God at Work in the World and in our Lives

In today's Gospel, John 14: 7-14, Philip asks Jesus to show them the Father. Jesus replies:  "Have I been with you for so long a time and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father....The Father who dwells in me is doing his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else, believe because of the works themselves....Whoever believes in me will do the works that I do, and will do greater ones than these...."

Jesus asks you and me the same question: "Dorothy Ann ((insert your name), have I been with you for so long a time and you still do not know me?"  He also reminds us that the "Father who dwells in me is doing his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else, believe because of the works themselves."

Look around and see the works that the Trinity is doing through our physicians and nurses and other healthcare workers. Look around and see the work God is doing through gardeners and farmers. Look around and see the work God is doing through parents and grandparents caring for their little ones who are dependent upon them. Look around and see the work God is doing through teachers, counselors and mentors and all those in human services, in retail professions and any career by which our lives are enhanced!  Look around and see the Trinity at work caring for all of creation: the birds that fly in our sky, the fish that live in our oceans and seas and rivers, the animals that roam the earth. "Have I been with you for so long a time and you still do not know me?"

God's Work within Me

Today’s readings, Ecclesiastes 3: 1-11 and Luke 9: 18-22, are breathtaking. Verses 11-12 of Ecclesiastes reads:  

“What advantage has the workers from their toil? I have considered the task
 that God has appointed for them to be busied about. God has made everything 
appropriateto its time, and has put the timeless into their hearts, without humans
 ever discovering, from beginning to end, the work which God has done”
 (inclusive language used by me). 

Notice the incredible humility of God in hiding from us the awesome work that the Holy One does in each one of us and in our lives every single day, from the beginning to the end of our lives!  Note, also, that it is God who “has appointed” for you and me what we are “to be busied about” while here on earth a short while.  And not only that, our Creator “has made everything [in your life and mine] appropriate to its time”.  Wow! How can I mistake that I belong to the Lord, that I have been created for His purposes? Am I willing to surrender the right to myself to God to be used for His eternal purposes in whatever way and wherever He wills?

The author of Ecclesiastes reminds us that God “has put the timeless into our hearts.”  The Gospel enlightens us concerning this in the Son of God taking on human flesh.  Jesus tells the apostles that he will “suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised.”   God, in human form, will be killed and rise. Death will have no power over Him. With and in Jesus, we, too, will not be destroyed by death, any death. The Resurrection—the timeless--is in us, just as it was in Jesus. Yes, we are made in God’s likeness, in the likeness of Christ.

That means, that, through the power of Christ in me, I can resurrect from sin into holiness, from deceit into truth, from weakness into strength, from stupidity into wisdom and on and on to the point of rising from my physical death into resurrected life in eternity when my life on this earth comes to an end!

Do I believe this? Do I live life with this knowledge in the forefront of my mine? Do my human behaviors radiate both the divine and the human transformed by grace?  Do I, in truth, believe that resurrection is applicable, as well, to everything, to every one of my experiences to the very end of my life when I, too, leave this physical body?