Monday, June 22, 2015

While we are weak





Sometimes I feel so weak.  It doesn’t take much to shift me from trusting God to believing all is lost. I feel so overwhelmed by terrible tragedy and the conditions that keep allowing it to happen that I feel paralyzed by hopelessness. I get so consumed by whatever pressing task is demanding my attention, or whatever persistent irritation is soaking up my attention, that all of this piles up within me and leaks out all messy and harsh and weary.

I can swing swiftly from life-giving connection with others to blame, jealousy, resentment or despair. I so easily slip into desperate grabs to secure my well-being, or over-eager attempts to fix and control others, that I don’t even see it happening.  
(Especially when I am too much on social media), from time to time I can almost feel fear’s messages coursing through my veins and feeding my brain.

When I am in this tenuous place, oh how good it feels to let go and rage out; the release! Letting the poison bubble up and spill onto someone who, in the moment, seems so deserving of it!  It is a nasty decadence. But I can testify to this truth: immediately afterwards, I feel putrid inside.  And I see the injury my words have caused in another person and the harmful disruption in our relationship, and what a moment ago felt like indulgent release ultimately makes me feel worse than I did when I started.

We are moving this summer through Romans and in jumping from chapter one to chapter five, we have skipped the part of the letter where Paul says nobody is righteous – nobody on their own is in right relationship to God, the true orientation of our being; every single one of us is under the power of sin. But God’s faithfulness to us is what frees us from the bondage to sin - that which destroys and tears apart our souls and relationships, destructive, pain-causing inhumanity that threatens to overtake us and that we sometimes, often, choose to succumb to.

Sin says it’s me against you; me for me, and you for you.
Sin looks like bondage to our own wants and needs over and against those of others. Bondage to acting like we’re in it alone or against, when we all belong to each other.  
Bondage to a mentality of insufficiency, scarcity, blame and hopelessness; holding onto unforgiveness like a weapon, that eats us from the inside.

In sin we compare and we judge and we give up.  We try to earn the approval of God or the world.  And we are slaves to fear, and trapped in the need to be right.  
Sin is not hypothetical; it shapes how we understand ourselves, how we interact with people, the very way we live in the world.

This impassioned and heady letter that Paul is writing, filled with what he truly, deeply believes, is not just in order to shape what other people believe. Paul’s goal is really, essentially, to change how people live. He wants to help them live in the way of God instead of the Way of Fear.  Paul describes the way of God, the Kingdom of God, as “life in the spirit,” “being a slave of Christ” and “true freedom,” and calls the way of fear “life in the flesh,” “slavery to sin,” and “bondage.”

So as we go along, and get into some specifics each week of different chapters in Paul’s letter to the Romans, I want us to remember the big picture: this is about freedom, living free as people who belong to Christ and not to sin.  But Paul wants us to know that true life, true freedom, can only paradoxically come through death – death to sin, death to the way of fear, entering into Christ’s death and resurrection to be made alive to our true reason for being: to be in the relationship of trust where our life comes from God and reaches out to each other in love.

But, we can’t get there on our own.  On our own we let fear tell us who we are instead of faith.  Instead of trusting God’s bond with us that will never let go to tell us who we are, we live like slaves to sin, powerless to stop our participation in destruction.

But, while we were weak, Paul says, while we were unable on our own to choose anything but our own demise, Christ died for us. 

Why would God do this?  Maybe, rarely, we could understand someone actually choosing to die for an impressively good person, but not so with God-  God proves his great love for is in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.  
While we were enemies, God reconciled us to each other. God didn’t say Get it a little more together first, and get back to me. God said, Now, you, just as you are, in the farthest from me you can be and the most against me you can get, I choose you. I love you. I claim and forgive and welcome you.

So Paul begins this portion of the letter, “Therefore, having been justified” - made right with God and each other and eternity- “by faith,” – by trusting in God’s faithfulness to us through Jesus, “we have peace with God.”

