Email Link
Facebook
Twitter
DiggThe God of Transformation
“God is changing things so that they finally reflect the dream of God. It will be new to us, but it is merely the fulfillment of what God intended all along.” –The Rt. Rev. Michael Curry, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina
By Stephanie Spellers
From the beginning, God has been about the business of creating, reshaping, and making things new. The record of Scripture is filled with images of a God who turns things upside down in order to get them right-side up, and creates something from what would seem to be nothing. Open the Bible to almost any page and you will see the evidence. In the beginning the Creator God takes the formless, watery void and brings forth life with a word and a touch. Later, we meet Abraham and Sarah, the unlikely patriarch and matriarch of Israel, both too old to expect to be the new parents of a great, holy people. Then we greet Moses, the stumbling, mumbling, ever-reluctant prophet and leader of Israel.
Can there be any doubt that God is a God of transformation who wants to embrace and transform all of creation? The promise is present in the prophet Isaiah, who cried out to the complacent children of Israel, giving voice to the word of God:
Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. The wild animals will honor me, the jackals and the ostriches; for I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people, the people who I formed for myself so that they might declare my praise. (Isaiah 43:18-21)
We humans might have a vested interest in depicting a changeless God who made a stable and unchanging world. Scripture, history, and our own life experiences put the lie to that hope. “I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” You have never seen rivers in the desert — this God will make it so. You have never seen wild animals obey — this God will make it so. You cannot imagine life beyond the old patterns and accepted ways that seem ingrained in the groove of creation — this God is not bound by those limits. This God is making a new heaven and a new earth, one where pain will cease, justice will rule, and death itself will die. God invites us to look around with the eyes of faith; then we, too, will see how God is “making all things new.”
In Jesus the Christ, we see the lengths to which the God of transformation would go in order to bring the dream [of God] to life. In the Gospel of Luke, the first act of Jesus’ public ministry is to enter the synagogue and offer this prophetic pronouncement from the scroll of Isaiah:
The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because God has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. God has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. (Luke 4:18-19)
Having dropped his bombshell, he rolls up the scroll, hands it back to the attendant, and takes his seat. Meanwhile, everyone is staring at him, at once aghast and in awe. He knows what they are wondering: Is this guy serious? His response is curt: “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” Yes, he tells them, the Messiah has come. The old order is passing away, and I have come to usher in a new age. Things are about to change.
And change they do. Jesus’ whole ministry — the whole account of God’s human life among us — is that of one who honors his tradition, but will not be bound by it if the dream of God demands something else. So he speaks to the Samaritan woman at the well, even though Jews and Samaritans were not to relate to each other, and especially not a Jewish man and a Samaritan woman (John 4:1-26). When he sees the man with the withered hand sitting in the synagogue on the Sabbath, he knows the rules: do not touch him, do not heal him, do not perform any unnecessary work on this day ordained by God for rest. He also knows he is being watched by the religious authorities who are waiting to pounce on him for the slightest infraction.
Jesus knew, and we certainly know, there would be consequences for his actions. He also knew he had come to do his Abba God’s will, to usher in the just reign of God. And he knew, as we struggle to acknowledge, that there is no way to have the dream without the transformation. The point is not to slog away in maintenance mode or to sit on the sidelines, pining for what was. The God of transformation invites us to “be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating” (Isaiah 65:18). God yearns for us to be part of this new creation and to rejoice in its unfolding.
The Rev. Stephanie Spellers is an Episcopal priest and the Cox Fellow and Minister for Radical Welcome at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Boston, Massachusetts.
From Radical Welcome: Embracing God,The Other, and the Spirit of Transformation, Stephanie Spellers © 2006. Reprinted by permission of news@trinitywallstreet.org.
