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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 you through changes and helping you to acknowledge 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 our own 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 in, through, and as Jesus Christ 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 ourselves and the loving communion of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and each other. 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. 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; things like power, wealth, sex, celebrity. 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-interested and we die. And I haven’t mentioned how Sin complicates and destroys our relationships with one another.
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 and brokenness 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 taking it upon and into his very self, 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-willed-ness, 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 to 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 and experience life that way. And as he enjoyed friendship with his Father in the Spirit so 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 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, God is making us his friends. He wants to listen, to comfort, to have fun, simply to enjoy every moment of our lives with us. He’s working 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.
