Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Today's text

Matthew 3:1-2, 5-6

In due course John the Baptist appeared; he proclaimed this message in the desert of Judea, “Repent, for the kingdom of Heaven is close at hand.” …Then Jerusalem and all Judea and the whole Jordan district made their way to him, and as they were baptized by him in the river Jordan they confessed their sins.

Prayer

What moves human souls to surrender certain routine to seek an unknown in the unknown? They go to find John, a desert wild man whom most would avoid should they see him on the street. What did they expect to find? And why should we listen, Great Mystery?

They went and confessed their sins. I do not carry a burden of guilt, but all too well I know the incompletion of my humanity. Fashioned to be so much more--more love, more grace, more beauty, more generosity, I am less of these and more of fear, anxiety and self-absorption.

But souls do not go into the desert to confess unless there is hope of something more. Routine binds us, unless the heart flickers with the warm thought that, maybe, there is secret substance that can lift me above sin and incompletion; maybe I can know more than fear and inconsequence; maybe I can enter that mystery that niggles restless at depths of heart unreachable by mere mind.

In the heart lies awareness of a kind of life, a grace and beauty beyond that which we have seen and lived and been. It is that which moves us to your messenger to repent, to confess we have been so much less, crying, “Make us more. Make us the more you intend. Fill us with the More you are, for you made us in your image to bear the substance of your life.”

So we come. We come from the comfortable knowns of routine that we know can never fill our hearts with delight. We come to the unknown and unknowability of your mystery confessing our restless incompletion. We come in hope.

So come, Lord Jesus. Grace our lives with that love that lifts us above incompletion.

Pr. David L. Miller