In Step with the Spirit

 Galatians 5:13-25

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When my children were little, we read a lot, and I do mean a lot, of Curious George stories.  William had his moment of months and months of Curious George at bedtime and as soon as he moved on to something else Alice started her moment with the little monkey.  One of the classic Curious George stories I remember is Curious George and the Dump Truck. It started with George playing on the living room floor of the house where he lived with the man with the yellow.  He heard a funny sound that sounded like “Quack”.  He of course got curious and looked out the window to see a duck and then he heard several more “Quack’s”.  It was a mother duck with five small ducklings in line behind her.  Where were they waddling off to?  George was curious and the next thing we know George is waddling right along in behind them, one of the family.  They crossed streets and waddled their way to the big pond in the city park where children were flying kites and men were planting trees.  And then…George saw something he had never seen before: a great big, huge dump truck.  George forgot about the ducks and climbed into the cab of the truck.  But he couldn’t see out so he stepped on some levers that made the truck dump its load of dirt into the pond; the dirt that the city workers were using for planting the trees and making flowerbeds. Oops!  Then George heard the ducks again and it seemed they really enjoyed this new island in the city pond.  The workers came and George felt really sorry, but they weren’t mad.  They were making the park more enjoyable for people, but it seems George had made the park a better place for ducks.  The ducks now had a happy home in the park too.

Curious George, something always seems to pique his curiosity and he follows it and somehow he always manages to make a mess of things, but in the end, everything works out.  In the book, I like the illustration of George getting in step with the mother duck and her ducklings.  He’s obviously squatting trying to do the duck walk.  And he’s made his arms into little triangular wings.  He’s just happily following along even through dangerous places like roads.  In George’s world, if you’re curious about something, become like it.  So, if you’re going to become a duck, act like a duck.

Looking at our reading from Galatians, this walk like a duck thing of Curious George’s is a fitting example.  This is kind of what Paul means when he says “If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.”  Sometimes translations don’t quite capture the imagery of the Greek.  That’s the case here.  If I were to take a stab at it, I would say, “If we are alive in the Spirit, get in step, get in line with the Spirit just like Curious George did when he tried to be a duck.”  But that would be adding to the text. But still, the message is simple.  Since we have been given new life in Christ by the presence of the Holy Spirit in and among us, then we must get in behind the Spirit and walk like the Holy Spirit wherever the Spirit leads.  

This simple message was one the Galatians had a hard time grasping and we do too.  When Paul first came to the area of Galatia, he was quite afflicted with some sort of eye ailment that was difficult to look at.  They could have called him cursed by the gods and refused to take him in.  But instead, they showed him compassion.  They took Paul in, a stranger, and treated his ailment.  They restored his health instead of shaming him.  They didn’t know that in welcoming this particular stranger they were welcoming a new reality indwelt by a God who loved them and was intervening in their lives in a totally “ungodlike” way.

 The Galatians were people who worshipped other gods through strange rituals and superstitions. Religion in the ancient world was very transactional: Do thus and such to the “T”, and this particular god will do thus and that if the god is in a good mood and it serves their narcissistic purposes.  Personal interaction with the gods was unheard of.  Interaction with the gods was through priests and rituals.  That a god would love humans or even mingle his or her self with a human was preposterously ridiculous.  

While he was healing, Paul began to tell them about how his God was utterly unlike those gods.  He told them the Good News of the Son of God becoming human as Jesus the Jew of Nazareth and how Jesus was crucified and died and then God in the power of the Holy Spirit raised him from death.  He told them of how in that act of incarnation, death, and resurrection God was destroying death and the disease of sin that affects the whole Creation and was setting in motion the healing and recreation of his broken and hurting Creation.  Finally, to those who will give their allegiance to Jesus God is giving a taste of this new creation life by the gift of the presence of the Holy Spirit and by that gift God adopts us to be his own beloved children.  Well, we don’t know the details, but apparently as Paul told this Good News to the Galatians the Holy Spirit came to them to dwell in them each and also among them giving them a taste of this new life in Christ that is characterised by a profoundly real experience of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  This totally freed them from obligations to gods who could care less about them.

Unfortunately, after Paul moved on from the Galatian communities some strangers came to them who were associated with the Jesus people mainly located around Jerusalem where it all began.  They taught that you weren’t a real follower of Jesus unless you become a Law-of-Moses-abiding Jew as Jesus was.  They were demanding even that men get circumcised.  The Galatians believed them and were beginning to take on the strenuous demands of following the Law of Moses.  So, Paul angrily wrote to the Galatians “Did you receive the Spirit by works of the Law or by hearing the Good news.”  Had they received this new life indwelt by the presence of God by observing rules and rituals in the way they used to worship their former gods.  No, they had simply received it when the heard the Message.  Paul said, “The Law is summed up in one commandment, “You shall love your neighbour as you love yourself” which they had so obviously done when they cared for Paul in his sickness.  It was just so very foolish of them to fall under that burden of keeping the Law.  God had made them his people, his own beloved children by giving them his very self, the Holy Spirit, as the result of what Jesus, the Son of God had done.  Keeping the Law could in no way add anything to the new life they now had in the Spirit of Christ.

