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Deutsche Version | Wiki Start | Topics Collection iii

Clean Up ...

Friday, December 16, 2011. In the time before Christmas many of us are trying to geht their home prepared for the Christmas days. Cleaning up, however, can take place on many levels … lets have a look!

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Cleaning Up in My Home and Job …

Some of us are cleaning up their homes. We clean the living room, decorate everything nicely with some stars and pictures. We clean the kitchen, prepare everything for the big Christmas dinner. We clean bathrooms and bedrooms. It is good to have these special occasions where we do what is often postponed during usual busy days.

I have been cleaning up my “todo-lists” in my job over the past weeks. All what I did not manage to do I tried to get done before I go into two weeks of Christmas holiday. I did not manage everything … there are many scientific projects which will take me more time and urgent management things have been pressing in from the side. But still I managed to get many things off the table, such that I can now start to touch the more fundamental questions I am working on.

In my science, cleaning up is an important activity. It is not for every day, you can keep cleaning up and moving things around without ever touching the more important questions. But now and then cleaning up is absolutely needed to create new space and capacities for what is important.

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Jesus is Cleaning Up …

My understanding of the life of Jesus is that it is also some cleaning up. He is cleaning up our mess. He is cleaning up guilt and shame. He is cleaning up the big split between God and mankind. He is cleaning up injustice and hatred. He is cleaning up missing love, ignorance and betrayal.

Christmas is a nice story and we all know about the ox and the donkey in the stable, where the Jesus baby was born. Somehow we also know that deeper things are happening here, though we might not be able to fully grasp them. The biblical gospels and letter then give us more insight into this: a child is born to save and to clean. In his death all guilt will be taken away. At the cross, in death and resurrection, God starts with a fresh start. God cleans up our mess!

Christmas is a fantastic beginning of this process. It is not a narrow-minded cleaning of a living room, but a deep and universal process, leading to new life, to transformed existence, to eternal perspective! Cleaning up is necessary … and it happens in Jesus. (Roland Potthast) ... more texts

jn_en_2011_12_16.txt · Last modified: 2017/06/18 16:48 by 127.0.0.1