Prepositions Can Be Tricky

2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17

When I was in the sixth grade our class performed a play called, "The Case of the Missing Part of Speech". It's a play in which the different parts of speech are taught under the premise of a professor who can't find something, so he goes to a detective who goes through the different parts of speech to help him find it. What makes the play fun as much as educational is that the parts of speech are taught through music.

That whole experience honestly introduced me to the world of English as a language in such a way that I knew I wanted to learn as much about the structures of that language as I could. One of the songs we sang had to do with prepositions and was sung to the tune of "Yankee Doodle". (A YouTube Search will get you to many links featuring this song.) Because of this, whenever I come across what seems to be a misuse of prepositions my eyebrows rise and my mind won't let me bypass the misuse.

As a result, my reading of this morning's passage was interrupted early on. The opening verse reads, "As to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him." Do you see it? Right there at the end - together to him, not with him.

My first impulse was to go straight to the grammar manual and point out that nothing can be together to something. The word "together" implies that that which follows must be "with". Then, as I was ready to make that leap into search-engine forever-ness I thought to myself, "You know, self, it may not be grammatically correct, but theologically it makes sense."

I began to imagine a fishing boat with its net being towed behind. As the net began to move through the waters it collected fish, all joining together with one another, but not necessarily with the boat. The fish-filled net is joined to the boat, just as we, the followers of Christ, are joined together as well as joined to Jesus.

The more I ponder this image, the more I realize that although Jesus came to live among us, his goal wasn't so much to be with us, but to lead us into a better understanding of God's love. Using my analogy, he's the boat and we're the fish, the net is God's love.

Being honest with myself I rather like this image. Maybe the next time I gather to something I'll take a closer look at it.