So, Paul tells them that since God had made them alive by and in the gift of the Holy Spirit, they needed to live according to the Spirit not the Law.  The Spirit’s way is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  Therefore, empowered, driven, compelled by the Spirit they must get in step with the Spirit and follow the Spirit implanted desires of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  Like Curious George’s mother duck leading her ducklings to the happy place of the pond in the park, the Holy Spirit leads us through the normalcy of the events of daily life by prompting us to be loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, generous, faithful, gentle, and self-controlled.

All that said, in North American Christianity we tend to be like the Galatian Christians who were deceived to believe they had to keep laws and rules in order to be Christian.  Rather than just accept God’s free gift of the Holy Spirit and let the new life of Christ flow through us, we have a simple belief in God practised in conducting moral duties.  This devotion to duty keeps us from understanding that we are Holy Spirit-filled, love-filled communities of brothers and sisters in Christ who know themselves to be beloved children of God.  We think there is more to being faithful than being prompted through life by that sense of Belovedness to act accordingly.  We have eclipsed our sense of belovedness behind moral duty or just being good people so much so that talk of being made alive by the Spirit and being guided by the Spirit sounds weird to us if not scary.

So, if reality is that we are alive by and in the Spirit, how do we recognize this and get in step with it?  Well, a prayer life is essential here.  That goes without saying.  As does the daily reading of Scripture and participation in Christian fellowship.  But, those are things we can also get legalistic about and turn into duties as opposed to their being cherished acts of devotion in the context of a relationship of beloved people with their beloved God.  We must search for this sense of mutual belovedness: mutual meaning God’s love for us, our love for God, and our love for one another.  When we take time for devotions (and may our devoted time grow to encapsulate all day) we need to approach it with the awareness that the Holy Spirit is present with us and knowing that prayer, Scripture reading, and Christian fellowship are the practice of a relationship with our God who is genuinely with us.  I like the idea of sitting with an empty chair next to me to give a sense of place for God to be.

Here's something else.  Something else that gets eclipsed behind duty is beauty.  We don’t talk enough if at all about the role of beauty in our relationship to God.  The Russian author Dostoyevsky once said, “Beauty will save the world.” I think he was on to something.  Where beauty is, God is not far from it.  On the seventh day of creation after calling his creation very good – or Beautiful – God rested, God reposed and enjoyed it.  When we take time to repose and appreciate the beauty that is everywhere around us, it has the effect of giving us rest and with that rest comes joy and with joy comes a sense of adoration for something other than self.  This is Creation’s song of praise to God.  When we rightly locate ourselves in the worship that undergirds creation, the one whom creation adores will soon reveal his self – present but absent.  When you find God or God finds you, be honest.  You have nothing to fear.  You are God’s Beloved child.  God is for you.  Amen.

            

Peace, Grace, and Love

Romans 5:1-5

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Peace with God, standing in grace, the love of God poured into us…these are powerful statements of our reality as it pertains to our relationship to God, indeed our experience of God.  Peace, grace, and love dominate our relationship with God not judgement, condemnation, and fear of offending him.  Peace, grace, and love…this is God’s disposition towards us.  Peace with God, standing in grace, the love of God poured into us…this is the foundation of our reality and of our experience of God.  Peace with God, standing in grace, the love of God pour into us is the root of our personal existence, the foundation of what we should know about ourselves, the foundation of who we should be as persons.  I know I’ve just made some big, lofty statements and I want to help you understand this foundation of reality, grab a sense of it because chances are we let it get drowned out.

Peace with God, standing in grace, the love of God poured into each of us…this is who we are.  Last week I spoke about abiding in and appreciating the beauty of Creation and experiencing the joy and love that flows through it and how at some point we come to discover the presence of God and how we are beloved by God.  Today I want to ponder upon life in the wake of discovering our Belovedness; which is life made full, made abundant in peace, grace, and love.

So, let’s look first at peace with God.  When I think of peace with God a couple of biblical images come to mind.  I think of the story in Mark of Jesus and his disciples out on the Sea of Galilee and a powerful windstorm began to threaten to swamp the boat and kill them.  The image of the storm and the way Mark words the story gives the sense that Creation itself or something very sinister possessing it is trying to kill God’s very vulnerable fledgling nest of those who are the beginning of God’s healing for his Creation.  Jesus, at first sleeping, arose and spoke sternly to the storm and at his word it ceased.  Something only God could do.  Immediately, the lake became calm, placid, not a ripple.  I have memories of being on a lake in a rowboat with my dad at the first break of sunlight fishing and there wasn’t a ripple.  It was very good.  Peace with God is like that.  Storms calmed, placid, not a ripple, very good.

