Being the first day after Easter Sunday, Easter Monday, we move into readings on the Resurrection and the possibility of our own Spiritual growth as those who are alive in Christ. I will continue to use the readings from Bread and Wine and incorporate Scripture and challenge for Spiritual Formation with credit to www.oklahomabaptists.org.
The entry poem for the section on Resurrection has become one of my favorites since I first came across it last year. It is the “Seven Stanzas at Easter” by John Updike. Updike implores Christians to touch, taste, and be empowered by the literal Resurrection of Jesus Christ. The fourth Stanza gets direct,
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy sidestepping, transcendence,
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
And as we walk through that door we are called to a new life of vitality that we must grow into steadily. This a fair way to think of Spiritual formation. That we might be transformed into mature, walking, talking, followers of Christ gaining inches day by day in our journey to and with Jesus.
1 John 2:15-17 The Message (MSG)
15-17 Don’t love the world’s ways. Don’t love the world’s goods. Love of the world squeezes out love for the Father. Practically everything that goes on in the world—wanting your own way, wanting everything for yourself, wanting to appear important—has nothing to do with the Father. It just isolates you from him. The world and all its wanting, wanting, wanting is on the way out—but whoever does what God wants is set for eternity.
The Message (MSG)
Copyright © 1993, 2002, 2018 by Eugene H. Peterson