You and I have peace with God. Peace! With God! God is not against us. God is for us. God’s faithfulness, Jesus’ own relationship to God, is what gets to set the terms for our relationship with God.  Not our failures.  Not our weaknesses and our trappedness and shame and not all the ways we hurt each other or ourselves.

What good news is this?? What gospel promise that keeps on bringing new life is this? That you and I cannot be held captive by our anger or pain or secret destructions, or broken relationships? That hatred and evil and destruction don’t get the last word?!  No! The final word is God’s love and God’s faithfulness and God’s redemption! 

If this is true, if there is nothing that can separate us from God’s love, then, in fact, the very thing we fear most and spend our whole lives trying to avoid at all cost, suffering and death, cannot separate us from God or God’s intentions for our lives, or the world, even.  God is making us part of God’s relentless mission of love to be bearers of hope and truth tellers in a world of lies and false promises, and that will not be swayed or thwarted – even by suffering.  The way of God will prevail.

This is not a simplistic formula – “Suffering is good because it makes you strong!” This is an abysmal thing to have said to you when you are suffering.  When I was a hospital chaplain, much of what kept people from wanting to be prayed for or visited by anyone “religious” was the fear that this sort of thing would be said to them.  Some form of “This is God’s plan. Suffering is good.”
Hear this: Suffering is not good; suffering is terrible. It is suffering.  But here this too: that doesn’t stop God for a second. Nothing can stop God’s love and redemption.  Not the most terrible thing we can dream up, or do, or experience; nothing has the power to stop God’s love.
What Paul is saying here is not prescriptive – telling them what to think or feel or believe about suffering, it’s descriptive – showing them something true – nothing can stop the mighty love of God.

Suffering is awful, but as many of us can attest to, God can use suffering to create in us a kind of deep and enduring strength, which forms character, which produces hope – and hope does not disappoint, Paul says, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.  God’s love has been poured into our hearts! 
Something has been poured into our hearts that can lead no other place in the end but hope.

This week I listened in heart-breaking wonder to the family members of the slain in Charleston speak out of great suffering of all things, forgiveness, anger and forgiveness, anguish and forgiveness. They stood there in faith and spoke out an unshaken commitment to love, and refusal to let hate win.  People can’t do that.  We are not capable of that kind of action. Only something poured into their hearts through the Holy Spirit enabled them to stand up there and be defined by God’s love instead of their pain and the evil that has stolen from them. That is sheer grace.  And it shows itself to be the most powerful thing on earth when even terrible suffering and utter evil cannot stem the tide of love.

And I want you to see the potent ripples this kind of thing has: trusting in their bond with God in such a powerful way as to step out and speak forgiveness in the face of such horrific evil is a humanizing and redemptive act- for themselves and their own future, but also for the one who became a vessel of evil. Instead of calling him a monster, which carries with it no expectation of anything other than evil, and even accepts violence as the only effective response to violence, their forgiveness calls him a person, and calls him to account as a person. It forces him to face what he has done and its impact on other persons to whom he is bound.  It makes him have to reckon with his God.  And it exposes the way of fear and hatred for what it is, and calls us all to account in the vast contrast with the Kingdom of God.  It reveals that God has another way altogether, than the one we so passively accept.

This kind of forgiveness, that comes from the love God pours into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, frees those who are suffering from eventually becoming entrapped in hatred.  It doesn’t end the grieving, oh no – grieving is holy, essential work that honors life and upholds God’s intentions for it, and mourning should never be silenced, quelled, hurried or solved.  Grieving joins our hearts to God’s heart.  But forgiveness takes human beings out of the God business, out of the life and death and judgment and retribution business, and puts us back in a place where we can receive God’s grace and find true freedom, even in grief and suffering- it keeps us connected to each other and God.

We have peace with God, you and I.  We stand in grace.  We are defined by the love of God, to be bearers of that reconciliation and love in the world. And when the times come to act from that bond of trust in God, be it in immense suffering and loss, unfathomable forgiveness that sets us free, great conflict and challenge, or small steady steps of consistent obedience – it is the power of the Holy Spirit, the love of God poured into our hearts, that fuels us.  It is not our own goodness or strength – God knows we are not inherently able to remember and act out of the truth of who God made us to be, (we can't just fix what we keep on breaking) – we need a savior. 

