VOICES

RENEWS & GENERATES

God does not just mend, repair, and restore; God renews and generates, transcending our expectations of even what we desire, beyond what we dare to ask for or imagine. In a stunning way, Bishop Wright expands on this theologically:

What you do in the Lord is not in vain. You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that’s about to roll over a cliff. You are not restoring a great painting that’s shortly going to be thrown on the fire. You are not planting roses in a garden that’s about to be dug up for a building site. You are— strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself— accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God’s new world.

The greatest miracle of the resurrection of Christ is not just the body of Jesus taking on a new, multidimensional, transformed DNA; the greatest miracle is the fact that the miracle itself reveals the expansiveness of God and the potential for a greater and deeper miracle that surpasses our imaginative capacities. By definition, God’s miracle breaks nature wide open, and such an act is the ultimate transgression in love by God toward God’s own Creation. The true gift, if fully understood and embraced, will transform us from within and make us beings of hope.

Excerpt from Art and Faith: A Theology of Making by Makoto Fujimura.