Imagining Abundance (1 of 5)

Public theologian and activist, Shane Claiborne, says, “It’s really, really difficult to understand that there is a God who is good when everything around us is so ugly and broken. And it’s hard to understand that there is hope and life after death when so many people are going, ‘Well, is there life before death?’ and ‘If God really loves me, then why are my kids starving to death?’ And the incredible thing I think a lot of us have felt is, as we throw those questions up at God and we say, ‘God, why don’t you do something about the masses of our population that are living in poverty?’ we felt God say, ‘I did do something. I made you.’

“And for some strange reason, God’s plan for salvation for the world is obviously Jesus. But the wild thing is that…maybe one of the greatest mysteries of our faith is that as Jesus left the disciples, he said, ‘And now I’m am going to the Father, but you will do the same things I’ve been doing, and you’ll do even greater things that these because I’m leaving you the Spirit.’ That we are to continue to be God’s mystical body…that God has no other [tangible] hands but ours, no other feet but ours. And the strange thing is that our God does not want to change the world without us.”

Today’s reading is from the Gospel of John chapter 14 verses 12 through 17 from the Common English Bible:

I assure you that whoever believes in me will do the works that I do. They will do even greater works than these because I am going to the Father. I will do whatever you ask for in my name, so that the Father can be glorified in the Son. When you ask me for anything in my name, I will do it.

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments. I will ask the Father, and he will send another Companion,[a] who will be with you forever. This Companion is the Spirit of Truth, whom the world can’t receive because it neither sees him nor recognizes him. You know him, because he lives with you and will be with you.

For the Word of God in scripture, for the Word of God among us, and for the Word of God within us we say…Thanks be to God.