See, Everything Has Become New

Paul declares in 2 Corinthians 5:16-21 that we are made new through Christ. We have been reconciled before God and sparked into a new creation. And so, his reasoning goes, with that new life intact we are the ones to bring God’s reconciliation to others, “God making his appeal through us…” Do you see that all things are new like this? It’s really a pretty elusive task. Sometimes I just don’t have the right frame of mind.

Our imaginations need to be stocked with such a vision. Poets know how to do this. One was Gerard Manley Hopkins who declares in the poem, God’s Grandeur, that “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” and that even though we do a pretty good job of messing creation up, “… for all this, nature is never spent; / There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; / And though the last lights off the black West went / Oh morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--/ Because the Holy Ghost over the bent / World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”

Another is Langston Hughes who wrote in I Dream a World that he did, in fact, dream a world “Where love will bless the earth / And peace its paths adorn...” and “…joy, like a pearl, Attends the needs of all mankind.”

And Antonio Machado wrote in the poem Last Night, as I was Sleeping “…that I had a beehive / here inside my heart. / And the golden bees / were making white combs / and sweet honey / from my old failures.”

So with their help and with Paul’s vision of a new creation we are asked to re-think what is handed to us from day to day. We are asked to see grandeur in tear soaked faces, and the joy of first light. We are asked see the seeds of peace in our last social rift, and just how it is that God re-works—reconciles—our old failures. Do you see it? It’s…. it’s… just… there, it flames “out, like shining from shook foil…”

Comments

[Dick Petermann]

See, Everything Has Become New: ...do i see? "It’s really a pretty elusive task. Sometimes I just don’t have the right frame of mind." It is as though I see myself in a mirror dimly... but yet i some how know. As a child knows his mother's touch... i some how know His touch, His voice, light, way. The elusive part for me seems to be when I do not spend enough time with Him. My mind gets distracted by all that whirls around me... so much so that it is as though He needs to awake me... do i see? I want to see, Lord... I want to see.