Saturday, December 8, 2018

Animated-Week 2-Humanity


Imago Dei

Why should naked equal sexual?
And why should sexual equal lust?
Or why must desire and lust be imagined the same?
Something is wrong.
Unless you can convince me
that all is precisely as it should be -
I'm going with my gut -
something is wrong

It is almost as if a toxin has been dripping
into the good things
into our hearts and how we love
into our minds and how we think
turning good things into opportunities to war and fight
and just sometimes spit and spite
causing our good desire to desire the not-good

and how shall we know
good after all this time?
how shall we detox our imaginations?

The Imago Dei
The Image of God is there in the distance within us
pale and shadowy behind the dust as on an attic mirror
and yet a true north for humans who look to it

How can human beings overcome
the ways by which we divide ourselves
one from another?
Is solidarity possible beyond race, class, and gender?
Can we find a source of value for every individual
 regardless of their sin,
 regardless of their hated of us,
 regardless of their status as our enemy or slave?

Before the first followers of Jesus found confidence in Him as the true Son of God, Jesus taught them that they too were the children of God. This ancient creed was recorded within the folds of a letter of Paul the Apostle. It claimed a thing amazing about the whole human race: there is no race...  there is no class, there is no gender by which to divide ourselves. To a world in which foreigners were feared and hated, slaves were human cattle, and men questioned whether women were really human at all, Jesus claimed something shocking. Into this world Jesus proclaimed (through Paul): "There is no Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no male and female, for you are all one in Christ. In Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith"

The Imago Dei gets very little press these days.
I would like to see that change.
It has, I think, power.
Power to encourage us
to love one another and the rest of the world - not pragmatically,
but through the very love we have of God.

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