The Visitor

Genesis 50:22-26

We began our journey through Genesis with the privilege of witnessing God making a place for humanity, with direction to fill the earth and exercise stewardship on earth as God’s representatives. Even the ‘punishment’ ensuing from the Babel episode, then, was a fulfilling of what God had in mind for humanity anyway. Eden was lost primarily in the heart, manifesting itself in a restlessness nothing in this world can fully relieve.

God took that restless human and turned the restlessness into a quest for a further place, a promise of land to settle, and descendants who would be as the stars in the sky. But that energy was never entirely focused on God’s direction and manifested itself in struggles fueled by concerns about pecking order.

But God just kept the promise going in ways our human judgement would never predict, or ever approve of, preferring the younger one to bear the promise, and then arranging through strange dreams to send a people-in-the-making off to another land with its own god-king, as a staging ground for its birth.

Genesis gave birth to a world, but so far Scripture has described only a gestation period for a people meant to bear the blessing of creation to the world. Now the book concludes with talk of God coming to visit his people. God’s Spirit visited the watery chaos and brought life. God will bring a new creation out of the womb of Egypt, through the waters of the Nile and the Red Sea.

The books of the Hebrew Bible are filled, as they progress, with talk of one who will yet visit Israel to take the people to a new level of life. God, as usual, did the unusual, and brought not an 'older brother' type of leader, but one despised.

It is my experience (as pastor of three different charges, interim-moderator over extended periods of numerous churches, Presbytery visitor numbers of times, member and convener of various special teams and committees, intern in a large congregation, and growing up in another, all of this over a period of four decades - well ok more counting the growing up) that the community of faith persists in acting and expecting as the people of God always seem to have acted and expected: that our faith-life should follow familiar patterns and worldly paradigms. But we’re in good company. It seems no people of God ever has got it. The disciples spent three years with Jesus and didn’t get it. So I’m not saying this to be ‘negative’ or to get us to beat ourselves up. It just points out all the more that we need to welcome God’s transforming power even as he uses us as instruments of transformation (ever really think about that word: trans-formation?)

Scripture ends as Genesis ends, with an invitation for God to visit. God has shown repeatedly that the one who fulfills his purpose will not be as we expect him/her to be.

My greatest dream for our church is that we would be happy, excited, delirious with joy to welcome in advance that over which we have absolutely no control, no say, no power except to say, raising our hands and eyes and lifting our hearts in utter expectancy, “Come, Lord Jesus.”

Prayer:
Come, Lord Jesus.

The foregoing will be the last Open Journal posting as we have known Open Journal. Open Journal will continue on an occasional basis. For my personal reading I’m going to keep on reading through the whole Bible. I will make occasional posts reflecting on fairly broad swaths of that reading (but be assured I won't copy all that Biblical text into the emailed version!)

Meanwhile, I have in formation a new internet offering that will be intended primarily as a basic online course on the Bible. You may be able to help me decide just what kind of format that will follow: Organized according to topic? Bible book at a time? I don’t know yet. Also my great hope would be to somehow draw totally unchurched people to this. One of the flaws of Open Journal in this regard is it has at times been rather academic, but then I have simply billed it as a sharing of personal study and devotional time and nothing more. I will also need to more disciplined in the timing of offerings of the thing. This new thing I would love to be a beginning of an inquiry that might lead to Alpha, or a temporary small group (on the ‘try before you buy’ principle), or even a sampling of worship. So that means also some strategy is needed for getting it ‘out there’ – to friends or family you may think of, maybe we could even put some enticing little ads in the paper.

Anyway, before ‘launch’ (aiming for Easter), I want to be very clear on the purpose, immediate goals, and ‘how’ of this. So I what I have in mind is to start it on a test-group basis with you, my Open Journal friends, and then reshape it or even rethink it with the help of your feedback, if you are willing.

So I’ll be taking a break from this form of ministry for a little season as I seek to grow this idea, but watch for the occasional posting on Exodus and beyond, with notification of same in your inbox.

Jim