The Very Image

I.        Vow of Affirmation

“We devote our daily life to God, and to serving our neighbors as images of God”

    
       2.  I will seek the image of God in each and every person;  
               I will treat them as fully worthy of the good I desire for myself.

It’s the cashier at your grocery store, the neighbor whose name you don’t know but you wave to every morning, the sleazebag womanizer on that “reality” show, your favorite song leader at church, your most opinionated and least favorite coworker, your implied national enemy, it’s the gaggle of high schoolers each with eyes and thumbs locked to their phones,  it’s your mother.  The image of God. It is in all of them, it’s in you fractured and trampled in the mud though it may be. 

By Through Painted Eyes via Flickr

“Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness…

So God created humankind in God’s image,

          in the image of God he created them;

          male and female God created them.”

Today we are called to look upon and treat differently those whom we encounter: I will seek the image of God in each and every person; I will treat them as fully worthy of the good I desire for myself. Realizing the image of God in others is not simply Pollyanna practice, nor prideful presumption of human-centered progress. In seeking the image of God in each and every person we can be more brutally honest about human unlikeness to God than strict total-depravity Calvinists and yet also be more positive about inherent value in each individual and group than secular humanists.

For Reflection and Action:

• Who have you seen already today (or yesterday)? If you didn’t notice it then, what traces of God’s image were in each one of those people? What hid God’s image in them from your view?
• Hear again Genesis 1:26a, 27 above. Decide how you will honor the image of God in the next persons you encounter. Name what you see to some of them today.
• Take seriously Matthew 25:31-46. Go find and serve God in one of the least of these.

Prayer Focus:

God, in whose image we have been crafted;

whose image I and we still bear,

 Open my eyes to see your very image in the stranger;

in the hungry and thirsty, naked, sick, and imprisoned ones.

Open my eyes to see and serve the very You in them. May it be so.