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Within
the last few weeks my kids travelled to Sorento, Italy, for a family wedding.
It was quite an occasion with much of the service being conducted in
Italian the chapel ornate and beautiful to be in. The
Bride comes from Coatbridge – a far cry from the romance of Sorento!
But because the wedding ceremony was taking place so far from home she
had to be super organised. All the wedding details and plans were published to a web
site so that family in Scotland and Italy had a central location for all the
information they might need to know. Of
course part of the wedding web site was the wedding gift wishlist. The
Wedding gift service used to be a rather exclusive thing offered by high-class
stores who took delight in helping organise the more elaborate wedding.
Nowadays it seems to be a far more standard practice for Bride and Groom
to inform their guests of the items they might wish to have as presents.
Of course it does help safeguard against getting six toasters and a host
of other duplicated items. The
Wedding day will see the Bride and Groom receiving gifts of a rather different
nature. Everyone wishes them health
and happiness, good luck, good fortune, and the blessing of family of their own.
And somehow these gifts are more precious than the toasters and the
crystal wine glasses! Makes
you wonder though what people do wish for a newly married couple.
At a time when we want a couple to have everything they could hope for
what do we pray for? Security? Good health? Wealth? A fantastic job? Happiness?
Love? Or something else? I wonder how most of those wishes relate to what God
offers to human beings. Is God
offering us what we want and need, or is God offering us something, which we
really don't much care about anyway? Because if God's gifts to us coincide in
any way with the sort of desires people have for the future, we'd be crazy to
ignore those gifts. And we'd be
crazy, or at least irresponsible, to keep it to ourselves, to fail to share
what’s freely on offer. The
letter as a whole is talking about the worldwide Church, the head of which is
Christ (Eph 4:15). The purpose of
the Church is described as the instrument for making God's plan of salvation
known throughout the universe (Eph 3:9-10), and the Church is clearly seen as
anchored in God's saving love, which is shown through Jesus Christ (Eph 2:4-10).
The whole of redemption is rooted in the plan and accomplishment of God,
the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit (Eph 1:3-14).
The language used can be strange to modern ears and difficult for today's
audiences to take in. So what exactly is salvation? What is God's saving love, which was shown so clearly in Jesus? What is redemption? And how does any of this relate, if at all, to the modern wishlist for our own futures? Salvation
is defined in my dictionary in two ways. Salvation
is defined as a deliberate, planned guarding and protecting of something felt as
precious, and salvation is also defined as the act of preserving or conserving
or keeping safe. God has a plan of
salvation in which God regards each human being as precious, and means to guard
them, to protect them and to keep them safe.
Salvation
is also to do with health, for the word arises from the Latin root, "salveo",
meaning "to heal". So God also wants to keep each human being healthy.
All of these things - being guarded, protected, regarded as precious and
being kept healthy - are probably quite high on most people's wish list.
Most people long for security and safety and good health, and to be
loved. And many people's lives go
wrong because they're unconsciously longing for one or more of those elements
but somehow go the wrong way about finding them.
So in God's plan of salvation God is offering us something we all want
very much indeed and is also offering us a way to avoid the unnecessary
difficulties and problems which arise because our search for them takes us in
wrong directions. How
do we take hold of God's protection and love? How do we take hold of God's gift
of health? Obviously
we have some responsibility ourselves. If
we want to be healthy we must live healthy life-styles.
We must eat the right sort of food, drink the right sort of drink and
take sufficient exercise. We must also make sure we get sufficient rest and good
quality rest, both of body and mind. We
must also make sure that our soul gets the right sort of food with sufficient
exercise and sufficient rest, for body, mind and soul are inextricably bound up
together and strongly influence each other.
If our soul is out of sorts, perhaps with a long-standing inability to
forgive someone, our bodies and our minds will begin to suffer.
If we carry a load of guilt and can't shed it, there will be a long-term
effect upon our bodies and our minds. The
Church offers the means to health of soul.
The Church offers a way in to God's forgiveness and offers God's food and
nourishment for our souls. The
Church also offers the means of experiencing God's love, through worship.
In
Christ we have also obtained an inheritance, says Paul in today's reading.
We have heard the word of truth, the gospel of our salvation, and have
believed in him, and so we're marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit;
and this is the pledge of our inheritance. We
see what God is like by studying Jesus. Jesus
showed the extent of God's love for us in that he loved us so much that he was
willing to die for us in order that we might be able to take hold of God's gifts
to us, gifts of love and forgiveness and reassurance for the future.
To make those gifts our own, we need to allow time and space for the God.
God offers us security, protection, good health, love and happiness.
Anyone who rejects those gifts can't have much of a wishlist.
Those with a genuine wishlist are looking for salvation.
God offers salvation, and God is always faithful. |