"Meanwhile, the cross comes before the crown and tomorrow is a Monday morning." Such apt and timeless words. Lewis here begins to petition us to see each other as holy, see the weight of our actions as they truly are. Each of us helps others, other "potential gods and goddesses," along the road towards eternal Splendor or eternal Damnation with our every action and word. He asks us to truly love one another without "flippancy, superiority, or presumption."
This has got to be one of the hardest things any of us could try to do. Not only are we to "love our neighbors as ourselves" as Christ commands us, but we must look at each individual and recognize that God-spark in their eyes - and that by our treatment of them and relationship with them we are interacting with a unique and holy part of God's precious creation. I have never understood humanity in this way before (and I've even read this sermon in the past). Maybe because I have such a hard time recognizing the Divine in my humanity I can barely sense it in others. But I also understand almost instinctively that were I to look at others and search for God not only would I find Him but my relationships with them would improve and deepen and strengthen. We all desire to be reunited with Christ, we all desire joy, and we are all able to attain both. And so, a new challenge for me in my faith: to recognize God in everyone I meet and treat them as a unique and special creation close to the Father's heart.
I also think it's beautiful that Lewis recognizes that true humility despenses with modesty. With God, we can be childlike in our pride at our small mimickries of Creation. We get to present our children, a new lesson we've learned, a garden we've successfully planted, a few dollars well spent, to our Creator with joy and even pride. How freeing is that? Where else and to whom else could we act like this towards as "adults?" To do this is to get a small glimpse of Heaven, where we can truly be carefree and come to Christ as a child, to feel firsthand Christ look at us with the pride and happiness of a loving father. As adults who have grown up in a nation with a divorce rate over fifty percent, we can all recognize the significance of such a thing.
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I agree that everyone we interact with is unique and is just as entitled to God's grace as the next person (none of us are...), but I disagree that everyone is a "holy" part of creation.
ReplyDeleteI like your points. However I fail to understand how the divorce rate being over fifty percent is relevant.
ReplyDeleteFor people whose parents have divorced, it's harder for them to relate to their own father, who doesn't live in the home, and thus even harder to relate to the Heavenly Father because our own fathers are the ones who are there to mirror that relationship. This is hard for people whose fathers are still living in the home but "absent," meaning they work all day and are emotionally absent when they are home. Because this often happens when we are children, relating to God the Father as a child no longer comes naturally to us, and this is a detriment to our relationship/relating to God.
ReplyDeleteI also found Lewis's idea of humility without modesty quite fascinating. I then realized the strong correlation between that idea and the life of Christ. Christ is the perfect example of humility without modesty, as he proclaimed who He was while at the same time always stooping to wash our feet.
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