There is so much life for us to enter into now that Christ is born. Our baptism into the life of Christ means that we inhabit a world of new beginnings. God is always seeking to communicate with us. Discernment is an essential part of hearing and receiving God’s words. The voice of God is full of power, but God does not force God’s self upon us. Rather we have to decide how we use the freedom God offers us. The triune God, who created order from chaos in the beginning, still desires to form us, to overturn our understanding of freedom and order.
We cannot escape God’s knowledge of us. This is cause for both thanksgiving and awesome trembling. It’s also an invitation to seek to know God as intimately as we are known by God. The basis of knowing God is love. As we grow in our ability to love God, our capacity for learning how to love others also expands. The Holy Spirit helps us recognize the communal nature of God’s love and call. How we live our lives affects those around us. The degree to which we seek to know and love one another is the degree to which we will understand this truth. The chaos in our world seems to call forth self-appointed prophets proclaiming doomsday and telling us “the time is at hand.” The specific prophecies might be wrong, but it is true that the time’s at hand. It is always the time to turn and freely choose new life in Christ.
Enuma Okoro, of Durham, North Carolina, is the author of Reluctant Pilgrim and co-author of Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals.
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Is That It?
Isaiah 61:10-62:3, Psalm 148;
Galatians 4:4-7; Luke 2:22-40
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