Day 28 - Boundary-Breaking Love

I love the title of this day's reading.  I've spent a lot of time this last year thinking and re-thinking my ideas about who God loves and who God accepts.  And I certainly don't have all the answers on that (though at one time I might have thought I did and that is what I am changing these days).  But anyways, today's thoughts from McKnight shed some more light on the subject.

He recounts the visions and the meeting that happened between Peter and Cornelius in Acts 10.  And I love this story!  It is surely a boundary-breaking kind of tale.  It is that moment when Jesus' message that he came to seek and save ALL who are lost becomes most real.  Peter, a Jew, is specifically sent to share the good news of Jesus to Cornelius, a gentile.  In his day, Peter would never have associated with such a man, but God tells him in a vision to go and not to consider the religious 'boundary' of the day (Jew vs. Gentile) that would have kept them apart otherwise.

McKnight goes on from here to share four principles from this story for learning how to cross boundaries and share God's love:

#1  Other People Are Listening for God (I think this was my favorite)
Jesus Creed love breaks down boundaries, but it can do so only when it recognizes that the God who loves us also loves everyone else. It is easy for us to be tempted to think that we alone are the right group, that we alone are the most faithful, and that others are less loved by God because we in fact love them less. But this gets things backward: we may love others less, but God loves them the same. Humans throughout the world and across the street listen for God because they, too, are eikons of God, humans made in God’s image. Here is where we need to begin: with the recognition that everyone can be a seeker for God just as we are.

#2  Resistance to Boundary-Breaking is Normal
Perhaps you are like Peter. Perhaps you need to hear from God that the boundaries of your traditional faith need to be crossed because God is at work outside your boundaries. To practice the Jesus Creed means to muster the courage to break through boundaries.

#3  God is Impartial
Then Peter uttered words that might reshape our lives today: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him” (10:34–35).

#4  God Dwells with All Who Face God
Holy Spirit down-comings and outpourings and fillingups happen when boundaries are crossed and when we knock down the walls of privilege to form the flat plain of community. God loves you; God loves me; God loves everyone. We extend the grace of the Jesus Creed when we listen to the good news that God is not a boundary-maker but a boundary-breaker.

I think I have most often in my life looked at God and the bible as full of boundaries... full of lots of rules, reasons, commands, traditions, etc. that restricted my life in many ways.  In what I do, in how I worship, in who I'm friends with, in where I go to church and on and on.  All of that has begun to change in me as I begin to open my eyes to just this sort of thing that McKnight is talking about here... that in reality, God broke down the barriers that keep us from loving people as He has loved, and wants us to break down whatever those barriers look like in our own lives.