Shrouds

SCRIPTURE: But God’s angry displeasure erupts as acts of human mistrust and wrongdoing and lying accumulate, as people try to put a shroud over truth. But the basic reality of God is plain enough. Open your eyes and there it is! By taking a long and thoughtful look at what God has created, people have always been able to see what their eyes as such can’t see: eternal power, for instance, and the mystery of his divine being. So nobody has a good excuse. Romans 1:18-20 MSG

THOUGHT: Do you ever have words that you just don’t like? Maybe for some reason you can’t figure out, they just feel weird in your mouth or carry a bad connotation. Shroud is such a word for me. I don’t like the way it looks or sounds, and I don’t like what it means. Historically, it’s a burial cloth that the body is wrapped in, but it has also come to mean ‘cloaked’ or ‘hidden.’

I’ve never for the life of me understood why if the truth is right before you, you would try to shroud it. If you can see the truth clearly, why not celebrate its rare sighting? Why trouble yourself to make it look like anything else? For example, why after the resurrection of Jesus, are the Roman guards paid to keep silent about what they witnessed at the tomb? (“[The high priests] called a meeting of the religious leaders and came up with a plan: They took a large sum of money and gave it to the soldiers, bribing them to say, ‘His disciples came in the night and stole the body while we were sleeping.’” Matt. 28:12-13 MSG) It’s goofy. Pay people to tell a lie about the wildest event in history – a tomb shook open and a dead man took off his shroud and came out! But so it goes. For whatever reason, the truth gets suppressed and the lies often get idolized and iconized.

Paul says nature reveals the truth of God, plain and simple: people have always been able to see what their eyes as such can’t see: eternal power, for instance, and the mystery of his divine being. But, for the people who don’t want a God, even nature can be shrouded behind acts of human mistrust, wrongdoing and lying.

PRAYER: Oh God, help us who believe see ever more clearly what the world wants to pretend away behind lies and shrouds, to suppress as if dead. Help us speak truth, prophesy truth, and celebrate plain and simple truth.