It is the power of the savior, who took on all that separates us from God and bore it in his very being, allowing it to claim and even destroy him, only to overcome death with life-  that is the power to forgive, the power to heal, the power to restore what is broken, the power to be vulnerable in our weakness and to come alongside us each other in love and share each other’s suffering. 

Faith like Abraham had, Paul says just before our text today, trusts that God can bring life out of death. Do we have that? 
When such terrible death happens do we trust that God can bring life from it?
Do we hold up the broken life consumed and used up by evil who would commit such an atrocity and believe that God can bring life out of death? 
Do we look at our broken country, so steeped in centuries of lies that allow violence and oppression and poverty and corruption to multiply and thrive within and among us, and believe that God can bring life out of death? 
That there is another way and God is bringing that way? 

What about our own hearts? 
Do we believe God can bring life out of death when we act like slaves to fear and anger and apathy, when we give into self-indulgence and sin, instead of trusting that we belong to love? Can we step into the trust that sets us free and find new life again?  Can we let our lives be used by God to bring new life into the places of death and despair around us?

Later on in Romans Paul will say that this kind of trust is most hard for those who already think they are faithful.  That’s me.  Lord, have mercy.

But today, right now, I choose to live in freedom.
And I already know I will fail. I already know I will slip into believing lies, trusting fear, letting worry or despair tell me what is real and either knowingly or unknowingly participating in destruction.  But thanks be to God that it is not my faithfulness but God’s – in Jesus Christ – that saves me and helps me to live free. That it is only through Jesus – who keeps calling me to trust, to faith, that my life is made whole.

So perhaps for me, and maybe for you too, it begins by saying,

Lord, I am weak.
I am incapable of trusting, unable to live in freedom, 
and I keep on choosing bondage instead of life. 
But I see the power of your love.
I see what forgiveness can do, and what hope opens up;
I have experienced your grace
and I want to be part of it with my whole being.
I want faith to tell me what is real instead of fear.
I want my life to participate – to grieve and forgive and set free and heal and welcome and repent and witness your redemption every single day; Lord, use me.
Help me to trust in your faithfulness.
Help me to believe that you always bring life out of death,
 and to trust that you will bring life from the places of death 
within and around me right now.
Connect my being again to your own,
that I may know you love me,
and that my life may flow from that truth.

Amen.

Sunday, June 7, 2015

Dear Fellow Faithers...




Paul is about to write a doozie of a letter, a tome, that one scholar (NT Wright) calls an “Alpine peak that towers over the hills and villages” of his other writings.  

Dear Romans…

Oh, he has so much to say to them! 
He is going to say something about everything he believes in and all that leads him! He is going to go on and on and paint the whole picture for them, and for us: all about our relationship to God and all the things we turn to instead, and how we have been made free but continue to live as though we were slaves to sin, and about grace and how it changes us and invites us always back into that freedom. About how it’s for everyone, and all that it looks like to live in freedom and life with God and each other. 
He’s going to unpack it all!

And he needs to start out by saying that it all begins with Jesus and comes back to Jesus.  That in him we are reconciled to God, called God’s beloved, called to be followers, sharers in grace. 

And even though he really is going to say all of this in such a very thorough way in the letter, he can’t help himself, so he launches right into it with his greeting, filling the return address box with perhaps the world’s longest run-on sentence. It begins, “From Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God” which is this – about Jesus, who is this - and then goes on to jam it with an ever unfolding description of what it all means, dropping descriptions open like an accordion file, one leading to the next, leading to the next, conjunction upon conjunction, like scarves being pulled from the clown’s sleeve.  Before I even say hello, this is what I want you to hear- where this gospel begins and what it’s for.

