Vibrant Life is at the heart of Resurrection Lutheran’s mission.  We are called to live in Christ, to vibrate on Christ’s frequency.  St. Patrick is someone who vibrated to Christ within him.  Born in Roman Britain ca 389, he became a slave in Ireland as a child when  captured by Irish raiders.  After escaping back to Britain, he felt God’s call to preach the faith to the Irish people.   He became an evangelist to his captors.

Are you ready for the True Parade?

Now his Saint Day is celebrated with parades, parties and green beer, and the Protestant pietist in me grates at the excess of desire and appetite.   But I recently read a short section by another Irishman, C. S. Lewis, in his sermon, The Weight of Glory, that gives a different perspective on such desires,

If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith.  Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when inifinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.   We are too easily pleased.

The phrase, We are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when inifinite joy is offered us, strikes me hard today.   St. Patrick Day celebrations are not a bad thing, but even at their best they are pale imitation of what God has prepared for God’s children.  God created us with a “God-shaped vacuum” that we long to fill.  Alcohol, sex, wealth, and ambition can not fill the vacuum.  We have a thirst, a desire, for God’s joy that we only partially fill in this life.   Heaven is where we will be fully what God created us to be and our celebration will have no end.  In heaven all life will be vibrant.

How have you experienced Vibrant Life?