Truly Living Out Our Faith

I am praying for the laity and clergy of the Mountain Sky Conference as we prepare to come together for worship.

Yesterday, the Spanish Language/Cultural Immersion trip ended with a day in Mexico City. One of the places we visited was the Museum of Anthropology. The number of items held by the museum was quite impressive. Thousands of years of human cultures were on display.

As I studied the remnants of one civilization after another, there was a thread through all of them: the role of faith in the ordering of community to further humanity in order to touch divinity.

For we Christians, the apex of this search for the elusive God is found in Jesus Christ—when God became one of us. In this way, we discover that God is searching for us as much as we are searching for God. Through Jesus, God gives us lesson after lesson of how to live together so that the ways of community reflect the love this God has for us.

God in Christ keeps pointing us to society’s margins: those who the world overlooks are precisely the ones we are to move closer to if we are to see the face of God. The poor, children, those who are ill, the lonely, the ones in prison, those in need, those deemed less-than, those called unclean—these are the ones who Jesus keeps drawing near to and invites us to do the same. This relationship challenges and changes us. We begin to ask questions of ourselves and the world around us. We start to live differently, reordering not only our individual lives but the entire community so that the well-being and dignity of all people (and all living things) are honored.

Perhaps this is what saddened me as I moved through the museum, reflecting on culture after culture (including my own): the failure to truly embrace our faith so that we can help usher in this beloved community. As G.K. Chesterton once said, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.”
What prevents us from truly living out this faith? Is it the fear of who we might become if we threw our whole selves into our faith endeavor?

With love,
Bishop Karen