Thursday, March 29, 2012

Today’s text

Philippians 2:5-8

Make your own the mind of Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, did not count equality with God something to be grasped. But he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, becoming as human beings are; and being in every way like a human being, he was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross.

Reflection

There is little around of the mind of Christ today, or do I fail to know how to look and see?

The mind of Christ is given-ness to the love of the God who is Love, whose will is life and whose joy is to see human souls breathe deeply, drawing in the good air of Earth that they may come fully alive to all they are and all that is.

Standing in the church garden, I stretch my arms, reaching for the sky. I feel the goodness of cramped muscles lengthening, unbinding from the clench of winter. I stretch and release the tension as my hands reach high, and suddenly mere exercise becomes prayer.

An endless blue sky is scattered with thin cirrus clouds, feathers of heaven, high, very high. A jet plies its highway across the blue, across the country, heading somewhere east; the clouds are so high I see the jet passing far beneath them.

And I laugh in awareness that I am … that I am alive … and that in this moment I am happy to see the blue and the jet and feel aging muscles rejoice as I reach for heaven’s gate, straining to touch the face of He who is the Source of this moment.

I feel the truth that my life and breath are a mysterious gift, and this moment, too, is gift, as I feel the goodness of the One who made me, breathed life into me and gave me a soul to feel this moment.

What has any of this to do with the mind of Christ, the mind of my brother Jesus, who looked at the trees and flowers, the skies and waters of the good Earth and felt much as I do now?

Perhaps only that in this moment love flows freely from my heart, as from his, love for all that is on this Earth, for all that exists across the wonder of a universe I can’t begin to comprehend.

Love flows from the goodness of straining muscles and the joy of blue skies and the smallness of speeding jets dwarfed by feathery cirrus on this gentle March day.

Love flows from awareness of the gift and wonder of life--from the knowledge that the Father of Life is love, a Love whose goal is to awaken the Love he is in us that we, too, may give ourselves for others.

Just like our brother, Jesus, who is the face of the Love who fashioned blue skies and March mornings and loves us all … to the end … and beyond.

Pr. David L. Miller