Dense vegetation lining the creek bed across the street from my home houses ants, rats, opossums, squirrels, racoons, hawks, owls, bees, and an uncatalogued menagerie of other species, all sallying into the neighborhood occasionally, just as the undergrowth itself joins vertiginous trees invading the sky. Dominating the scene of towering, verdant flora and teeming, vital fauna, is a bark-stripped, broken remnant which would be easy to disparage. Though more than a stump, it is no longer a tree.
In his message through Moses as they prepare to enter Canaan, Yahweh tells Israel how easily they could be overlooked (“You were not greater in number than any other people”) or even despised (“You were the fewest of all peoples”). Yet in the same breath he declares them his treasured possession: holy, chosen, loved.
Reciprocally, in his first general letter, Peter reminds believers that we gaze not on things most visible—trials, suffering, or even a means of escape—but on Jesus, “whom having not seen,” we love.
The cluttered undergrowth or climbing vines and branches of schedules and interruptions, friends and acquaintances, assignments and contemplations, accomplishments and failures—they clamor in periphery to be focus. In stark relief, rightly sight-center, for us, there is Jesus; for others, our faith.
This week, may our faith rest on and reveal the centered fixity which could only be grounded in Jesus.