REALITY IS CHRIST OUR LIFE

You may know people who never admit they are wrong, they talk incessantly and cannot cope with  reality because they have created their own. But being a life-giver means discarding the things about which we were wrong and being open to progressing into truth and new vistas of life.

THE GREAT TRUTH
The Great Truth of life is that God is trustworthy and that we belong in His Belonging. The other Truth is that Christ has earned us and taken steps to undo the separation of the fall and establish a closer oneness with Himself than that which preceded the fall.

In Christ the knowledge of good and evil culture of non-life is undone and God lives in us – which is what we celebrate at the Lord’s Table.  Christianity is meant to be the Kingdom of God. The belief that Christianity is not a religion but a person is spot on. Almost. The Kingdom of God is incarnation - Christ in you, the trinity in us, God manifesting as His daughters and sons and as a result the re-creation of the church and society. The salvation of the Earth will come from the Eucharist lived.
None need lived from a convoluted gospel when Christ is their life.

ULTIMATE HEALING
We can, like many seek refuge from the chaos of life in the seeming bulwark of the law. Muslims do this. So do some fundamentalist. Non-Believers construct their own law known as political correctness.  These are expressions of the knowledge of good and evil.

People of great intelligence and some with little, have seen the law as the solution of substance for a chaotic world. But law/the knowledge of good and evil is not the solution. It is the problem. It’s a dead end because it inverts the achievement of the cross. Historically the law led to the cross. But the cross does not lead to the law.

HALF GRACE
There are theologians who promote grace – as they should – but their grace is defined as the ability of the self in Christ to cope with the law. This is a half-grace and a distortion of the Gospel. Real Grace is Christ as us known as incarnation and celebrated at the Lord’s Table. The Eucharist is not a means of getting sad enough about the cross to do better. The Eucharist means that Christ and we are one – that He is our life. This is the larger grace and the real grace. This grace means that Jesus is for us, is in us and is expressed as us.

MISGUIDED CURE
The key to overcoming the chaos of civil life and the torpor of churchianity is not law empowered moralism or spiritual gifts unconnected to the incarnation. The healing of the world comes from union with God - the result of which is the creation of the sons and daughters of God who minister new creation life.

IN THE FAMILY
We belong with God, which is to say that we belong in the Holy Family. The fullness and love of God is The Trinity as God. So, Paul prays that we be immersed in the riches that are ours in the Trinity, ‘For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.’

ADOPTED
We have been adopted into the Fatherhood of God and made one with the source of our being in the person of Jesus. This is the reality of salvation, of infinite life and the regeneration of humanity. It is in oneness with Father that we mature into sons/daughters of God.

REAL ADOPTION IS NOW
“It is in and through this revelation of God the Creator as the Father of Christ Jesus, and also as our loving Father in virtue of our adoption in Christ and our union with him, that we may discern the wonderful truth that God does not exist for himself alone, that he will not be without us but has made us for himself and has actually given himself for us so that, without ceasing to be creaturely beings utterly different from him, we may nevertheless be one with him, as the Father and the Son are one in the Holy Trinity. Hence nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from his love, any more than anything can separate the Father and the Son from one another.” (1)

Declared here, is our oneness with God as sons/daughters and the vicarious humanity of Christ in which our oneness with Christ is forever guaranteed in the person of Jesus. We don’t earn oneness with God. It has been earned. This is where we begin. Not in ‘keeping close to Jesus’ - as if we could. But in living from where Jesus has positioned us – in the Communion that is God. One with the Vine we are the fruit of Christ’s Presence.

 
(1) Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) (p. 140). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.