Seriously, What Is Forgiveness?

Text: Mark 2:1-12

Forgiveness is a common word in our faith vocabulary much like the words grace, faith, truth, love, and even the word God.  These words reflect foundational elements in our faith yet I think we readily use them without really knowing about what they mean.  This morning I want to look at what we mean by forgiveness because I think what we think we mean by it isn't exactly what we find in the Bible.

So what do we mean by forgiveness?  In the last 25 or so years something called forgiveness has made its way into the world of emotional therapy and healthy lifestyles.  Several studies were done that demonstrated that forgiving can contribute to our being happier and healthier whereas not forgiving and bearing a grudge can do the opposite.  So, it seems that there is something cathartic or soul cleansing about forgiving.  This is why if you look the word up in a more recent dictionary you will find that the subject of feelings comes up.  Forgiveness gets defined as a process one goes through in order to stop feeling anger or resentment towards another or to stop feeling like you need some sort of retribution for a wrong done to you.  You've heard people say, "Just let it go."  Definitions also involve ceasing to require the repayment of debt.

When looking up what it means to forgive in older dictionaries you often find the topic of pardon, to grant pardon to one who has wronged you, to let them go without exacting punishment.  There's also the financial side of things too.  There's also the idea of granting or allowing.  If you go way back to the Old English roots of "forgive" or "forgiefan" it means "to give in marriage".  Thus, it goes without saying that forgiveness and marriage go hand in hand.  The word essentially means "to give completely".  It is the act of giving with a huge sense of finality to it.  You can apply that to wrongdoings, to debts, and so on.  It is to relinquish a rightful claim to something forever, to utterly give it up. 

If I were to philosophize on this a bit I would say that forgiveness and trust go hand in hand.  When a father gave his daughter's hand in marriage it wasn't just an exchange of property as some want to see it.  He was letting go of any claim he had to rightfully be the one who provided for and protected his daughter and in turn completely trust another man and his family with that task.  When somebody wronged another, they in essence broke trust with that person and with the clan.  Therefore, to forgive was to give trust back to the offender.  Forgiveness led to reconciliation not only with the one offended but also with the whole clan.

Summing this up, our modern idea of forgiveness has to do with the cathartic process of letting go of anger and resentment.  The Old English roots of the word, which goes back to just before the 1100's have to do with maintaining trust in communities of people.  There is a bit of a narcissistic flip.  Today, forgiveness deals with me and how I feel.  Back, forgiveness dealt with us and how we trust each other.  Keep this in mind and let's move on to the Bible.

Looking at the Bible, when the word forgiveness comes up it is usually associated with the forgiveness of sins and therefore involves our relationship with God and with one another.   This comes out in the Lord's Prayer when we say forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.  Also in our passage from Mark when Jesus said, "Son, your sins are forgiven" and then the Pharisees got upset because Jesus was doing something only God can do.  There is also our reading from the Psalms this morning, Psalm 32 begins, "Blessed (or happy) is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered."   We can see here an added dimension of our own need to be forgiven not just to forgive.

To get our English translations of the Bible we have to find words in our language that carry the same or similar meaning as the words in Greek or Hebrew.  This is rarely an exact science and it quite often happens that essential meaning gets lost or corrupted as the meanings of words change over time.  A long time ago the church began to use the Old English word "forgiefan" to translate into English a Latin not a Greek version of the Bible.  The Latin word they were trying to translate was perdonare, which means to pardon.  This had the unfortunate side effect of getting the church to think of sins being a ledger of offences for which we are guilty rather than as a disease in our humanity that causes a breakdown in our relationships with God and one another and destroys our God-given dignity as persons and rather makes us ashamed.

