"Who dat?" Who Indeed?: 29th Week of the Liturgical Year, October 16-22, 2011

Romans chapters 4-8; Luke, chapters 12-13.

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On my way to Rome, I stopped in New Orleans for a wedding. American bride; Serbian groom. Five generations present on each side. The scars of war. Pain of refugee exile. All enveloped in laughter, kissing and dancing, children playing and children promised. Life experienced as love. Love not erasing divisions but making divisions a non-thought. As they will be at the “wedding banquet of the Lamb.” Nothing but celebration: the celebration of life given and to be given through love. God was there.

It is so simple: where God is, there is love. Where love is, there is God. Where God and love are together, all divisions drop out of existence. The word “foreign” becomes foreign to reality. People are people just being people. That is all that counts. As it does for God.

I turn to the readings for the week. They are all about power: “For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, now and forever!” There is no power but God’s; all other is illusory. But we live by the light of illusion. We think that law-observance has power to save us from sin. Or that sin has power to make us happy apart from God. Or that the powers at work in this world—the powers that create the conditioning of culture, and the power that cultural “programming” has over every one of us—are so strong, so entrenched, so omni-present there is no hope of overcoming them through wisdom, justice or love.

We dare not (or care not) to interact with God, unconvinced that his power is identical with his love. God’s love turns all his power to our good. God exercises power by lavishing love. Yet we dare not (or care not) to approach him. We deal with him through the “intermediaries” of written laws, written words of prayer (using another’s words to speak to him, not daring to trust in our own), the written words of others’ thoughts that we do not make our own through confrontation and reflection incarnated in personal choice. Our “religion” is immersion in a system; it is not immersion in Christ. We live the law, but we are not saying and experiencing in our hearts law transcended in the refrain of Paul: “I live now, not I, but Christ lives in me!” For Paul, Christ was the law; the law was Christ, and to live in lovc was the law of laws.

Love is relationship. And the reality of relationship is interaction. To live in love as persons and with persons, we must interact as persons with other persons. This is the life of the Trinity: what gives identity to the Three Persons as Father, Son and Spirit, what makes them distinct as Persons yet one in nature as God, is the mystery of relationship. The mystery of their interaction with One Another.

And this is what gives us our identity as made in the image of God, made in the image of the Three Persons. We were created and re-created by grace to be persons establishing our identity through our relationships with God and other persons. That is, through our interactions as free, self-orienting intellectual beings whose self-orientation has been swallowed up in surrender to the all-absorbing magnetism of the Attraction of God.

When all are drawn by love into the eternal celebration of Life undistinguishable from Love, we will all be one in Christ, dancing at the “wedding banquet of the Lamb.”

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