The God of the Living

Week of November 6, 2016

As we draw closer to the conclusion of the liturgical year which ends with the great feast of Our Lord Jesus Christ King of the Universe, we begin to hear in our proclamation of scripture the themes of heaven.  In today’s Gospel, a question is presented to Jesus.  In heaven, to whom do we belong if there were multiple situations that caused a person to be married in the eyes of God more than once?  Jesus tells us the things of heaven are far beyond what we can imagine.  Our imagination with its finite language cannot describe the infinite.  Jesus also invites us to recognize the God of the living.  He focusses our attention on the God of the present who moves in our world.  We are invited to see every day as a potential opportunity to be faithful and our heavenly Father is faithful to the events and moments of our lives.  God is present in every second and every fraction of a second, whether we are paying attention or not.

As a young child some of my earliest recognition and thinking about God happened when I set up the HO train set and moved trains from place to place.  We were so proud that we could run two trains on two separate tracks at the same time in opposite directions.  One was a passenger train that went from station to station, the other was a freight train that carried all the goods necessary for life.  I would often think about the electricity and power that it took to run the trains.  The controls could slow things down or speed them up.  With the twist of a dial a train could pass the station and not let anyone off.  In my child brain I thought of how we as a family did all of our traveling on trains.  It was as if we were on God’s train board.  He controlled everything and we were under His power and control.  As we went out to Denver on the Denver Zephyr, I would go into the dome car and just watch all of creation pass by and think about the vastness of all God created and how He was always in control.

Our God is God of the living. He longs for us to recognize Him in the faces of our brothers and sisters.  He calls us to use the things of this earth to propel our thoughts towards our relationship with Him and how we are all heaven bound.  Our God is most profoundly God of the living as He feeds and nourishes our souls.  He is God of the living as He crashes into the moments of pain and suffering in our lives and how He lifts up our being to rejoice in an emotion of the purest joy that can only flow from Him.

When I reminisce of the times I felt close to God, I find His fingerprint on my heart.  I know He has done the same for you.

Our God is God of the living.

Reverend John J. Ouper