Justin Appel

Dear Friends,

Over the last couple of days, our family began reading a series of Advent stories taken from the Bible, and we found ourselves sitting around the dinner table, talking about the creation story in Genesis 1 and 2.

Two central elements in these stories, and the nexus of our little conversation, was God’s creative activity, and of the nature of his final creation. God, a Trinity of Persons, a community of love, creates man (adam, anthropos, homo), male and female, in the image of God. (Yes, this is a thorny and thoroughly pre-modern sentence!)

God took dust and breathed into them the breath of life: we are a unique combination of bodies and souls, vivified by the grace of the Holy Spirit.

We talked quite a bit about what it means to be made in God’s image: having the capacity to love, being creative, having freedom, being made for community.

The gist of this creation story is that we are much more than simple dust, more than a naturally occurring part of this world. We are made for God, with souls that are meant to be flooded by the Holy Spirit. We were put into this world, but in a real sense, our basic orientation is not towards this world, but towards the One whose image we bear.

I have this story and our discussion in mind as I read today’s Gospel lesson about ‘giving to Caesar the things that are his’ (Luke 20:19-26).

Just as the coin has the Emperor’s image superimposed on it, so our dust is imbued with God’s image. Even the object of money refers us to the ‘mundane’ realities of the world — realities which have little to do with our created-ness, with our divine purpose.

We have been ‘stamped’ with God’s image, and our ‘life’ is found entirely in him.

Yours in Christ,
Justin