URC Daily Devotion Thursday 18th April 2024
Reading 1 Corinthians 1:18-21
For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,
‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’
Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe.
Reflection
On the surface this text is challenging us with the idea that the Cross can seem to some as foolishness. Maybe this is our lived experience quite a bit of the time. Christians may not always agree on what was going on when Jesus died for us but it remains central to our faith. Proclamation with integrity and humility is a significant part of evangelism.
For many people that we seek to share faith with there can be an intellectual barrier in what can be seen as credible. There can also be an experiential barrier, where the Church has genuinely let people down, abused them in some way, or just not connected with them.
The writer C.S. Lewis has had a big impact on my life and helped me to see how fiction, narrative, and imagination can also play a significant part in how people can come to faith. Lewis wrote “I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralyzed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings…. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.”
Perhaps today you can take a moment to think of a book, song, musical, painting, film, play, or poem that connects with what it means to be human and what it might mean to see and encounter God at work in Christ. I’d like to suggest that as we increasingly have our imaginations baptized this will overflow into our conversations with others.
Prayer
Creator and creative God,
God of our experience, imagination and beyond,
help us find natural ways to steal past watchful dragons.
I thank you that your encounter with the world
is so rich with imagery, metaphor, wonder, mystery, and beauty.
Help me to resonate with this in my conversations
and point to you as you are
and not as we have found ourselves confining you.
I hear and receive the words ‘Courage dear heart’
Amen