The Greek word Jesus uses which we translate as forgiven does not mean a cathartic process of doing away with anger and resentment nor does it mean pardoning a person of a ledger of offences.  The word is "aphiemi" and it simply means "to send away".  Once a year the ancient Israelites had a particular day for dealing with the sins of the people, Yom Kippur - the Day of Atonement.  It involved sacrificing a bull and two goats.  One of the goats was called the scapegoat.  It was called this because the priest would lay his hand upon its head and whisper the sins of the people into its ear and then it was led away into the wilderness where it was then sent away where it could be destroyed by whatever.  When Jesus told the man his sins were forgiven he meant sent away as in scapegoated out of existence.  This is of course pointing to Jesus' death on the cross.

That Greek word "aphiemi" (to send away) is the word that the Jews in Jesus' day were using to translate a particular Hebrew word, which we also translate as forgive.  The Hebrew word is nasah and it means to lift up and carry.  Think scapegoat as well.  The scapegoat carries away the sin of the people.  Our sin is carried away.  I like to think NASA and the space shuttle.  The Psalmist also uses a word, which means covered.  This refers also to the Day of Atonement.  A bull and a goat were killed and their blood, which represented their life, was taken.  The blood now represented life that had passed through death.  The high priest sprinkled it all over the temple and the priests and even the ark of the covenant to do two things: to cover over or cleanse the stain of sin on the people and the temple and to unite God and his people in the blood, this life that had passed through death.  This is why the Psalmist says blessed is the one whose sin is covered over.  This sprinkling of blood of course points us to Jesus death and resurrection and our union with him in the Holy Spirit.

So, with all that in mind what was Jesus telling this paralytic when he said! "Son, your sins are forgiven".  Was he saying that God had gone through a process to cathart his anger at the man or that God now trusts him again?  I don't think so.  Jesus said this when he saw the faith or faithfulness or loyalty of the four men.  They had lifted up and were carrying the paralytic on his mat to bring him to Jesus.  Jesus saw that they were nasah-ing this man and moreover removing every obstacle to bring him to Jesus where they knew he could be healed.  This compassionate act by faithful, loyal friends of carrying or nasah-ing this paralytic to Jesus is why Jesus says to the man that his sins are sent away.  This fellowship of friends were showing this paralytic unconditional love and acceptance by lifting him up and carrying him, bringing him to Jesus to be healed and removing every obstacle on the way.  Remember paralytics were viewed in the same way as lepers and blind people back then.  They were called unclean and cast out of the community because people believed them to be cursed by God for some horrible hidden sin that he or his parents had committed.  People would even refuse to touch them for fear of becoming unclean themselves.  Yet, here were these four men carrying this paralytic on the mat of his disease to Jesus and willingly taking his uncleanness upon themselves because they knew Jesus could and would heal the man.  Jesus saw their unconditional love in action and that's why he said, "Son (meaning you're one of my people), your sins are forgiven."  Whatever was keeping this man cut off from loving community was obviously gone, sent away by these four men lifting him up and carrying him.

So, seriously, what is forgiveness as far as the Bible is concerned?  It is not the cathartic process of letting go of anger and resentment.  It is not pardoning a person of their ledger of offences.  Forgiveness is what happens when a small group of people unconditionally love and accept a sin-sick person, bearing with him in all his weaknesses, bringing him to Jesus, removing all obstacles on the way so that he may know unconditional love and acceptance in Jesus name so that he is no longer outcast (though he may have deserved it).  Small groups of Jesus' people unconditionally welcoming and loving others in their brokenness and helping them to find wholeness in Jesus is what forgiveness is.  If there is a cathartic process of letting go of resentments, it is found while being nasah-ed by faithful Jesus people.  If there is such a thing as having the ledger wiped clean, it is found in the unconditional acceptance of faithful Jesus people.  Welcoming people into community where the unconditional love of Jesus rules the day and helping them to find peace in him is true forgiveness.  So let our way be the way of those four unnamed men.  Amen.