 “Gospel” means good news, and Paul is insistent that it is not just some flat message; it is the very power of God to change the world.  And it isn’t just words about something that happened – that Jesus came – but it’s truth about something that keeps happening, claiming us and doing something in us and to us and through us, and he can hardly keep from saying it all right off the bat.

I tried to diagram this opening sentence, and instead ended up making lists about all subjects and objects in the text – God, Jesus, the gospel, Paul, the Romans, others, how the text describes them.  Then I added arrows going every which way – the power of God and choosing of God flowing through Jesus to Paul and the believers in Rome, the way Paul sees his whole mission and calling as coming through Jesus, from God, and connecting him to them.  It’s all a lovely web of interconnection, really, coming from God and returning to God and empowered by Christ and bringing us to Christ, and needing one another and meeting one another. 
I considered bringing in a ball of string and asking people to stand up here and throw it around as each person is mentioned as the source, recipient or vehicle of action, so we can see how Paul really does see it all connected to God through Christ, inviting each other to trust God, and finding that when we hear about one another’s obedience of faith our own faith is strengthened all the more.

At our session meeting Thursday I shared about a hard decision I had to make to say No to something I had already said Yes to.  And part of the decision process for me was realizing that living in God’s abundance, instead of in scarcity, means accepting that I am a limited human being.  And it means believing that I can trust that God will accomplish what God wants to do through those who can participate in freedom and joy.  It means not choosing to do something because I am afraid to miss out (which I often am) or because I think somehow God can’t get it done without me (which, unfortunately, I often do).  And, after three days of hesitating, when I finally said No, I felt peace and release. I felt like I was living into trust in God and my interconnection in the world.

And when I shared this with the other folks at session, more stories came out, about the courage to live in trust instead of fear.  And how it feels when we do, and how hard it is to do.  How we are so pulled toward wanting to live in fear and self protection – what we will hear Paul call slavery to sin -  and instead we are to be, as Paul describes himself here, "a slave of Jesus Christ," meaning that everything in our life reflects the life of the one to whom we belong, who sets us free to live in love and connection to God and each other, instead of being trapped in cycles of self-protection that shut others out, and self-destruction that shuts God out.

And what a gift it is not to be in this alone!  We looked around the table at each other and could feel how we need to hear each other’s struggles with this, and share each other’s successes, how we help each other to trust and to live in the promise of God’s freedom and life when the alternative is breathing down our necks all the time.

I imagine the community in Rome receiving this letter from Paul.  Getting the huge package from Fed Ex and breaking open the seal.  They had not yet met Paul, and wouldn’t until years later when he ended up in Rome under house arrest and they could visit him whenever they wanted to hear him teaching from his front porch rocker in between writing letters to other churches and people far and wide. 

But Paul has heard of the believers in Rome, and they have heard of him, and they all know are in this thing together.  And Paul is longing for the chance to sit down with them in a way that strengthens all of their trust and encourages them all in this life in Christ.

They didn’t have things figured out.  They were bumbling along, messing up and learning from it, having conflicts and sorting them out, facing adversity and persecution and figuring out who they were in the midst of it, as they learned how to be in relationship with God and each other in this new way. Jews and Gentiles, with all these different beliefs and cultural practices that had shaped their upbringing, and still directed their lives, trying to figure out together how to follow this Jewish Messiah and what it means to be in the Body of Christ together. 

Imagine what it felt like to open this giant letter, filled with deep theological explanations, how rich and wonderful it would be to begin to digest it with one another! To read it aloud all together, and lay it alongside the scriptures the Jewish brothers and sisters brought with the stories of God’s faithfulness of old. To speak it out beside the word of mouth stories from Jesus-followers passed around, and use it to enlighten the transformative encounters with God through the Holy Spirit they themselves had, and to wrestle together about what it all means and how to live faithful to it.

There was no bible yet. This letter, which ends up in the bible, would’ve been such a gift, such instruction and direction and encouragement.  
And perhaps Paul is thinking about this as he begins in such an intense, verbose and deliberate way – drawing their attention immediately to Jesus, to their connection to God through him, and to their mutual call to faith and trust.

