27th Sunday Harmony as Children of God

Let's return to an old theme but an essential one: Salvation. The freedom to choose to do good for others is Salvation. Salvation means the freedom to be the good people that God created us to be. Salvation means the freedom to become and experience the person we are to be.

Genesis, the first book of the Bible, tells of God creating harmony out of chaos. God creates humanity to work to help build that harmony in the world. We do this by being in harmony with God and with others and with the world around us. As a sign of this harmony God creates the two, male and female. They signify not just marriage, but the value and importance of relationships; the value and importance of community.

God, we must believe as Christians, is relational. God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, a harmony of three, a community. Into God’s image we are created; as relational beings.  We are created to relate to God, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In fact it goes deeper that just a “friendship”. The reality is are God’s children, all of us are a child of God. All of us are deeply connected to one another at our core.

At the core of every relationship is the acceptance that each person is a child of God. When we keep that in mind about ourselves, about the person in front of us then we can work on the rest.

One of the great issues we have in our world, and it is not a new one, but one that has plagued humanity from the beginning is that we do forget this. We forget the divinity within each.  We objectify others and we permit others to objectify us. This sin lets us demean others; thus we have had slavery, racism, bigotry, pornography sexism, and many other isms. We have divorced people from their humanity, from their reality as a child of God. Chaos and death ensue.

Jesus speaks of this. He is not just talking about divorce between husband and wife. Btw, the style of divorce was too easy back then. A husband could simply write a statement to rid himself of the wife. No rights, nothing.  

At the heart of this message is that we do not forget the importance and the need of the other.  Jesus calls us to work on our relationships. He reveals and reminds us that we are all God’s children, in that tender but very impactful follow up about Children coming to God.

It is too easy to fall into the chaos and forget the harmony of God; that God empowers to be in harmony. It is too easy to let go of believing in goodness, in others, the world and ourselves. This is the original sin that we continue to commit, over and over and over. 

Jesus’ power was because he was The Son of God. He healed, he forgave, he loved because he had that love of God within at his core. He gave of himself empowered as the Son of God. He rose from the dead as the Son of God. He never let go of his identity as the Son of God.  This power, this freedom is ours too. We must never ever let it go.

Eucharist signifies this.  As a child of God, we can love, we can heal, we can forgive and be forgiven. We can give of ourselves for the good of others. We can arise when we fall down.  We can create, with God, a better harmony.

With God we can transform this world.