Isaiah 2:1-5; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24: 37-44
…the flood came and carried them all away. That verse from today’s Gospel strikes me because it resembles a dream told me by a friend. She dreamt that a tsunami sept everything away , and that powerful sweep was the coming of Christ. The image is as frightening as freeing, as awesome as unexpected, a surge of adrenalin. There’s no going back–but why would you want to?
Do you remember after 9/11 how people were so vigilant, responsive to their neighbors, more thoughtful, perhaps even more grateful for everything we usually took for granted? Also a little more paranoid, our collective complacency upset, our fragility exposed, our comforting denials shaken loose. And I also remember people wanting everything to return to “normal.”
How often in the grief counseling we can buy by the yard, are we urged to “move on” and “get back to normal”? Our tragedy, I believe, is that we think there are no losses that should change our lives forever.
Don’t we resist that emptiness, the dissatisfaction that makes us transcend ourselves and yearn to be more? But we are so incomplete without that dissatisfaction.
When I’m thrown out of my orbit, is something necessarily wrong? Why can’t I see that remaining in my “orbit” is just going in circles, chasing my own tail?
When Christ comes into my life, he doesn’t affirm my complacency, fluff up the pillows and insulate me in a downy quilt. He doesn’t offer eternal sleep but eternal life.
He offers a disruptive vitality as can only be generated by the fear of the Lord, by my eyes seeing clearly what I habitually do, till I feel dissatisfied enough to change at any cost.
He doesn’t come once but again and again. Do I just head for cover?
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