Monday, March 04, 2013

Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32


Lent 4 - Year C 


Grumbling is an opportunity for teaching. Not direct instruction, mind you, but a story or three. Grumbling indicates there is some unresolved matter at hand. Conscience or some other cognitive dissonance is at work wondering how to resolve a current unsolvable paradigm or misunderstood proposition.

How can a good guy associate with not good guys and still remain a good guy?

This disrupts our easy categorization of who is for us and who is against us.

Notice how all three of the stories respond to grumbling by ending with “Rejoice with me, there is found joy on earth and reflected joy in heaven!” This enters under the grumbling level to plant a new vision seed that would be automatically rejected had the grumblers been instructed to “Get a life” or “Snap out of it” or “Don’t go there” or “Don’t worry; be happy”.

So, in the next 24 hours you are likely to meet a grumbler. You probably already know what they are going to grumble about since we are such creatures of habit and cultural memes. Try preparing a story now, so you can use it later.

This is good practice for next Lent when we could participate in a discipline of daily developing and sharing stories to counter the common grumbles of our time and location.

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