"Tight lines" is a blessing fishermen offer each other, a wish for lines taut with the weight of good fish. May God grant that the lines written here be taut with His blessings.
Tuesday, 26 May 2009 | |||
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The Groaning Spirit | |||
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Our coffee maker seems to speak in the wordless groans Paul
mentions in verse 26 of our text for this coming Sunday,
Romans 8:22-27. As it perks coffee, if all else is quiet, one's ears
get the impression of a conversation going on just beyond the range of
intelligibility, as if a radio show were playing in another room. Which
is exactly what we thought the sound was the first time we heard
it. So our groaning coffee maker is the sound I imagine as I think about how the Holy Spirit comes alongside and prays with us in our prayers. In the text, the groaning intercession of the Spirit resonates with the groaning of the whole creation in verse 22 and we ourselves groaning inwardly as we wait for the completion of God's kingdom, which Paul here describes in verse 23 as waiting "eagerly for our adoption, the redemption of our bodies." For myself, there are two sorts of occasions when I find myself "groaning inwardly" in eager waiting for what God is going to do. The first is on deeply moving, beautiful occasions when I have the feeling that I would like to stop time and simply stay in that moment. A happy family gathering, a bright morning beside a mountain lake, or a joyful gathering at the Lord's Table will make me sigh inside for the day when such gladness and beauty will actually be forever. On the other hand, those times when I feel deeply that something is not right with myself or the world also make me grown inwardly. Moments of sorrow for past sins, sitting beside someone dying or in pain, or just seeing creation's beauty blighted with some garbage or ugly development all cause me to groan for God's new and better day. And as Paul says in verse 26, I don't even know quite what to pray at such times. Praying for a good moment to last or a bad one to end soon seems trite and generally fruitless. Our sighs for the redemption of ourselves and our world really do often seem beyond words. That's why the gift of the Holy Spirit's own groans is so wonderful. He prays with us when we do not know what to pray for ourselves. The word for "help" in the phrase, "the Spirit helps us" in verse 26 carries with it an image of one person coming alongside another to pick up one end of a load. This business of communicating with God the deepest longings of our hearts can be a massive burden, but God Himself has chosen to carry it along with us. Verse 27 arises out of the fact that God knows both Himself and us better than we do ourselves. So out of that deep understanding of who we are and what He desires for us, He sends His Spirit to pray with us better prayers than we can pray alone. Even when we do not know what God's will is, the Spirit is bringing our prayers into conformity with His will. So as our coffee maker groans, or the wind moans through the trees above our house, or as I feel my own aching sighs for things to which I cannot even give words, I rejoice in the sounds and the feelings as signs of God's helping, groaning Holy Spirit. May He lift and carry all our prayers deep into the presence of God. | |||
Thursday, 14 May 2009 | |||
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We Shall Overcome | |||
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I'm just barely young enough to have missed the impact which
the signature song of the civil rights movement had on friends and
colleagues a little older than I. Though it's hard to grasp it fully,
with a secularized account of the civil rights movement now an accepted
part of the American story, "We Shall Overcome" reflected the
Christian spiritual roots of the hope in which a generation demonstrated
for fair and equal treatment of people of all races. Ultimately the hope which motivated the civil rights marchers goes back to the connection we've seen drawn throughout I John between love for God and love for others, between a living faith in the saving work of Christ and living acts of love in the name of Christ. In I John 5:1-8, John begins the final weaving together of these two threads. In verse 4 we receive reassurance that the Christian hope is not just for a world of love somewhere in a future paradise, but that the love of Jesus Christ is already breaking into, transforming and overcoming this troubled world. The common lectionary ends the lesson with verse 6, an odd stopping point because there is a natural break between verses 5 and 6. Verse 6 begins a line of thought that really carries forward all the way through verse 12 or 13. So I've opted to extend the reading on through verse 8 for this coming Sunday. It's partly because verses 7 and 8 are so wonderfully mysterious and the lectionary leaves them completely out of any assigned reading. Verses 7 and 8 are certainly difficult. They were apparently corrupted in Latin texts of the third or fourth century (adding a specifically Trinitarian mention of Father, Son and Holy Spirit). Even with the addition the meaning is murky. What is the significance of the testimony of the "the Spirit, the water and the blood?" Augustine tries to work it out in terms of the Trinity, arguing that the Spirit here is actually