Screw duality

Sometimes I wish life weren’t so messy

Sometimes I dream for the blessed anesthesia of black and white

Yes and No

Saved or Lost

Right or Wrong

Sometimes it was all nice, and neat

But instead it is messy

Jesus entered fully into the untidiness of this world

He embraced it all

The beauty and the ugliness

The fear

The legalism

The uncertainty

He entered into the ambiguity and pain

Because that was the only way he could really

Be in the world

See the world

Touch the world

And so he was born in poverty

went down into the muddy water of the Jordan, to receive a sinners baptism

he wandered in the desert

he ate with sinners

he was praised and reviled

he was beaten and scorned

and killed, unjustly

and he calls us, his followers

to follow, follow, follow

We cannot hide behind the rules

We cannot hang on desperately to certitude

We cannot focus on what is rigid and settled

And refuse to enter the uncertainty

For if we do

We can no longer see, people

We can no longer feel, the pain

The confusion

The fear

Instead we will walk around muttering

“the scriptures say, the scriptures say,”

And lose our capacity for empathy

We will not see the young woman, pregnant from a rape

We will not see her life in tatters

Her anger, her fear, her anguish

We will only see our belief that abortion is wrong

And lose our capacity to see her

This living breathing person, who is in so much pain

We will not see the person who happens to be LGBTQI

We will grab hold of a few lines of a letter

Written over a thousand years ago

And not see the value, the beauty of that person

Who is so precious in God’s sight

Jesus always saw the person first

The one standing in front of him

He saw them completely, fully

And with the eyes of love

And for that person, he broke the law

He went against scripture (how many times was he accused of violating scripture!)

And to that person he offered acceptance, and forgiveness, and love

And more than once he said

“you have heard it said, but I say”

As he raised the bar

And called us to higher levels of empathy

And compassion

And generosity

And love

We cannot allow the comfort of certainty

To blind us

To close our minds, and hearts and souls

That is not the Jesus way

The Jesus way is to lead with the heart

The Jesus way is to enter into the mess

And always, always

See the person in front of us

As a child of God…

And love