Back in the 60’s a
form of mental health therapy called Reality Therapy erupted on the scene and
proved to be revolutionary. It helped
people get their lives together not so much by dealing with the past to make
the present better, but rather by making the present better and the past will
resolve itself. When we think of going
to counselors or psychiatrists or psychologists, we imagine that we’re going to
have to lay on a couch and start dealing with our childhood issues to
understand how they affect our lives now.
There’s truth in that approach because we do pick up many emotional
barriers to living life as we grow up and understanding them helps us to be
free of them. Reality Therapy doesn’t
begin with mulling over the past. It focuses
on the here and now.
Reality Therapy
starts with the question: if you were to wake up tomorrow morning and as the
result of some sort of miracle everything in your life was perfect, what would
be different? To answer that question
you have to begin to imagine a new reality and then list a few things. Then, the therapist simply asks: what do you
have to do now to make those things a reality?
You then set about making that new, healthy life a reality with the help
of the therapist who simply coaches them through and gets the client to
acknowledge their fears and childhood emotional barriers and face them as they
arise.
Reality Therapy is a
very practical approach. It really helps
people dive right into the nitty gritty of their own lives lives by the work of
striving to bring about a vision of hope.
Moving to the nitty gritty of this sermon, I think Reality Therapy makes
a good analogy of what God has done and is doing for us through Christ Jesus in
the power of the Holy Spirit.
Let’s just be honest
about Reality for a moment. Reality for
us from the cosmic level right down to the personal level is plagued by a rift
that exists between our loving Father, the Almighty Creator, and ourselves. God created us to live in close fellowship
with himself but for some reason we instinctively rather do our own thing as if
we were gods of our own little worlds.
Even when we do our best not to be our own gods, things still remain
fairly messed up. We can’t seem to see
past our own nose and doing what seems best for it. Even when we say we are simply trying to do
what is right and best for everybody self-interest still lurks on the backsides
of our motives.
This problem, which we call Sin is a
relational disease. It hampers our
ability to know God and to have the close fellowship with him for which he
created us. And, as it is a disease it
leads to Death. Due to this relational
distance from God we start coming up with our own ideas of what God is like – myths,
religions, superstitions – and we start relating to false images of gods that
we make in our own image. The end result
is that we just do not know God and wouldn’t know him if we saw him. The crucifixion of Jesus proves that. What we are left with is a relational
blindness that results in us being self-willed, self-indulgent, and
self-interest and we die.
Getting back to our
analogy of Reality Therapy, if we were reality therapists and had nerve enough
to ask God that if he were to wake up tomorrow and by some miracle overnight it
was now a perfect world, what would be different? I think he would answer that by saying, “My
creation right down to the last sub-atomic particle of it would enjoy
friendship with me as I intended it to enjoy.
This rift would be no more. There
would be no more sin and death and sickness and disasters and people hurting
people and people just plain hurting.
They would love as I love for they would know me as I am.” Playing the roll of the therapist a little
more we would have to push God a bit further and ask him what he’d have to do
to make this perfect world a reality.
Well, if we take what Paul writes here seriously, God’s answer is not to
keep making us miserable until we break and get ourselves right with God so
that we can enjoy his blessing. God’s
answer is that he is going to have to become as we are, knowing sin, and by the
power of his very being destroy it within himself and heal this cosmos by
uniting it to himself…and then we would see God for who he is.
According to Paul
this is exactly what God has done in Jesus Christ. “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew
no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” In Jesus of Nazareth God the Son became
human. He took upon himself our
self-willedness, self-indulgentness, and self-interestedness but never acted
out of it. Instead, he took it to the
cross and there as an innocent man wrongfully suffered the death deserved by
the most heinous of us. He died. God within himself suffered death. The mechanics of that are beyond our
understanding. Needless to say, God
knows and has experienced death.
Well, death has no
home within the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The rift that human sin has brought about
between God and humanity cannot exist in the loving communion of God. God raised Jesus from the dead vindicating
him, proving that God is righteous and faithful because God is Love. In the very being of Jesus the Christ the
rift has been healed. In him God and
humanity are in communion as God intended.
For now, Jesus has taken resurrected and healed humanity back into God
and has sent the Holy Spirit to be with and in us so that we are united to God and
are partakers of Jesus resurrected and healed humanity. It is not enough to say that we simply have
restored fellowship with God. Rather, it
is more accurate to say we have communion with God in Jesus the Christ because
we are grafted to Jesus by the Holy Spirit.
Indeed, God has reconciled us to himself in Christ Jesus.
Jesus’s uniting our
sin-laden humanity with himself and dying with it has forever changed things
for the whole of the creation. Paul
says, “…we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have
died.” In Christ all of humanity has
died and has available to it in Christ the new life of his resurrection. All who are in Christ indeed are a new
creation. By sending the Holy Spirit
into us Christ unites us to himself and the Holy Spirit begins the work of healing
in us that began when in, through and
as Jesus of Nazareth God the Son became human. God will complete this healing when he raises
us from the dead just as he raised Jesus.
For now, just as Jesus lived his earthly life with the struggle of two
wills within him-the human and the divine, so also we live it. And as he enjoyed friendship with his Father
so do we enjoy the friendship of God forever.
It’s all the result of God’s doings, not our own.
Reality for the whole
creation has changed because God has put us into friendship with himself
through Jesus Christ in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit with and in
us. Things are different now since
Christ Jesus lived, died, was raised, and sits at the right hand of the
Father. We no longer have to look at our
own little realities in the same way. We
can have hope, the hope of knowing that God is our friend and is working his
loving will in us and in the details of our lives. God isn’t out to get us. Rather, He’s out to make us his friends. He wants to listen, to comfort, to have fun,
simply to enjoy every moment of our lives with us. He’s out to heal us of the hurts that we live
with. We just have to accept his
friendship, draw near to him, and start living in the New Reality, the New Creation,
the New Humanity that he has created in, through, and as Jesus the Christ and
let God heal us. Amen.
