Wednesday, November 10, 2021https://kuc.org/wp-content/uploads/joy-42.jpg
Katie Snipes Lancaster
Scripture
No one has ever seen God;
if we love one another,
God lives in us,
and God’s love is perfected in us.
1 John 4:12
A Look at Joy
[In his introduction to the book of Acts, Willie James Jennings connects the God of Pentecost to the God of creation, the God of Israel to the God we meet in Jesus Christ, the God of here to the God of there, the God of then to the God of now. The same God who joyfully creates, joyfully calls us out to meet others with a deep love. How will we respond?] —KSL
The same Spirit that was there from the beginning, hovering, brooding in the joy of creation of the universe and of each one of us, who knows us together and separately in our most intimate places has announced the divine intention through the Son to reach into our lives and make each life a site of speaking glory. But this will require bodies that reach across massive and real boundaries, cultural, religious, and ethnic. It will require a commitment born of Israel’s faith, but reaching to depths of relating beyond what any devotion to Israel’s God had heretofore been recognized as requiring: devotion to peoples unknown and undesired. What God had always spoken to Israel now God speaks even more loudly in the voices of the many to the many: join them! Now love of neighbor will take on pneumatological dimensions. It will be love that builds directly out of the resurrected body of Jesus. It will be love, as Karl Barth says, that goes into the far country. This is love that cannot be tamed, controlled, or planned, and once unleashed it will drive the disciples forward into the world and drive a question into their lives: Where is the Holy Spirit taking us and into whose lives?
(From Willie James Jennings, “Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible”).
Prayer
God, this world is filled with love.
Let us meet you as we meet one another in love.
Reach into the depths of us.
Relate to us.
Announce love within and between us.
And show us your way.
Amen.