Sunday Best

Saturday 12/24/2011 6:02 AM

Tonight we have a Christmas Eve service in our church.  The choir is singing and we have been told to wear “festive clothing” for the service.  After the service we are having everyone over to our house for our annual family celebration.  A family friend plans to come over to join as after the service but does not want to go to church with us.  She thinks that God would reject her because of all the wrong things she has done in her life.

That idea of having to be good enough to come to meet God runs deep in our human bones.  We are either too frightened to come before God at all or else we feel that we need to put on our “Sunday-go-to-meet’n” clothes if we are to be accepted.

This morning I read three different passages of scripture as part of my devotional time.  The first was from 1 Samuel 3, the story of God’s first meeting with Samuel.  Verses 3-4 say, “The lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel was lying down in the house of the Lord, where the ark of God was.  Then the Lord called Samuel.”  There were a couple of things that caught my attention.  It says the lamp of God had not yet gone out, implying that it usually did go out.  According to the instructions God had given Moses in Exodus 27 the lamp was to never go out so Samuel and the other priests were disobedient in that regard.  Samuel was also lying down in the house of the Lord, where the ark of God was.  The ark was to be kept in the holy of holies and the high priest was the only one who was supposed to enter, and then, only once a year.  That means that either the ark was not in its prescribed place or Samuel was sleeping in the holy of holies.  Either case implies further disobedience.  In spite of their disobedience, God comes to speak with Samuel.  A second passage was Acts 9, the story of Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus.  Saul was breathing out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples, having them arrested and, in some cases, overseeing and consenting to their death.  In spite of his aggressive persecution God comes to him on the road.  Finally, I read Psalm 22:24, “For he has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help.”

I like to think that God wants to associate with nice people, those who have their act together and don’t have all kinds of baggage in their lives.  In truth, God comes to those who are scorned and afflicted in the world, to those who actively persecute and belittle him and to those who live as if God didn’t even exist.  Those are the people God likes to hang around with and have meaningful conversations with.

I spend too much of my life trying to get my ducks in a row, trying to give God, and others, the impression that I have it all together.  God wants to meet me just the way I am.  In spite of my duplicity he comes to me with grace and whispers his love and mercy into my ear.  Oh for the grace to hear him clearly.