Be Clean

Text: Mark 1:40-45

I used to have a 2000 Chevy Malibu.  I am pretty sure that according to the biblical definition it was unclean.  I lived in fear that anyone who got into it would themselves become…unclean.  What was wrong with the car?  Well first of all, it was a used car that came with a wide array of odours through which it bouquetted with the changing of temperatures.  These odours were initially well masked by the new car smell deodorant that used car dealers have.  There are times when I got in it and I could smell body odour.  Whose it was, I do not know.  At other times it was this musty, yucky, been too wet before smell.  At other times it smelled as if something had decomposed in it.  At other times it smelled like a smokers’ convention.  And smells weren't all, there was an orange patch on the right-hand front corner of the driver’s seat of my own doing.  It was Cheeto residue or Chit and chip grease.  Finally, there was the dust and, well, we all know what dust is made of – meteor debris, pollen, human dander, and disintegrated human mucous solids.  Anyone who braved sitting in my car inevitably would carry away some of its foulness with them.  They therefore encumbered upon themselves its uncleanness.

Well, back in Jesus’ day people with leprosy were looked upon with much the same disdain as my wife did that car (actually it was worse and my sense of humour belittles their circumstance).  Lepers were called unclean and as such they were banished from town to live in leper colonies and had to beg by the side of the road.  People were afraid to touch them for it was believed that not only could the leprosy be passed on, but also the uncleanness.  You see, being unclean meant more than simply being dirty.  Leprosy was one of those things that people considered to be a curse from God because of some terrible hidden sin.  It was an outward expression of an inward diseased spiritual condition.  It was believed that the inward spiritual condition of a leper was so diseased they were not even allowed in the temple to worship God. 

Today, we no longer regard lepers as unclean.  Yet, the notion of uncleanness still pervades.  We all have people in our lives we’d just as soon not be around.  We know people we just don’t want to keep company with and to our shame the reason can simply be any sort of personality quirk or life condition we want to single out and turn our noses up at.  Other times we treat people as if they are unclean because they are difficult people or because they are full of hate and anger or never have anything good to say and we just don’t want to be dragged down into that.  Sometimes it is because the person has hurt us or we have hurt them and we don’t want to mend the relationship.  We can at times treat ourselves as if we are unclean by making ourselves believe that we’re not good enough.  There’s something in our past that we’ve done or was done to us that makes us feel unacceptably different from others and even unacceptable to God.  That’s what it is to be ashamed of ourselves.

But, all of that is not a satisfactory definition of what it is to be unclean.  I’m going to dig out an archaic word that I don’t really like because for most people it is misunderstood and wrongly used to label people.  The word is sin.  Sin is humanity’s condition of hopelessly being and doing other than what we were created to be and do.  God created humanity in God’s own triune image to be a loving community of people who bring order to the creation and voice its praise to its maker.  We were created to enjoy God and worship God and enjoy life.  Instead, we bring disorder and abuse to God’s good creation and instead of finding rest in letting God be God we toil and strive at being our own gods.  When it happens that we become aware of our own sinfulness, our uncleanness, we feel ashamed and the result of that is that we hide from others and from God and all the while live in denial of our uncleanness.  And so, we try to find whatever means we can to keep from feeling the shame and the guilt whether its burying ourselves in self-destructive behaviours or perfectionism or blaming or approval seeking.  And it gets worse, we inevitably pass our uncleanness on to others for, you see, uncleanness is relational in nature.  People hurt us and we hurt others and the uncleanness (brokenness, shame, guilt) gets passed along.  We are all unclean.

