What God does best.
Dear friends and members of St. Matt's,
Yesterday was the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul. If you read the story from Acts, you get a sense of this conversion and a sense of who Paul was. We know that he was zealous, a religious leader, one of the elite. And scripture tells us that before his conversion, he was active in the effort to persecute Christians, to eradicate this little sect from their faithful community. It's fair to say he was one of the chief enemies of the Jesus movement, which was still very young and struggling to find its feet. His conversion story tells us a great many things, but among them is that God can always bring good things out of the messiest, most broken situations.
Paul is just one example of this. There are more examples scattered all over scripture and tradition, all over our heritage, even throughout our own lives and communities. Paul would become arguably the greatest apostle of them all. We have more writing from him in scripture than from anyone else. And there were whole schools of thought that sprang up after him to write the rest of the Pauline epistles in his name. He was a pastor, a church planter, a passionate evangelist. It's clear with modern eyes that he didn't quite get everything right - like the fact that he thought Jesus was coming soon. He couldn't have imagined us and our life, the fact that we would still be here, that creation would look like this.
And yet, his voice and his witness becomes one of the most sustaining parts of the Church universal. He has carried generations of Christians through their faith journey, encouraging some, challenging others, and hoping to move all into a deeper faith and a more meaningful relationship with Jesus. And he couldn't have come from a messier place or made a more dramatic change. From persecutor to champion, from torturer to pacifist, from doubter to believer.
God specializes in calling goodness, hopefulness, and promise out of the messiest situations. Out of the people, places, and efforts we might consider completely lost and unworthy of our time. God can always find a way. And I don't know about you, but as I sit here on this Tuesday watching the snow come down, aware of all that is messy around us (and there is a lot of it!), I find that incredibly comforting. Even incredibly hopeful. That God will use us, send us, encourage us, even in the midst of our various individual and shared messes - creating for us and the world around us more than we could have asked or imagined. Even now, God is doing that work with us. With the mess around us and within us. In our broken hearts, broken relationships, social distance, frustration, despair, and loss. Even in our tensions over politics, race, and justice. Even now, God is working to transform us and the world around us.
What mess do you most need God to transform? What part of you, what part of your life, what part of the world around us feels so lost to you that you can't imagine God finding th good in it? Can you turn all that over in prayer to God today, asking for that gift of transformation? For God to do what God does best: bring order out of chaos, light out of darkness, peace out of violence, love out of hate, goodness out of pain, and life out of death? You'll be amazed by what's possible.
Faithfully,
--Marissa +
Tags: Welcome from the Rector