St. John the Baptist of New Brighton

Connections&
February 24, 2002--Second Sunday of Lent

Jesus was transfigured before Peter, James and John. Matthew 17:1-9
"God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him." John 3:1-17

The rosebush
A homeowner was making the Saturday trip to the town dump. As he was tossing his bags of trash into the designated area, he saw a pile of tangled vines and plants off to one side. A dot of red caught his eye. In the mass of knotted and torn branches a tiny rosebud was struggling its way upward. The rosebushes apparently had been thrown away by a would-be gardener who could not make them grow and lost patience with them. The man smiled at the persistence of the little bud and went on his way.
The next Saturday, the man returned to the dump site. There was a rose, a little taller, a little straighter, trying to bloom. Putting on gloves, he dug out the bush on which that one bud clung tenaciously to life. He brought it home and replanted it in his own garden. Within days a beautiful rose bloomed. Before long, the whole bush came alive. In fact, that one bush became the showplace of his garden, outblooming and outgrowing the other rosebushes the man would plant. And each year the bush seemed to have one especially long stem with an exquisite red rose on it.

CONNECTION: The rose--and the gardener who rescued it--offers a more complete understanding of humankind's relationship with its Creator. We tend to see God as the great cosmic Ruler, a mysterious being totally detached from us and removed from the human experience. But, in his encounter with Nicodemus, Jesus speaks of God as a loving Father who created us and our world out of love and seeks to restore his beloved creation through an even greater act of love--God's becoming human himself in order that his beloved humanity might realize his dream of becoming holy and sacred. God is the ever patient homeowner who saves the rose, not the impatient gardener who casts into the junk pile whatever disappoints him. Despite our own lack of confidence in things holy, despite our own rejection or obtuseness to the things of God, God is not satisfied with our struggling and dying in a junk heap but comes in the person of Christ that we may grow and blossom into the people God has created us to become.u

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