But, let’s take a good look at how Jesus dealt with our uncleanness because it’s really moving.  The leper in our gospel reading is a prime example.  The first thing to note is that Jesus was moved with compassion for him.  The leper came before him kneeling humbly yet confident and begged to be made clean.  The leper was tired of being put to shame and of being ashamed of himself.  He wanted his life back.  He wanted to be able to be part of community again and be able to go to the temple to worship.  So, he came to Jesus and said, “If it is your desire, you can make me clean.”  Jesus looked at this man who was a revolting mess, his flesh was rotting on his body and the stench would have been overwhelming, and instead of being moved to disgust Jesus was deeply moved with compassion.  Instead of saying, “Get away from me.  You’re disgusting.”  Jesus touched him – touched the leper and took the leper's uncleanness unto himself.  Jesus the incarnate Son of God became unclean for this man.  He shared in the lepers uncleanness.  Then jesus said, “It is my desire. I want you to be clean.  Be clean.”  Immediately, the leprosy left him and he was clean. 

This is the way Jesus deals with us in our uncleanness.  He has compassion for us.  He touches us with the hand of the Holy Spirit, touches us to take our uncleanness onto himself, and in turn fills us with his cleanness, fills us with knowing the steadfast love and faithfulness of God the Father just as he himself knows it.  When Jesus touches us he touches us with his very self, the Holy Spirit.  God doesn’t say to us, “Get away from me, you worthless disgusting sinners.  You ought to be ashamed of yourselves and you deserve what you have gotten.”  He doesn’t say that.  “He says, “I really, really, really want you to be clean.  Become clean.”  God really, really, really wants us to know how very much he loves us and makes it so we can.  That's why Paul writes:  "God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Rom. 5:8).    He didn't say, "stop sinning so that the benefits of Jesus death can apply to you."  God doesn't make us clean ourselves up before he'll have anything to do with us.  In fact, there is no way we can do that.  Cleanness is a gift that comes with the gift of the Holy Spirit.  For us even to be aware of our uncleanness the Holy Spirit must be working in us.  Otherwise, we are lost in sin and just plain unaware of it.

Sometimes people become aware of their uncleanness and don't know where to turn.  They don't come to church because most of Western indeed North American Christianity has been giving the impression we have to get ourselves right with God before even coming to church.   The Church has been overly concerned with morality in a way that has made those who are in the crisis of uncleanness feel even more unclean.  That's pretty much the same thing the priests, scribes, and Pharisees made lepers feel in Bible times and not just lepers.  That's the way most common people were feeling and since they could not go to the "god-ordained" for God's forgiveness, they were flocking to John the Baptist out in the wilderness for he truly spoke and acted for God. 

People today are doing by flocking to the health care profession for ant-depressants and spending time in the self-help section of bookstores where they find a huge section of self-help books on how to accept yourself and be the you you’ve always wanted to be.  That’s not what it is to be clean.  Being the me I’ve always wanted to be usually means I leave a wake of hurting people behind me as I selfishly pursue my passions and go about being true to mine own heart.  True self-acceptance comes from knowing God's acceptance. Being clean comes from God touching us with the fellowship of unconditional love that God is as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit God and that touch makes us new and then compels us to become those who create deeply compassionate fellowship with others that reflects the unconditional love of the inner life of the Trinity. 

This touch happened for all of humanity in, through, and as Jesus Christ and in that touch God the Son took humanity’s uncleanness into himself and took it into the Communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and there it perished.  When Jesus died on the cross uncleanness died with him.  This touch that began for all humanity when God the Son became the human person Jesus God extends to each of us through the gift of the Holy Spirit so that God’s presence in us puts to death our uncleanness and makes us clean.  It is not God’s nature to be angry and disgusted or revolted with us because of our uncleanness.  It is rather God’s deepest desire to make us clean and just as Jesus touched the leper and commanded him to be clean and it became so, so it is that God touches us each and commands us to be clean and it becomes so.

Winding down, since we are clean we are those who spread cleanness rather than uncleanness.  Our goal is that when people come around us a bit of Jesus rubs off on them.  To do this we must ground ourselves in prayer and strive to pray continually.  In the Greek the same word is used for begging as for praying.  Prayer begins with being mindful of God’s presence continually with you.  If you have to, imagine that Jesus is sitting in the chair next to you or standing next to you.  Sooner or later a door will open and you’ll just know he’s there.  Spend time reciting the Lord’s Prayer or some other verse over and over to yourself.  Take time to pray for the people you know.  Say a silent inward prayer for everyone you come across throughout the day.  Occupy your minds as much as possible in prayer and you will experience cleanness welling up in you along with some other things like joy, contentment, compassion, patience,…the good stuff.

