Grace and peace to you
True or false: “All people are etched equally with the glorious image of God.”
This really is the most foundational of all faith questions and precisely the reason why the Bible editors answer the question on the first page in the affirmative: “True! It’s true!” Up until that biblical time the answer was always: “No! It’s false!”
To declare “it is true” is to make many declarations all at the same time: All people are equal in worth. The worth of a human person is not to be attached to anything (anything means anything) other than the mere fact of them being alive. God is equally shared, present and connected to all. God values all equally. This is what makes the story of humanity told through the scriptures so radical. The scriptures declare up front no one is less than or more than any other. Therefore students of scripture should know better than anyone else that they are no better than anyone else.
However, the Bible is not just a book of statements answering faith questions, it is a travel log of a people’s journey to live into their statements of faith, ever seeking deeper understanding and integrity. So the story is a long one because it doesn’t skip out the numerous times when the people forget their first foundational principles. The story doesn’t leave out the many times the people declare in word and deed and prayer that others, because of their nationality or beliefs, should be smote to smithereens. Vengeance and violence stain the pages, all in God’s name, with all breaking the foundational principle. This is Divine defamation.
The scriptures also tell of the bizarre hypocrisy of a people believing they are better and more deserving than others, precisely because they believe in a God who is the loving Creator of all. Let that sink in! In three-year-old speak: “Our God is love which makes our God better than your God and our God will beat yours up to prove it.”
Thankfully there was always a remnant on the journey – in both Hebrew and Christian testaments – who bravely held true to the foundational principle and living out the truth of God’s image etched in all, despite the noise and threats directed at them. Jesus stands in this tradition and invites us to do the same.
The gift of the scriptures’ honest telling of a people’s long wayward journey is that we are able to see our own journey in theirs, and get honest about our walk. As in the scriptures, Church history is filled with first principles being quoted and then denied in action. We witnessed this two weeks ago when the United Methodist Church in the US voted to remain a body that denies the dignity of LGBQTI people. Effectively, like our own Methodist Church of Southern Africa’s baptising bigotry. The sin has never been two people of the same-sex loving and respecting and intimately caring for each other. Rather, the sin has always been the denial and exclusion and punishment of such love. Heterosexism is as sinful as racism and sexism.
Thankfully when the church is blind to this, God uses others – like the Constitutional Court – to expose our blindness and hopefully open our eyes as it did last week in relation to the Dutch Reformed Church.
Be assured that at CMM we will continue to stand in the Jesus tradition of non-discriminatory love.
Grace,
Alan
