“Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty. But as I told you, you have seen me and still you do not believe. All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away. For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all that he has given me, but raise them up at the last day. For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.”
Church up at Ranges today – it’s Easter Sunday. There were a stack of stations set up for reflection. The one that grabbed me most was, quite oddly the station about Hunger. The Bible mentions hunger quite a bit. It is wound very tightly into humanity, we need food to physically survive and food for contentment.
Each image showed was of lips – a conceptual variety of those covered in glitter holding dice, eating paper and words, half painted red, a child feeding from it’s mother.
It’s so easy to satisfy hunger with stuff, with life with busyness, with wants and percieved needs. It is not easy to satisfy hunger of the other kind with Jesus. But it is better. And things seem right when the hungry goes searching for the holy. And because the holy can relate to us in our hunger, it makes it possible.
Last night was the start of a spin off thing happening through Ranges. We don’t know really what it is, except that Les and Vubka (I know I’ve spelt that wrong), Bob, Tim, Cat, AJ (and Lily and Annabel), Geoff and I – not an exhaustive list for future reference as it’s rather open ended- met for dinner and had a good discussion on the Kingdom of God, church etc.
If injections were more positive things I’d equate it with that. It was good, whatever it was. And it was right. I came away hopeful.
Les very succinctly described our role in the Kingdom of God as not to ‘go build’ (Whatever the hell that’s meant to mean anyway) but rather as stewards. Taking it back to the Garden of Eden, where when ‘the fall’ occurred; there was a split in horizontal relationships between people, the land etc and we lost that perfect vertical relationship (with God) was affected. And this then are the areas we are stewards and the point being to draw things closer to that perfect vertical…. I have explained it terribly and I’m sure it’s not complete and I don’t know fully what it looks like, but it’s certainly not about a point of ‘salvation’ and a ‘go out and make converts’.
I like these people. I like what God is doing.