Another way to spread the cleanness is to show hospitality and be gracious and complimentary to everyone you meet.  Welcome people into the joy of your lives with uplifted faces and kind words.  There are other things we can do as well, speaking the truth in love for one, showing patience, listening.  We need to keep in mind that most everybody to varying extents feels unclean and that drives them in the way they are to do the things they do.  It changes people tremendously if we strive to help them feel clean.  In the name of Jesus Christ be clean and spread the cleanness.  Amen.

Are We Going to Dance?

Text: Acts 14:18-28

Baucis and Philemon were just your run of the mill down to earth people who lived in Tyana, a small village in the province of Phrygia (central Turkey).  Their home was a small, rustic cottage with a modest little yard and an old grey goose for a guard dog.  They were a bit out of place in their corner of the world.  All their neighbours were quite well off and lived in lavish estate houses with enclosed yards and locked gates.  One day two ordinary peasants came and asked for a meal.  Baucis and Philemon, having little, were glad to share and so they showed the strangers great hospitality.  They fed them well and as Baucis kept filling their wine glasses she realized that her pitcher of wine was not going empty.  She then surmised that these two men were not ordinary peasants but the very gods Zeus and Hermes in disguise.  So, she figured she'd better feed them the best she could and went out to get the old grey goose.  Well, the old grey goose realizing she was about to be cooked fled into the very lap of Zeus himself who said Baucis need not cook the goose.  Rather, Zeus told Baucis and Philemon they should follow him and Hermes up the hill just out of town because he was going to destroy the town for he and Hermes had been to many houses that day only to be locked out and treated rudely.  When they got to the top of the hill and looked back they saw a flood had destroyed the village and a beautiful temple to Zeus was standing where their house once stood.  As Zeus and Hermes were leaving Baucis and Philemon made two requests: that they be the guardians of the temple and that when it came time for one of them to die they both would die together.  Zeus granted their request and in the bog where they were buried two intertwining trees grew, one an oak and the other a linden.

Well, that's a rough cut of a fable by the ancient Greek poet Ovid found in his work Metamorphoses VIII.  It is a fable which demonstrates the virtuous practise of theoxenia, or showing hospitality to the gods.  This story greatly informs our passage from Acts in which Paul and Barnabas find themselves also mistaken for the gods Zeus and Hermes.  They visit the town of Lystra in the province of Lycaonia which is adjacent to Phrygia where Baucis and Philemon were supposed to have lived.   Paul proclaims the Gospel and there's a man there crippled from birth who believes Paul's message of the Lordship of Jesus Christ the Incarnate Son of God crucified and raised, ascended and returning.  Paul perceives that the man has faith to be saved and tells him to stand up and walk that his salvation may be enacted.  The man does and the crowds go wild lifting up their voices proclaiming that the gods Zeus and Hermes had come down to them.  Knowing their Ovid, which was truth as far as they were concerned, they were not going to let happen to Lystra what happened to Thyana, the town of Baucis and Philemon.  So, they pour on the theoxenia and try to offer sacrifices to Paul and Barnabas thinking they were Hermes and Zeus.  Paul just does get them to refrain from doing that by pointing them to the one true living God who was their Creator.

