When God took on flesh in Jesus Christ, the uncreated and the created, the eternal and the temporal, the divine and the human became united. This unity meant that all that is mortal now points to the immortal, all that is finite now points to the infinite. In and through Jesus all creation has become like a splendid veil, through which the face of God is revealed to us.

This is called the sacramental quality of the created order. All that is is sacred because all that is speaks of God's redeeming love. Seas and winds, mountains and trees, sun, moon, and stars, and all the animals and people have become sacred windows offering us glimpses of God.  Daily Meditation, Henry Nouwen

There is something that resonates deep within me when I read meditations like this one from the Henry Nouwen Society. I am continually struck by the richness, fullness and, yes, sacredness of life that meditations like this bring to my mind and my daily experience of life. All the negative and profane things we are constantly bombarded with day to day…. wars, church controversies, homelessness and family tragedies of one type or another, bombard us from every side on a daily basis. This negative experience of life in our world gets the best of us and we tend to believe and act as if that is our only reality.

But when we consider what it is we truly believe (or say that we believe), how is it possible that we can’t see that all life, all creation-- and our place in it-- is sacred. Everything in our Christian tradition points us to this fact. We begin to see the possibility of loving our neighbor as we love ourselves when we are trapped in the daily difficulties of life. And it is most appropriate for followers of Christ to feel this way.

But since we are often our own harshest critics who have a difficult time seeing ourselves as lovable, we don’t always love ourselves. This means that we sometimes do end up loving our neighbors as we love ourselves: poorly and with many negative judgments.

There is a more excellent way. We are greatly loved by God just as we are, and through the incarnation of Christ, we are an important part of all the created order that is at one with our Creator. We have been deemed absolutely lovable just as we are by the Creator of all that is.

Many people have asked me about the sentence I use before the blessing at the end of each service; “You are a new creation, Christ for those to whom Christ will send you.” It is modified from a blessing found in the New Zealand Prayer Book. This crazy notion builds on, and reinforces, the notion that we are all creatures of amazing worth: sacred. The God who created us, redeemed us, and sustains and nurtures us, has made each of us “a new creation” made in God’s image. And as that new creation we are called to be the face of Christ in this sacred world today, going into those places in our daily life that Christ will and does send us.

I believe that it is vitally important for us to hear this affirmation week after week so that we may be reminded of the sacred life we have been given every day. It reminds us that we are the face of Christ to others, and it reminds us that others are the face of Christ for us. We are the beloved of God, and must work at loving ourselves. We need to understand this before we can learn to love our neighbors as ourselves. When we see our life and God’s creation as sacred we see that we are indeed a new creation, Christ for those to whom Christ will send us.

Greg+