COME BACK TO GOD

Today’s reading is II Corinthians 3 – 6.  We are reading from the New Living Translation.

I grew up on the Oregon coast, and have always been fascinated with certain kinds of animals, like salmon and migrating birds.  These are creatures that instinctively know they need to make their way home, that they need to come back to where things began.  They don’t know why or how it happens. They just know.  It’s as if they’re hearing and responding to a voice that says, come back, come home.  And they do.  They make their long perilous journey back home. 

God is calling us back home.  And we’ve been given a ministry of calling people to come back home.  There is a homing device, built into the hearts of people and all creation, that instinctively tells us to come back.  It tells us that there is a Home. 

In the Marshes of Venezuela there’s a bird hearing the stirring and it’s responding.  It’s making it’s journey all the way up to the north slope of Alaska to the Arctic circle.  It’s going home where new life will begin.  It is responding to the voice to come home.  Somewhere off the coast of Asia, in the Pacific Ocean, there’s a school of salmon.  They, too, are hearing and responding to that mysterious voice that’s saying, come home.  They will head back, traversing the Pacific Ocean, making their way hundreds of miles, upstream, into a river no one knows about, because they’ve heard a voice calling them home.

God has placed a homing device in every human being.  Somehow, through our human pride and the malicious, violent attack of the enemy of our souls, the signal has been scrambled.  We don’t know how to get home again. There’s an ache within every human to go Home. We’re not always sure if it’s real or what direction to go, if it is real.  

Paul says, we’ve been given a ministry to tell people that the ache is real, that Home is real.  

God, in his great mercy, has come to us because the ache, our blindness, the separation, the desire, and the brokenness are real.  He’s come to mend us.  He has come to give us direction back to where we belong. He’s given us a ministry, through the power of the Holy Spirit,and in sincere love, to invite people to come back Homw, to see that they have a Home.   If and when they respond, the Spirit of God comes to reside in them.  In a sense, He unscrambles our homing device, and we are able to make the journey back home, finding strength and transformation as we do.

Strange things happens to salmon, as they leave the salt water and enter the fresh water.  Their bodies began to change. They are being transformed as they make their way back home

It is the same with us.  As we embark on our journey Home, we too, are changed.  

“And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.  We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.  We implore you on Christ’s behalf:  Be reconciled to God“ (II Cor 5:19 – 20)

Remember well, the call to come back Home.  Remember to invite all those you can, to come back Home with you.  Paul says, all this is a gift from God who brought us back Home to himself, through Christ. He’s given us this task to be reconciled to Him, and to help others get Home, too.