Psalm 45.11-18; Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49,58-67; Romans 7.15-25; Matthew 11.16-19, 25
Do we see as God sees? The people in the days of John the Baptist and Jesus missed a great blessing by not seeing who they were or what God was doing. Eliezer, in our reading from Genesis, saw aright because he knew what he was looking for in finding a wife for Isaac, a family resemblance but not in physical form, but in character. Paul didn’t see aright, he persecuted the church because he believed it was following a lie, that Jesus was not Messiah, until God opened his eyes and you can see in his letters that Paul’s eyes were always looking for people with the right hearts and characters, whether slaves like Onesimus or the slave master Philemon, women who sold dye or kings and queens. It is incumbent on us to recognize one another and to be recognizable to one another.
“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which,if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”