[Rector]

Emptiness

 

There was a man who had lost his calling. His soul was now empty, and in the place of Divine intimacy there was work. Male power games, the stuff of ephemeral immortality, is all he now possessed. As a young man he had "got religion", got it in a powerful way. Yet, as the games started to lose their purpose, his sense of immortality slowly faded with his fading hair; it was then that the deafening echo of emptiness come upon him.

 

There was another man, a powerful man. He came to Jesus one evening, on the sly, as it were. It was not wise for a powerful man to be seen talking with Jesus.

He was a man who could no longer touch the center of things, and so Jesus touched it for him.

"You can't get to heaven", said Jesus, "unless you are born again".

"Born again, physically born again?" questioned this powerful man.

"To enter heaven" said Jesus, "a person must be born physically as a child, but also spiritually as a child of God. The mind, empty of the Divine, must be touched by the Spirit of the Divine. To enter heaven a person must be mysteriously born of the Spirit of God."

"How is it possible for this to happen?" the man asked.

Jesus then spoke of his cross - heaven's doorway. The touch of the Divine, the enlightening of the mind, the renewing of the spirit....... comes in the simplest of ways - trusting the crucified Christ. "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life."

 

[Pumpkin Cottage]
lectionarystudies.com