Interesting to note here is how Paul unknowingly taps into the endemic beliefs about gods the people of Lystra had and when that happens a mass religious movement arises.  Also, interesting to note is how in that mass religious movement people want to idolize or worship the messenger.  Now I would like for you to consider that this is quite possibly what has happened with North American Christianity since it has become media driven.  We should be asking what endemic beliefs about god and the gods has, let's say, Joel Osteen tied into to have such a mass religious movement surrounding him?  What endemic beliefs did Rick Warren at Saddleback Church tie into in Orange County, CA for such a purpose driven way of doing church erupt that really hasn't proven all that successful anywhere else?  The same can be asked of Bill Hybels and the Willow Creek Church seeker-sensitive movement which has proven largely unsuccessful or rather unrepeatable outside of that Chicago suburb. 

To look more broadly at North America as a whole and our endemic beliefs about god and the gods, I contend that Zeus still lingers around the tall steeples of Christendom.  You've come across him I'm sure.  He's the almighty, all-knowing, bearded old man enthroned above the clouds.  He makes it rain or not.  He's the supreme head of the state and of the financial institutions.  He's the great Watchmaker who set the universe in motion and stepped back only to interfere on the side of the Americans and Brits when evil erupts.   He is the ultimate judge of people with respect to the afterlife which is the only thing that really matters anyway for us or should be.  Therefore, if we want things to go well for us, we have to figure out a way to keep the old man upstairs happy with us.  So, we go to our temples to get our moral compasses reset and our egotistical psyches refreshed and maybe give a thought to becoming more altruistic.  We do this because there is a lingering suspicion that the lingering Zeus will get us in the end if we are not good people and upstanding citizens.  Some good modern day crusaders named Bill Bright and Billy Graham developed a message that tied Jesus into our game.  They said this God loves us and has a wonderful plan for our lives.  But because of sin we can't know God, his love, or his plan.  Jesus is the only solution to our dilemma.  So, if we want it to know all this we have to invite Jesus into our hearts. Yet, something happened in the '60's to our lingering Zeus.  He was dealt a mortal blow and he and his temples are slowly and steadily disappearing.  I think maybe Narcissus, Aphrodite, Bacchus, Athena, and the Fates formed a coalition opposition government and are slowly poisoning him and his son Apollos to death.  And Hermes, well, he tries to keep this lingering Zeus in power by masquerading as an agent of change which only gets him whipped or he's the institutions biggest Don Quixote or he's just playing it safe because the institution is paying his salary.  And, I'd better stop before my sarcasm proves to be nothing more than the last defence of a weak mind.

Friends, we truly need to take a fresh look at our doctrine of God. I think there is a huge failure on our, the Church's part, that is affecting our congregational life as Presbyterians.  It is that though we confess that God is Trinity, functionally were are unitarian.  We have bowed at the altar of Christendom's lingering Zeus.  I prayerfully believe that our neglect in "getting God right" - if I may put it as politically incorrect as that - is what is at the heart of our problem with what NCD calls passionate spirituality.  So, in an effort to put us back in the right direction please tolerate me talking about the Trinity with, of course, three points.

Firstly, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, one of the theologians behind the Nicene Creed said, "When I say God, I mean Father, Son, and Holy Spirit."  He realized that people differ in what they mean when they say the word God.  Just ask any American who or what they are referring to as the god mentioned on their currency.  In the Christian faith, God is Trinity - the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Of late we have grown accustomed to confessing that God is Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.  I appreciate the move there to inclusive language, but that move only reduces the Trinity from being a communion of persons to just being actions.  Moreover, God is the loving communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit before creation ever existed and therefore before the actions of creating, redeeming and sustaining ever came onto the picture.  Though it is common in our culture particularly among men to reduce people to being simply what they do, we cannot do that with God.

Secondly, the Trinity is a loving communion of persons.  By person we do not mean what is typically thought of in individualized Western culture.  A person is not an autonomous, rational, decision making animal capable of shaping its own destiny.  A person is rather a relational being.  Yes, there is something uniquely me about me but my me is profoundly shaped by all the relationships that I have been in and continue in.  I am so profoundly shaped by them that I might as well just say that I am the sum-total of all my relationships though to do so would drive us to being reductionist in the opposite extreme.  The Trinity is the loving communion of persons - the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - whose personhood is the relational way of being that forms their identity. God the Father is not Father without the Son and the Holy Spirit.  God the Son is not Son with out the Father and the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit is not Holy Spirit without the Father and Son.  Thus, we cannot be who we are without God and one another.  We are who we are by our relationships with God and one another.

