Mtr Paula Barker Datsko

Dear friends,
“He is the Way. Follow him through the Land of Unlikeness….” So opens a poem by Auden that is set two ways in our hymnal. Like Auden’s poem, each of today’s scripture lessons call us to leave behind our ordinary ways and follow the Way of God into the extraordinary land of unlikeness.

The prophet Jeremiah voices God’s condemnation of those who are shrewd in the ways of the world, building their comfortable lives unjustly by cheating laborers, practicing oppression, and condoning violence through which innocent blood is shed. Such people live in an aura of success in our own world also, don’t they? Jeremiah’s prophecy commends instead those whose justice and righteousness bring relief to the poor and needy. In God’s sight, it is well for those who focus on bringing justice to the poor. A time of reckoning is coming for the rest, when there will be groaning like the pangs of a woman in labor.

In his letter to the Romans, Paul also compares the inbreaking of the new reality to the groans of childbirth—filled with hope as we experience already the first fruits of the Spirit and yearn for fulfillment as children of God. We are being liberated from bondage to the flesh, by which Paul refers to everything in our body and soul that opposes God. The Spirit bears witness in us, with prayers deeper than we can fathom, that we are being brought to new life in the freedom and glory of children of God. Extraordinary possibilities abound in this Way opening before us, possibilities that are infinitely more than we could ask or imagine.

Jesus speaks from this new reality when he refers to himself as living bread that has come from heaven. People stuck in ordinary patterns of thought deride him: Don’t we know his father and mother? What nonsense is he speaking by claiming to have come down from heaven? Yet those who are following the Way of Jesus into the land of unlikeness can testify to the truth of what he says. We have experienced how partaking of the bread of life, his flesh given for the life of the world, feeds the Spirit’s stirrings in us, empowering us together to live into God’s eternal realm -- effecting justice, rooted in truth, and graced by the beauty of God’s glory.

Where will you, today, perceive an opening and feel a tug to follow Jesus in the Way of unlikeness?

Faithfully,
Mtr. Paula Barker Datsko