Giving The Life We’re Given
Thoughts on the First Readings -Joe Frankenfield
3rd Sunday of Easter
Acts 2:14, 22-33

I remember reading a story about pirates when I was a child. They weren’t very bright pirates. They had waylaid a ship carrying gold pieces to pay an army. They searched that ship high and low looking for the gold never realizing that it filled the old sea chest in the captain’s cabin on which they played cards and rested their feet.

Recently a preacher touted Christianity as the best insurance policy a person could have: it reimburses a faithful person, he said, not with silver and gold but with eternal happiness.

It’s very common but sad to find the relationship that we have with God reduced to this kind of individual affair. We degrade the universal promise of creation’s fulfillment into a private future of eternity-on-a-cloud for a chosen few of us given in trade for our fealty and tribute.

The God we pray to – the God of Jesus – isn’t some super potentate resting on a throne waiting for his subjects to enter his presence with honors and gifts. God’s intent isn’t to offer us a reward for appropriate behavior. It’s difficult for us to realize that The Creator is offering us a chance to co-create the cosmos.

We are life-bearers. In all we do, wherever we go, we have the ability to bring life. Are there other life-bearers? We don’t know; it makes little difference. We are what we are and we can do what we can do. We can knowingly, intentionally work with God. We are not probationers or sycophants; we are co-creators. That’s a role we can’t ignore without betraying ourselves – as well as our Creator.