Andy Cornett | living in the new creation

endlessly captivated by the person and work of the resurrected Jesus

God of the small step

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Last Sunday night I sat around with some friends in our small group and we swapped stories of what God has been teaching us these last few weeks or particular ways we’ve seen his hand in our lives. It was beautiful. But one thing that kept coming up again and again is how our own Plan B or Plan C in something seems to have been God’s “Plan A” all along.

It put me in mind of a quote shared with me by an elderly woman in our church who sings in the choir and likes to read theology books and biblical commentaries in her free time. Every now and then we’ll talk about what she’s reading, and a while ago she brought me this clipping from a commentary on Romans 15:14-24. I keep this highlighted page (along with a small collection of others) pinned to a board by my desk.

Did Paul ever get to Spain? There is no evidence whatever that he did. But his desire to do so, and the fact that he wrote Romans as part of the preparation for such a trip, points out an extremely important lesson for us all. Perhaps God sometimes allows us to dream dreams of what he wants us to do, not necessarily so that we can fulfill all of them – that might just make us proud and self-satisfied – but so that we will take the first steps towards fulfilling them.

And perhaps those first steps (as they appear to us) are in fact the key things that God actually wants us to do. Paul may not have got to Spain. That didn’t matter; the gospel got there fairly soon anyway. What mattered then, and has mattered enormously in the whole history of the church, is that, as a part of his plan to go to Spain, he wrote Romans. We should never underestimate what God will do through things which we see as small steps to a larger end.

[I’m not certain of the source; I think it is NT Wright in his Romans for Everyone.] When I first read that, it was a flash of light to my mind. It perfectly captured how I think God so often works in our lives – “never underestimate what God will do through things which we see as small steps to a larger end.” It is one of the myriad of ways in which God seems to delight in surprising us, sometimes playfully, sometimes mischievously or infuriatingly, by doing what he intends regardless (or in spite of) what we intend. Call it part of the mustard seed miracle of the kingdom of God. We plant, God grows. While we are sleeping it off or planning some other grand project, God quietly works. Sometimes the seeds sprout in the unlikeliest of places. Sometimes the sidelined plants with minimal attention bear the most fruit.

What I think of my work isn’t nearly as important as what God is doing in it or through it or behind it. Yes, I have the confidence that I can give my all to it, that none of it is a waste, none in vain. But at the end of the day, I don’t carry the load. I can’t see far down the road or even around the next bend. All I have is light enough for the next step (and it’s no small truth that his word illumines both the path and my feet). May God give me – may God give all of us – eyes to see.

Dream big dreams. But do not forget the God of the small step.

on truth and kings

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And we who now stand at the foot of the cross have to face the most searching questions because we, too, find it desperately uncomfortable to look at the face of God’s Image, the man, the king, and see there the perfect likeness of the maker and redeemer of ht world. We are so stuck in the system so Caesar – his swords, his coins, his gambling soldiers – that we too have a hard time recognizing truth of any kind, let alone speaking up for it We are so anxious to protect the philosophies upon which our modern works is built that we will do anything to declare that we have no king but Caesar, that when push comes to shove religion is just a private thing which musn’t affect the public sphere, even when Jesus is reminding Caesar’s representative that he only has power because god has given it to him. And perhaps that is one of the reasons why the church is in such pain at the moment, caught between ‘what is truth?’ on the one hand and ‘no king but Caesar’ on the other.

But the good news – and this is after Good Friday – is that this story, for all its searing challenge, remains the story of the scriptures and the power of God, and therefore of the glory and love of God … and if it is true that that love must transform our whole lives, our public life, our grasp of truth on the one hand, our dealings with Caesar on the other, this can only be if we are first grasped and transformed by that same love at the very deepest level of our personalities.

Tom Wright, from “Good Friday,” in The Scriptures, the Cross, and the Power of God: Reflections for Holy Week. 64-66.

on the cross of Holy Week

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These are some of my favorite words on the cross of Holy Week. From Tom Wright on Matthew 23:34-46, “the Law and the Lord:”

Not a jot or tittle, said Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, will pass from Torah until all is accomplished; and as he articulates the greatest commandment in Torah, so he is on the way to its ultimate accomplishment. The vertical commandment, that we should love God with all our heart, is joined together with the horizontal commandment, that we should love our neighbours as ourselves; and Jesus combines the vertical and the horizontal into the greatest symbol of triumphant love the world has ever seen, a symbol at once clear and obvious and yet fathomless in its profundity, all the more so for its having been up to that point a symbol of the triumph of Caesar, his coins and his empire. The cross stretches up to God in loving obedience, and out to the world in loving service, and all because it is not only David’s son but David’s Lord who hangs there, so that the real stretching out is downwards, from God to us.

from “Palm Sunday Matins,” in The Scriptures, the Cross, and the Power of God: Reflections for Holy Week.

on Holy Week

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Much of Holy Week consists, or ought to consist, in our going back in mind and heart to those first and unique events. In our day particularly we need to be reminded that what happened then was not just one example of a general pattern, but the central and unrepeatable events which form the hinge upon which the great door of cosmic history has swung open at last. That is perhaps the hardest thing for our generation to believe, and we have to rub our noses in it over and over again. But when we do that – when we grasp the unique and decisive and one-off nature of those events, from Palm Sunday to Good Friday and on to Easter itself – we discover again, and it’s bound to be almost as deeply disturbing, that there are similar lessons always to be learn in the church and in our own hearts and lives. When Jesus comes to his church, and to this people, today, he comes with the same message, and with the same warning. He comes seeking fruit, the fruit which belongs to his father. And those of us who decide to make the journey from Palm Sunday to Good Friday can never therefore do so in anything other than fear and trembling. We are, says St Paul, the temples of the living God. God forbid that when the Lord whom we seek comes once again to his temple he should find it necessary once more to come with stories of judgment. May we so hear the word, so live within the story that we find ourselves in six days’ time at the food of the cross, and in eight days at the empty tomb, and find ourselves saying, “this was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.”

– Tom Wright, “Palm Sunday Matins,” in The Scriptures, the Cross, and the Power of God: Reflections for Holy Week. This book (meditations and addresses from Matthew 21-23, 28 and John 13, 19, 20) has been my holy week companion for several years now. I expect to do the daily readings again this week and post a choice quote or two here or on facebook.

grace and peace – Andy

on that e-word again

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Let me share a passage I read earlier this summer that really caught my attention:

‘Day of YHWH’, ‘Kingdom of God’, victory over evil and pagan rulers, rescue of Israel, end of exile, the coming of the Messiah, the new Exodus, and the return of YHWH himself; and, in and through all of this, the resurrection of the dead. This is the combination of themes which characterizes the first-century Jewish expectation of the future. And, as I noted earlier, this is to be God’s future in the sense that in this way God will come, so to speak, into his own. He will become king in a new way: ‘On that day,’ as the prophet puts it, ‘YHWH will be king of all the earth, he will be one and his name one,’ [Zech. 14:9] presumably in a way which somehow, strangely, is not yet true. How this was to happen, what it would mean in practice, remained for many of mystery, a puzzle. That this eschatology would come to pass was a fundamental first-century Jewish belief, the inescapable corollary of monotheism and election. That all this has now come to pass in Jesus the Messiah is a central plank in the theology of St. Paul …

Wright then moves through the Day of YHWH, parousia, judgment, and the renewal of all creation through the Messiah …

“Thus the picture is complete: Paul has reimagined every single aspect of first-century Jewish eschatology around Jesus the Messiah and his death and resurrection.”

– N. T. Wright, Paul: In Fresh Perspective. p.135, 145