Breaking Open

Your work bag or brief case is over-stuffed.  You stand on it, stretch it, pull it to try to get it closed.  Your smart phone calendar is colored in.  There is not white space in which to breathe.  Does your life ever feel to small to fit in all of your expectations and the expectations of others? 

Prayer

Dear Jesus, what if we are the ones trying to shrink You and the life You invite us to down to a manageable size?  What if our hopes and dreams of life are much smaller than Yours?  Free us, break us open wide to enter a bigger life of love and grace than we can imagine right now.  Give us courage, hope, and faith that You want to use us to expand Your Kingdom of love in this world of darkness.  Amen.

Matthew 12

Comments

I enjoyed shrinky dinks as a kid.  My friends and I would color on the plastic animals, people, and objects, then place them in the little oven to shrivel and shrink down into hard plastic art.  Sometimes I wonder how often we try to shrink God down to our size.  God is so big, so unmanageable for us, and, frankly, God's ways can overwhelm us.  "Love your enemies...really?  Forgive...really?  Sell all we have and give to the poor...really?" 

It's much easier for those of us who try to follow Jesus to try to shrink his teachings and way of life down to our size.  One of the ways we do that is to distill his mind-blowing, heart-changing, disquieting, and freeing stories into a list of things for us to do or not do.  While this process is important for us in order to "flesh out" how Jesus' teachings transform how we live, it is vital that we don't get so wrapped up in our "answers" that we stop listening to Jesus, stop allowing his teaching to challenge us.  When we start defending our small ideas of Jesus' Kingdom against Jesus, that's when we find ourselves in trouble. 

Matthew 12 shows Jesus to be like a crazed, sledge-hammer wielding God-man in a china shop, happily wrecking the misunderstandings and rituals the religious leaders came up with to try to shrink God's ways down to a manageable size.  Unfortunately, the religious leaders, in their attempts to faithfully live according to God's laws, made many rules for "not working" on the Sabbath out to be more important than healing others or receiving God's provision to satisfy hunger.  The Sabbath, intended to be a time of rest, renewal, and being in worship with God, became a huge, burdensome, fretful series of rules.  Jesus broke those open as he broke open the heads of grain to eat on the Sabbath and as he extended his hand to heal the man with the withered hand.  Several times in this passage he said, "I tell you, something greater than the ______ is here." 

Anytime our vision of God's way of life (the Kingdom) gets to be too small, Jesus has a way of breaking our vision open and expanding it!  Though that process can be a disturbing one, calling us to acknowledge where we are wrong and turn back toward Jesus' ways, it is life-giving!  It is expanding.  For love, mercy, and healing are greater than rules, laws and regulations, thank God!  And we will know when we are following Jesus when we see the fruits of love, mercy, and healing. 

Life Questions

1.  Who is it that we don't want to be around, that we just don't like?  This person might be our opportunity to see how big God's love is.  How can we be at peace with them or reach out to them?

2.  Where are we focusing on the "minor" issues of life while neglecting love, mercy, and healing?

Prayer

Gracious God, thank You for not allowing us to get too comfortable, for breaking us open when our love needs to grow bigger like Yours.  Thank You for being slow to anger and rich in mercy.   Give us the power of the Holy Spirit to love, heal, and forgive so that the world may know You are the Lord of heaven and earth and everything in them.

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