God Is Still Speaking, #1

Yesterday after church a group of folks gathered to discuss how we would organize our Sunday School after our Christian Education director retires at the end of October. It was mostly about mechanics and logistics, the comfortable discussions we fall into at these types of meetings: who is available to cover when, what is the procedure, etc.

But right in the middle there was a God Is Still Speaking Moment. Carol, our Christian Ed director, put in a DVD that is part of the curriculum. She told me later that it was not even the video clip that she intended to show first. It was geared for middle school students and it was a clip of a group of kids discussing Jesus' family tree. They were commenting on the variety of characters in Jesus' ancestry, how some were famous Biblical characters known for following God and how some were people that would not be considered at all "religious," or as one of the kids put it, not like he pictured "church people."

God used a Sunday school video clip to speak to me yesterday. I hope, if God was speaking to others beside me, they were listening as well. Jesus of Nazareth, the one sent to redeem and restore the world, came from a pedigree of bastards, murderers, prostitutes, and cheats.

God can use any of us to birth the Divine into the world. There is nothing we can do to disqualify ourselves. One is used by God because God chooses to use one, despite one's education level, title, station in life, social class, or criminal record. Of course, our life experience may make us more or less fit for particular ministries, but none of us are disqualified and, therefore, none of us exempt.