So our verses today from this letter are the address label and the opening greeting, the delicious doorway into what’s coming - Paul’s message that will unfold wider and wider, into a huge, colorful, elaborately detailed canvas of language and ideas, explanations and admonitions, words that point to the reality that we are drawn into the life of Jesus Christ and all the rest of everything else begins from this place and leads back to this place.

And it is by faith that this happens.  “The righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith,” it says.  We are going to spend a lot more time with this word, so let me just introduce it in Paul’s introduction – his thesis statement for the whole letter that our text ends with today - by saying Faith is trust, but it also has loyalty in it, and it originates in God’s trustworthiness and loyalty, God’s relationship to God’s beloved people, and Jesus relationship of trust and obedience to God, and we are called to participate in that.

There is one word family, pistis, that encompasses “believing, trusting, faith, faithfulness, belief, trust” and can be translated any of these ways or even as some verb form like, "faithing."  One scholar (Michael Gorman, in Reading Paul) explains, “Forms of this word-family appear in Paul’s letters more than 200 times. Depending on the context, Paul can stress one aspect or another of this complex phenomenon that we…refer to as faith.”

So in “faith” we are drawn into this bond of trust that exists between God and Jesus, this connection that binds us to one another in love, and shapes our lives into a response of trusting and faithing, and helping each other do the same.

If we zoom up from the big web we’ve just created from imaginary string, here is basically what Paul is so eager to get started saying: we’re all called by God into a life defined by God’s saving love in Jesus Christ that happens through a trust relationship opened up to us in God.

I want to close by reading you a paraphrase of these verses (adapted from Eugene Peterson's The Message), and I am going to ask you to close your eyes and imagine that this letter is coming to you. 

We are going to pause a few minutes, and I invite you to call up in your mind where you are right now in your own faith, by which I mean, consider, and then hold in your imagination, an honest sense of your own relationship of trust with Jesus, your connection to other believers/trusters, and how that trust plays out or doesn’t, in your life these days… 

I, Paul, am a devoted slave of Jesus Christ on assignment, authorized as an apostle to proclaim God’s words and acts. I write this letter to all the believers in Minneapolis, God’s friends.

The sacred writings contain preliminary reports by the prophets on God’s Son. His descent from David roots him in history; his unique identity as Son of God was shown by the Spirit when Jesus was raised from the dead, setting him apart as the Messiah, our Master. Through him we received both the generous gift of his life, and the urgent task of passing it on to others, who receive it by entering into obedient trust in Jesus.

You are who you are through this gift and call of Jesus Christ! And I greet you now with all the generosity of God our Father and our Master Jesus, the Messiah.

I thank God through Jesus for every one of you. That’s first. People everywhere keep telling me about your lives of faith, and every time I hear them, I thank him. And God, whom I so love to worship and serve by spreading the good news of his Son, knows that every time I think of you in my prayers, which is practically all the time, I ask him to clear the way for me to come and see you. The longer this waiting goes on, the deeper the ache. I so want to be there to deliver God’s gift in person and watch you grow stronger right before my eyes! But don’t think I’m not expecting to get something out of this, too! You have as much to give me as I do to you.

Please don’t misinterpret my failure to visit you, friends. You have no idea how many times I’ve made plans for Minneapolis. I’ve been determined to get some personal enjoyment out of God’s work among you, as I have in so many other non-Jewish towns and communities. But something has always come up and prevented it.

Everyone I meet—it matters little whether they’re mannered or rude, smart or simple—deepens my sense of interdependence and obligation. And that’s why I can’t wait to get to you in Minneapolis, preaching this wonderful good news of God.

It’s news I’m most proud to proclaim, this extraordinary Message of the power of God for new life to everyone who trusts him, starting with Jews and then right on to everyone else! God’s way of putting people right shows up in the acts of faith, confirming what Scripture has said all along: “The person in right relationship with God by trusting him REALLY LIVES.” 


Amen.

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