The Purpose of God

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/090816.cfm

1 Mic 5:1-4a
Rom 8:28-30
Mt 1:1-16, 18-23

Brothers and sisters:
We know that all things work for good for those who love God,
who are called according to his purpose. 
For those he foreknew he also predestined
to be conformed to the image of his Son,
so that he might be the firstborn
among many brothers.
And those he predestined he also called;
and those he called he also justified;
and those he justified he also glorified.

               Romans 8:28-30

Our vision of success for another person will never match God's plans. Our imagination has a ceiling. What we want for a child of ours, for instance, no matter how lofty or great pales in comparison to what God has in mind. What we humans develop in our thoughts is necessarily limited by the height and breadth of our experiences. 

We can imagine awesome things -- that our child will learn the secrets of the universe, hear and respond to the call of the Holy Spirit, discover a loving spouse, follow the Christ, focus on a marketable skill that excites them, build a comfortable and welcoming home, and birth remarkable children of their own. As wonderful as all that sounds, our dreams and imaginings for the ones we love, however magical and magnificent they are, leap only so far. 

We concoct the future from the yearnings of our heart. In this, we are like the Father. We want to create, nurture, let go, and then embrace for all eternity those whom we call family. To desire that another would know the delight of all these things -- home, children, and career -- and then reach back to us in delight, to tell us tales and thank us for our love, stems from a divinely inspired DNA.

God’s dreams, though, don’t just come true. They are true in the very thought of them, and therefore eternal. That concept, an eternal relationship with God and each other, defies imagining. Our human driven dreams rely upon faith and hope, a two dimensional yearning. More like an ache than a reality. And then when fulfilled, our dreams are more like relief than complete joy. God lives and operates in certainty. Upon his incarnation as one of us, though, God agreed to be like us. To ache for each of us, and cry in relief. The incarnation, where God becomes our brother, defines the length of his love for us. He shot a pharmaceutical steroid, only delivered by the Holy Spirit, into our dream muscles. He went through birth, life and death. Then, he showed us resurrection. And, he told us about everything, speaking as one of us. We can now peek into heaven through the lens of the creator himself.

Consider breakfast. When we think of making breakfast, we envision the entire process, something we have done all our lives. The eggs, bacon, toast, potatoes, orange slices, butter, jam, coffee and Tabasco appear before us. But, careful as we are, our eggs break, we curse at the seeds in the orange slices, the coffee burns, and the Tabasco is flavored by a chipotle spice. Why did someone decide to ruin a perfectly good recipe? We constantly run into our limits.

God’s thoughts follow a far different process. God takes the taste, smells, texture and shared meal of breakfast to another level. We offer the food in thanks, and he delivers eternal nourishment. 

We are like God in our dreams and sometimes even in the follow through, but God is all reality. His imaginations take shape. We tend to fence off our dreams, hesitate in getting them off the ground, and are disappointed in the results.  God created the universe to bring us breakfast, and revels in our enjoyment of the feast. Because God actually made us and everything possible in the process of an imagined breakfast, we are drawn into God’s purposes from our daily need to eat. We may even think we are responsible for the breakfast preparation, but the parts of the breakfast were not our ideas. 

Our breakfast does not exist before we think of it. It arrives when we call to it, and build it. This sounds like God’s behavior. God, though supersedes our thinking process by engaging us to come up with our own recipes. Without God the chicken, oranges and coffee beans would never arrive. But, as his provision, they don't really constitute a breakfast worth exultation. God didn’t hand us a feathered chicken, a round hard orange, raw coffee beans and then expect we would be grateful as we clawed through our food. The jam we spread on our toast, the butchered, cured and sliced bacon, and the complicated vinegar mix in the Tabasco sit on our shelves because of a lineage of imaginations from people like us whom God knew would double down on the creation. Over and over, our ancestors, and even us, will bring to the breakfast meal new and amazing developments. That is God's plan.

Yes, a great deal of pride must have ensued when God imagined and brought forth the coffee bean. But billions of years waited for the coffee pot. God applauded the first contraption, and every drip, press and latte burbling crankcase since then. 

Think of heaven’s roars of delight when the initial recipe for Tabasco hit the lips of its creator. The angels probably looked at the saints with some measure of doubt that this concoction made any confectionery sense. Why would anyone want to spice up a rather amazing looking life as it was, they surely wondered. And, maybe still do. Many of the saints, though, had probably already considered and even tried to develop a flavor that would excite so many people. Saints aren’t jealous, but a few may have raised a finger of familiarity and even murmured an unimpressed word or two, pretty darn sure that they already came up with Tabasco under another name.

God, though, knew the moment that this discovery would bring in the very notion of vinegar itself. 

Think of it this way. When our son or daughter stands in the second row of the third grade choir and sings with all their heart to an audience of wide-eyed parents, the joy in our heart matches the joy of God. We had only imagined this moment might come. God experiences this moment with every parent on earth through all of time. It's the stuff of his being. Before there were microphones, cameras, and Instagram, children have sung to their parents. Parents have cried with joy for thousands of years. Technology has enhanced the volume and preserved the memories with more clarity, but like breakfast, the joyful experience of singing children has delighted heaven since the birth of Eve's first child.

God reacts with joy even with his foreknowledge of everything that has and will happen. He can cue up every dream fulfilled, all the way through the end of time. God doesn't experience hope, though, with his foreknowledge. He experiences expectation. He feels that joy from moment to moment, a constant giddy tickle of Alleluia, and has done so with every living creature since the inception of the first atom. Through the person of Jesus, God the Father and the living Spirit somehow escalate their already perfect joy with the singing of the children in creation and the eating of breakfast meals. 

The lineage of our families is written into a record that God saw coming from the beginning of time. Like we watch our children escape into the world and then rush back to us to say they love us, God has already known those of us who would turn to him. He has known everything before hand, and then burst with joy when it happened. 

Because we can barely, and only, imagine how constant and awesome such replicated joy must be, we can almost understand why God would want us to be his brothers and sisters. God’s plan wasn’t to just set us off into the timeline of a chugging universe, waving goodbye when we are born and then meeting us later at the train station of heaven. God decided to join us. God made us like him. We innately desire the intimacies of family and friends, because God made us like that.

From the human development of Tabasco and discovery of the many ways to enjoy coffee beans to the songs of our children, God’s delight is fulfilled. He breathes and the universe lives. We work and play and God beams with joy. And then, God arrives in body and Spirit.

How great are our hopes and dreams for our children. How much greater must be God’s expectation of our turning to him and being with him forever. Not just rising up and sitting on a cloud, but walking up to the very person of Jesus and wrapping our arms around him, knowing he loves our children even more than we do. He's heard the songs that our children have sung to us, too!

The broken eggs, charred toast, undercooked bacon, and off key singing of children may dent our vision of a perfect breakfast and a talented progeny, but the nourishing never-ending delicious breakfasts in heaven, and the eternal embrace of our sons and daughters and friends and families and Jesus himself, mark the very purpose of God.

And that's just the singing children and breakfast.