6-13-19 - The First Conversion

(You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel is here.)

Jesus uses a lot of possessive pronouns when he describes the life of God (at least, as John’s Gospel renders his words…). He speaks of what is the Father’s, what is his, what the Spirit gives. And he indicates that all this richness shared by the three-personed God is also shared with us:

“He [the Spirit] will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.”

What has been declared to us? The future of God’s reign. The fullness of Life. All the key pieces of information and insight we sometimes feel we’re missing. God is not holding anything back for later – we just don't yet have the capacity to receive the whole signal; our systems would crash.

So, does it do us any good if we don’t “get it?” Here’s what I think: a part of us does get it. All of it. Has received the Good News of life without end, here and in the world to come, and has been set free by that Good News. We experience spiritual growth as that part of us becomes more able to share that knowing with the rest of us, until the faith-receiving self is in command, and the fear-responding self has been integrated and converted. Then we look more like Jesus. We are in a sense our own first mission field.

It’s not only God who incorporates three persons in his being; perhaps we incorporate a very different kind of trinity: our true, God-given, spiritual self; our world-shaped natural self; and the energy it takes to navigate life from that dichotomy, an endeavor that can take on lives of its own.

The good news about the Good News is that what belongs to the Father belongs to the Son, and what belongs to the Son has been declared to us by the Spirit. It is the Spirit who brings about our integration and conversion, as we allow her/him access. And as we receive the fullness of God-Life shared equally by the persons of the holy Trinity, we then share that God-Life with the people around us and within ourselves, and that feeds back into the Life of God, in an infinite loop.
It's the original sharing economy, and it never, ever runs out.

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