the Father who is pure "spirit" (see John 4:24), the water is a symbol of the Holy Spirit (see John 7:38, 39), and the blood is a symbol for Christ. I prefer an ancient understanding which sees the water and the blood as the brackets of Christ's ministry, His baptism and the Cross. From there we can understand Spirit, water and blood as ongoing witness to the life and work of Jesus in the life of the Church, specifically in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit and in the sacraments of baptism and holy communion. Thus the arena for victory in Christ is seen to be the worshipping Church. If love for God and love for each other is going to take form in a visible overcoming of the present world, then it will take place within the lives of a people who gather in a community collected by the Spirit and marked by the celebration of the sacraments. In other words, the Christian practice of love cannot be separated from nor replace our practice of worship. So let me with utmost respect for the zeal and loving spirit of sister congregations, question a recent innovation by which some fellowships have taken to dispensing with Sunday worship, as often as once a month, in favor of a morning of community service. I hesitate to disparage this, because so much good is being done and so much good will is generated. Yet I do wonder if the spiritual energy which pushes us into loving service can be sustained if we start to sever the connection between the witness of Spirit, water and blood and the good we are trying to do. Even more deeply, I wonder if we can continue to be people of God, people of Christ, without the continual and regular witness of worship and the sacraments. In the meantime, for me and our congregation, I freely admit that we are probably stronger on the worship side and need to be drawn a little more into visible displays of the reality that Christ is overcoming the world in our midst in acts of love. So my questioning of the practice of others is only with a deep sense of my own deficiencies. And, in the end, thanks be to God and not to our own efforts, we shall all overcome, or better, He shall overcome. | |||
Wednesday, 06 May 2009 | |||
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The Antidote to Fear | |||
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I just discovered a kind of backward reassurance in the
challenging passages we've been reading from I John. In this week's text,
I John 4:7-21, the apostle once again emphasizes the command he's
been pushing all along, to love one another. The challenge of the command
is especially strong in verse 8, "Whoever does not love does not
know God" and in verse 20, "If we say we love God yet hate a
brother or sister, we are liars. For if we do not love a fellow believer,
whom we have seen, we cannot love God, whom we have not
seen." As I struggle with my feelings toward a handful of people who have troubled my life, John's emphasis on love toward others is not very comforting. When I struggle to love a difficult person, John causes me to fear that my love toward God may be bogus. I was oddly relieved to read a sermon by William Brosend, at the beginning of which he suggests that all John's talk about love in this letter signals that relationships in the Christian community to which he wrote must have been pretty dicey. Brosend suggests that John's church was not unlike our churches today, where we constantly deal with fractured relationships. Thus, as I said, it's a kind of backward reassurance or the pleasure of company in misery. Yet it helps me when I reflect on the fact that even then, in the first decades of the church, Jesus' people needed to be strongly and pointedly reminded of His command to love each other. . . because they weren't any better at it than I am. Even more helpful in this text is John's constant reassertion of the priority of God's love over our love. Verse 10, "This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us. . ." Verse 16, "And so we know and rely on the love God has for us." Verse 19, "We love because he first loved us." Any love we have begins in God's love. We are not asked to manufacture our own output of love, but are invited to tap into the prior gift of God's love to us in Jesus. That's how, despite all our own imperfection and failure to love each other, we can still receive and begin to live in God's "perfect love" that "drives out fear." There remains an urgent call to grow in love. I can't become complacent on the basis that John's church was no better than our own in the business of love. Changing that is one major point of his letter. What we learn is that we have no need to despair when we fail in love. We need not fear God's judgment as verse 17 says. We may continually return to the fount of love in what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. From that starting point, we can make faulting and humble progress in learning to love each other, and thus genuinely demonstrate in our lives that God's love is real. | |||
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I am the pastor of Valley Covenant Church in Eugene, Oregon. I love to flyfish and hike along the beautiful rivers in our area. I welcome your comments as I share sermon work in progress and occasional other thoughts.
Thank you for visiting this blog. I invite you also to visit my web page.
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