Greetings my friends.
This is Mark Gladman,
Also known as Brother Frederick James,
Your friendly neighbourhood monk in docks.
Welcome back to day 13 of our series,
God is.
As we begin today.
I invite you just to close your eyes if it's safe to do so.
To take a nice deep breath in.
And out.
And feel yourself settling fully into this moment.
Bringing your body to stillness.
Feeling only the rising.
And falling of your breath.
And the beating of your heart.
Bringing your mind fully into this moment.
Stilling yourself to hear and receive the voice of the Spirit today.
Opening yourself.
To receive the voice and the words of the Spirit.
Bringing it and allowing it to settle into the good soil of your heart.
Sometimes I wonder.
If there is a nagging question.
That sits underneath our spiritual lives.
And it's not so much the question we think it is,
Which is usually,
Is there a God?
I think the question for a lot of us is actually,
There is a God,
But.
.
.
Does God really?
Want me.
Now we may not say it that way.
But we ask ourselves whether we've prayed enough,
Or sinned too much,
Or believed correctly,
Or if we've really repented or done enough good.
Sometimes we covertly ask ourselves whether.
God could possibly still love someone like me.
And in doing so.
.
.
Our spiritual lives become a long attempt to answer one question.
And that question is,
Am I?
I accept it.
And the thing that Jesus came to tell us.
Ease.
Yes.
That's it.
Just yes.
Not if,
Not but,
Not maybe,
But just.
Now there's a very old instinct within Christianity that says something has gone terribly wrong between humanity and God.
Now that instinct is right,
Look around.
We know something's broken and fractured.
We hurt one another,
We exploit,
We deceive,
We become violent.
We turn love into possession.
We turn difference into threat.
We turn fear into hatred.
And we carry wounds that we didn't choose and we create wounds that others don't deserve.
Suffice to say,
It's obvious there's something.
.
.
Broken.
But unfortunately.
Christianity is sometimes told the story in a way that's often interpreted.
As though the primary problem is that God has become angry.
With humanity.
Humanity's sin?
God rejected us,
Humanity fell,
God withdraws.
And as a result,
The salvation story becomes a story of how God can be persuaded to take us back.
But what if we have the story backwards?
What if the great movement of salvation is not God changing God's mind about humanity?
What if it's humanity waking up to the fact that God has never stopped saying,
Yes.
Look at Jesus.
Jesus doesn't seem to wait until people.
.
.
Have sorted themselves out.
He calls fishermen and tax collectors and sinners.
He eats with outsiders and touches the unclean.
He forgives enemies,
Restores failures.
He finds people.
Simply where they are.
The invitation precedes the transformation.
The trajectory is always come.
Den.
Fallout.
The welcome comes before anything.
The yes always comes before the no.
Becoming.
Imagine someone who's spent years convinced that they're unloved.
And then someone comes along and says,
You are loved.
But they don't believe it.
So they begin to look for evidence.
They test the relationship.
They expect rejection.
They interpret kindness for manipulation.
They assume the welcome won't last,
And eventually.
.
.
Something changes.
They begin to trust.
Now,
Nothing about the other person's love has necessarily changed.
So what has?
What's changed is the person's capacity to receive.
That love.
And I wonder,
Maybe salvation is something like that.
Not God moving from no to yes,
But us.
Slowly discovering that God's yes was there.
Before I knew how to hear it.
And this is where I find the question of original sin fascinating.
Now,
Whether you hold.
.
.
To the idea.
Of original sin or not.
And I'll be honest and say,
I'm one of those who don't.
I hold to another idea,
And I'd be happy to share that at another time if you're interested.
But there are obvious things that we can see in the human condition.
We are extraordinarily good at believing there's something wrong with us.
We inherit shame,
We learn fear,
We learn comparison,
We learn that worth has to be earned,
We learn that love's conditional.
And that because of this,
There are people who belong and people who don't.
And we learn how to hide.
But one way of understanding the human predicament is this.
We have forgotten that we are loved.
It's not about broken rules or that we made mistakes.
Rather,
Somewhere deep within us is this fundamental suspicion.
Maybe I'm not enough.
Maybe God doesn't really want me.
Maybe there isn't enough grace to go around.
And maybe the gospel is God's persistent answer.
Yes!
Yes,
You are.
Yes I do.
Yes,
There is.
Think about the parable of the prodigal son.
When you read the parable,
We often think of the youngest son as the lost one in Jesus' story.
He's the one who leaves and squanders everything.
And comes to his senses and then comes back.
But if you read the parable carefully,
You'll see that the older brother is lost too.
He never leaves the property.
He obeys,
Works,
Does everything right,
And yet he doesn't know the Father's heart.
The older brother's keeping score.
Comparing,
Doing the math.
He's angry that grace has been given to someone that didn't earn it.
And that should be a part of the story that hits us as being deeply tragic.
One son,
The younger one is lost through rebellion.
But the other,
The older son,
Is lost through merit.
But both of these boys.
Need to discover the same thing.
You don't have to earn your place in God's economy.
God's yes doesn't mean anything goes.
Again,
Grace doesn't mean that nothing matters.
God's yes is not an approval of everything we do.
Love can say no.
Love can confront.
Love can challenge.
Love can demand change.
But there's an important difference between you are unacceptable until you change,
And you are loved and because you are loved.
You can become free enough to change.
The former begins with rejection.
Where the latter begins with belonging and Jesus seems to begin.
With belonging every single day.
So maybe today.
.
.
Try and experiment.
Take one of the things that you carry shame about,
And as you hold that thing,
Sit with this question.
What if God already sees all of this and still says yes to me?
Not yes to the behaviour,
But yes to you.
Your existence.
Your possibility.
You're becoming.
Yes to the person that you are still.
Becoming.
And imagine what might happen if we genuinely.
.
.
Believed this.
I think for many of us it would mean becoming less defensive.
Less concerned with proving ourselves,
Less threatened by other people's successes,
Less judgment,
Less being afraid of failure,
Less being desperate to be right all the time.
Maybe we'd find ourselves being able to admit that we're wrong.
Being able to apologize,
Being able to change.
Being able to finally stop spending so much energy constructing a version of ourselves.
The one that we think deserves.
Love,
Because if love is already given,
What do we have left to prove?
And let me say again,
Grace doesn't make us passive.
Quite the opposite.
If I believe I have to earn God's love,
Spirituality becomes exhausting.
But if I believe I'm already loved.
.
.
My spirituality becomes responsive because I'm responding.
To that.
I don't obey so that God will love me.
Rather,
It's that I learn to love because I've encountered love.
I don't forgive so that I can earn grace.
I forgive because grace has begun to reshape me and who I am.
I don't serve so that God will notice me,
Instead I serve because I've begun to see other people differently.
See how the direction changes there?
Grace comes first,
And then comes the response.
And that friend?
Is salvation.
Not God finally deciding,
Alright,
I'll let you back in.
But God continually saying,
Come.
Come home.
Come alive.
Come out of hiding,
Come out of shame.
Come out of the endless merit economy.
Come out of the exhausting attempts to prove that you deserve to exist.
Come.
Yes,
You are loved.
You are wanted.
You are held.
You are not an accident God has reluctantly agreed to tolerate.
And the journey of the spiritual life is learning to live.
From that yes.
God may not need to change their mind about you.
But maybe you need to discover.
That God has already made up.
Their mind.
About you.
And what is that?
Yes.
You are loved.
Yes,
You belong.
Yes.
You are mine.
And may grace,
Peace and love hold us and envelop us as we come face to face and believe this truth today and always.
Until tomorrow,
Friends.
My God's love.
Be with you.
Bye for now.
