Living Lent

Insofar as here and there, and now and then, God's kingly will is being done in various odd ways among us even at this moment, the Kingdom has come already. Insofar as all the odd ways we do God's will at this moment are at best half-baked and half-hearted, the Kingdom is still a long way off, a very long way off to be more precise and theological.
 
As a poet, Jesus is maybe at his best in describing the feeling you get when you glimpse the Kingdom. It's like finding a million dollars in a field, he says, or a jewel worth a king's ransom. It's like finding something you hated to lose and thought you'd never find again--an old keepsake, a stray sheep, a missing child. When the Kingdom really comes, it's as if the thing you lost and thought you'd never find again is you.
 
In "Beauty and the Beast," it is only when the Beast discovers that Beauty really loves him in all his ugliness that he himself becomes beautiful. In the experience of Saint Paul, it is only when a person discovers that God really loves him in all his unlovliness, that he himself starts to become godlike.
 
Paul's word for this gradual transformation of a sow's ear into a silk purse is sanctification, and he sees it as the second stage in the process of salvation. Being sanctified is a long and painful stage because with part of himself the sinner prefers his sin, just as with part of himself the Beast prefers his glistening snout and curved tusks. 

Many drop out with the job hardly more than begun and among those who stay with it there are few, if any, who don't drag their feet most of the way.
 
But little by little, less by taking pains than by taking it easy, the forgiven person starts to become a forgiving person, the healed person to become a healing person, the loved person to become a loving person. 

God does most of it. The end of the process, Paul says, is eternal life.
 
     Frederick Buechner

Can we limit God's judgment, or God's grace, to our own understanding? In the case of the terrorist bomber, the man who kidnaps, rapes, and murders a child, or the architect of genocide for political gain, the answer we long for does not come. We simply do not know how God will choose to work against, with, or through such a person. We may work to see those who do evil brought to justice in this world and we may pray for anyone here and now who seems "hardened in sin." But when it comes to the word reprobate, I wonder if it is a word that any human being has the right to call another. 

     Kathleen Norris