Why Roots? / Rooted in Christ

In a time long, long ago, before the advent of yard maintenance folk (you know, like when I was a kid), my parents used to pay me to pull weeds. Don’t tell them, but I used to get some weird pleasure out of it. I used to love getting the perfect pull. When the whole root comes out, and all you have to do to get the dirt of is shake it a little bit, yeah, the perfect pull…what a thrill.
I bring this up because if you have ever stopped to look at a root it has different shoots that go in different directions; they spread hoping to reach into the rich soil that surrounds the plant. The food they supply to the plant will ultimately travel through the one main shoot, but the plant would not grow as big, or be as stable if the roots did not spread and draw strength from many sources. I would like to say that the Christian faith is like a root. As followers of Christ we can draw strength from many sources.
Our relationship with Christ is like the main shoot, it is fed through Scripture, our faith families (a.k.a church), and through the stories of those who have come before us. In the months that follow, I will elaborate on how I see each of the sources feeding our faith. For this month I want to focus on being rooted in our relationship with Christ, after all, He is the shoot that all other sources must flow through.
I had long thought that being a Christian was all about being good and doing the right thing. We are not to ask questions, but to silently follow a set of rules. As a Christian you can do this, but you can’t do that. I thought you could, for lack of a better phrase, “earn your way into heaven.” It has only been over the last five or six years that I began to wonder about the purpose of Creation, and the role of the Cross.
Why did God create us? Why would an infinite, perfect being choose to create us, a people He knew would choose to sin against Him? It is difficult to imagine, isn’t it?
As I went about my study, a very different picture began to appear. It seems that since the beginning of time God has taken a special interest in humanity. He was in relationship with Adam and Eve in the Garden. Even through the story of Adam and Eve’s first sin we see God’s intense and intimate love for them. God wants to have a relationship with His creation; He wants to have a relationship with us.
The whole of the Biblical witness speaks to this truth. God is continually speaking to His creation. First he speaks through the patriarchs, then the judges and kings, then the prophets and priests, and in the ultimate act of redeeming love He sends, and speaks through, His Son. A suffering servant sent to live, die, and be raised for us. Not only does Christ speak of loving God and each other, showing humanity the Father’s heart for His creation, but He loves us in what He
would call the greatest love. He gives up His life for his friends, that we might become His brothers and sisters, and sons and daughters of the Most High God.
God chose to create humanity because He wanted to share with something outside Himself the perfect community He experiences in the trinity. Picture if you will a perfect community of three distinct persons bound together by one substance. It has been described as the heavenly dance, a dance whose partners’ serve and love one another perfectly. Giving and receiving, serving and accepting, the dance goes on in perfect love, in perfect community. It is out of the overflow of this perfect love that God decides to create humanity, to join into this community.
It is through accepting the truth that God wants to be in relationship with us, and accepting that through Christ He has made it possible, that we gain right standing before God. What Christ has accomplished on the cross is a work of reconciliation. Because of the cross, and the sending of the Holy Spirit we are freed from sin, able to learn how to live in right relationship with one another. When we learn to live ROOTED IN CHRIST, we learn to live in community with God and one another the way we were intended to in the beginning. It is in these relationships, which Christ has made possible, that we are able to fully enter into the creation we were intended to be. The rules of the Christian life are not about restricting oneself from experiencing life, rather they are guidelines given by God that we might truly experience it.