Thirdly, the Trinity is a loving communion of persons formed in the relational and dynamic being of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit through their giving themselves so completely to one another that they are one.  The Greek word for that is homoousion.  They are the same stuff.  They are all the sum-total of the relationship that they share in one another that is distinguished as steadfast love and faithfulness.  Another word the post-Nicene church used to describe their dynamic communion of love is perichoresis.  Peri means around or through.  The chor- part means to contain or indwell or inhere.  So originally the term meant that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit mutually indwell one another or indwell through and around one another.  A word the derives from the chor- part is chorea which means dance.  So, later in the life of the Church perichoresis came to mean the divine dance.  The Trinity is in himself the dancing in, around, and through one another of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in self-giving steadfast love and faithfulness, a dancing that reaches out to us to include us in themself.

So, there you have it God is Trinity - the loving communion of relational persons, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who give themselves so utterly and completely in self-giving, indeed self-sacrificing love that they are One.  I will now say briefly why this matters and to do this we must ask what has the Trinity done for us and not only for each of us but for his whole creation in, through, and as Jesus of Nazareth the Christ the incarnate Son.  Well, let's keep ourselves to simply saying he has done nothing short of restoring his image, thi divine dance of love, in humanity and in so doing has saved, is saving, and will save his whole creation.  Like the man crippled from birth whom Paul commanded to walk and he did, the Triune God of grace makes this salvation, this including us in the dance effectually real in humanity through the powerful working of the Holy Spirit to build community.  The Holy Spirit has been, is, and will continue to bring into existence all over the place small fellowships of people who give themselves to one another in self-giving indeed sacrificial steadfast love and faithfulness.  The creation of these small communities of the body of Christ all over the world is like the sprinkling of the blood of atonement all over the temple on the Day of Atonement in ancient Israel.  

The loving communion that arises among us by the work of the Holy Spirit reflects the true image of the Trinity within the creation.  This is only possible because each of these people, each of us are organically, dynamically, and essentially united, glued, bonded to the Son by the relational working of the Holy Spirit so that we know deeply and personally the steadfast love and faithfulness of the Father for us just as Jesus the incarnate Son knows it for himself.  So, in turn, we want to thank and praise and serve the Father as faithfully as Jesus himself does because it is Jesus, the Son's, own faithfulness that abides in us as our own.  In these fellowships things like forgiveness, reconciliation, mutual affection, graciousness, kindness, peacefulness, self-control, gentleness, and loving one another as Jesus has loved us each by giving himself for us - these relational things are what really matters.  Therefore, a major component of passionate spirituality for us is to work at being the community of people who in their relating together reflect the image of the Triune God of grace because he has adopted us into the dance of his very self.  The people in these fellowships, us, were once crippled from birth by sin and death, but now we live and dance in the life and dance of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit because of what the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have done, continue to do, and always will do in, through and as Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son in the power of the Holy Spirit to the glory of the Father.

Finally, St. Athanasius who was the primary theologian behind the Nicene Creed wrote in his classic The Incarnation that the reason he knew Jesus has been raised from the dead and lives is that all over the world idolatry was ceasing to exist.  So it is today in the church as I see it.  In the church here in in North America the hidden lingering Zeus of Christendom and Christendom itself is dying because Jesus lives and he will no longer tolerate the presence of this false god among his people.  The question that comes to us now is are we going to die with Zeus or are we going to dance?  Are we going to get serious about loving the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and our neighbours as ourselves?  Are we going to get passionate about loving one another as Jesus has loved us each?  Are we going to dance?  Amen.