, God the Father is revealed to the world in stunning clarity.  Jesus then is the great sacrament, symbol, revelation of the very depths of the incomprehensible God.  What Jesus reveals is the Father’s love for us humans:  a self-giving love unto death, an unconditional love accepting our flawed condition, forgiving endlessly our weakness and malice. (A Traveler Toward the Dawn by John Eagan, S.J.)
 
 
Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: Come Thou Long Expected Jesus


Come, thou long expected Jesus,
born to set our people free;
From our fears and sins release us;
let us find our rest in thee.
Israel’s strength and consolation,
hope of all the earth thou art;
Dear desire of every nation,
joy of every longing heart.
 
Born thy people to deliver,
born a child and yet a King,
Born to reign in us forever,
now thy gracious kingdom bring.
By thine own eternal spirit
rule in all our hearts alone,
By thine all sufficient merit,
raise us to thy glorious throne.

Closing Prayer:
Come, Lord Jesus!
     You are my righteousness.  You are my goodness, the cause and the reason for goodness.  You are my life and the light of life.  You are my love and all my loving.  You are the most noble language I can ever utter, my words and all their meaning, my wisdom, my truth, and the better part of myself.  Amen. (Preparing for Jesus by Walter Wangerin Jr.)

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