Another story I think of when I think of peace towards God is Jesus’ healing of the man who was possessed by a legion or 1,000 unclean spirits.  The townspeople tried to contain the man by chaining him up in a graveyard.  But he always managed to break the chains and then run around naked and shrieking incoherently.  When Jesus showed up the unclean spirits recognized him and begged him not to destroy them.  At a word, Jesus cast the legion out of the man into a heard of pigs who went and drowned themselves in the Sea.  Again, something only God could do.  The whole town came out to investigate the commotion and found the man sitting at Jesus’ feet, clothed and in his right mind.  That’s a powerful image.  This very tortured man now psychologically, emotionally, spiritually and even physically reposing with God, clothed with personal dignity, and thinking clearly about himself.  To glimpse oneself with the love that God sees you with, to know yourself as God knows you - this is peace towards God.  Those thoughts that torture us about our own lovability, those horrible ways we beat ourselves up and try to mercilessly destroy ourselves with shame and guilt, all the self-destructive “unclean” thinking ended – that is peace with God.

Moving on to standing in grace.  Grace is a term that has to do with the royal court as opposed to the judicial court.  Unfortunately, too much of Christian thinking for the last 1,000 or more years (and that’s a very long time) has located it in the judicial court where it’s meaning is reduced to the leniency of the court where we don’t get the deserved penalty for sin because Jesus stood in our place and took the penalty of death for us.  But, grace isn’t a judicial courtroom matter.  Rarely does it show up in the Bible in that sense, but it has been mistakenly made predominant.  Grace has rather to do with a monarch’s disposition towards her subjects.  Grace is receiving the favour of your monarch.  Imagine yourself being invited to come into the presence of the Queen.  She invites you to come and stand before her.  What and honour!  You are invited to stand, rather than to kneel.  This a gesture of empowerment.  Then, the queen gently extends her hand towards you for you to touch to acknowledge your worth.  She speaks to you to indicate you have her ear and that she is favourably disposed towards your requests and will act for you.  This “for you” experience with your monarch is what grace is.

The grace in which we stand is that we stand in the presence of God with God’s favour.  He touches us and speaks to us personally giving us dignity.  And, God promises to act for us.  God is for us.  By for us, I mean come Hell or highwater God in his loving kindness will make happen what is best for us.  God will in time work all things for our healing, all things.  Stay standing in the presence of God praying and listening.  God is “for you.”

Finally, looking at the love of God poured into us as the Holy Spirit, God’s very self, coming to dwell in us.  This is an odd one for us to talk about as it involves talking about personal experience of God when we’ve all been well schooled in a misdirected version of the Christian faith simply being centered on moral duty rather than personal devotion or, if you got Billy Graham-ed at some point, you had an experience of forgiveness and called yourself “born-again” in addition to that sense of moral duty.  I suspect you’ve heard very little about the presence in us and the work of the Holy Spirit in us and find the topic scary.  So, I’ll try to talk about this in a familiar way.

One thing I like about this time of year is driving around and seeing the fields newly planted.  They look so vast and wide-open and I know that the power of new life is there working away yet unseen.  I sense a bit of the glory of God in that vastness.  I feel like this when I see fields mowed and the big, round bails of hay lay waiting to be put away.  The vastness in the fields of agriculture is spiritual to me.  It touches my spirit.  In those moments of seeing the vastness and the beauty and the glory, I myself feel open towards life as opposed to feeling closed in on myself in my small, little world.  I feel open to the mystery of God’s working new life in me.  I feel open to other people.  The Holy Spirit works like that.  The Spirit encounters us at some point or over a period of time and we come to sense that we are beloved by God and this sense of being beloved opens us up to life and to others, opens our eyes to see ourselves and life anew, to feel newly alive, to feel hope, to feel worth, to feel favoured.  

From this sense of our belovedness flows love for others, and it is a particular kind of love.  It is like grace.  As God is for us and his “for us” culminates with our knowing ourselves to be beloved, so we open our lives to others and help them to discover they are beloved.  When Jesus spoke of denying oneself, of laying down one’s life for others, and of even dying to oneself, this is what he meant.  He meant that we don’t go about life seeking to make “me” great or get my wants and needs met by imposing myself on others to their detriment.  Being that way is how we wrongfully take life as opposed to receiving life for the gift that it is.  To deny or die to self is to help others discover their own belovedness, worth, and beauty.  It is to be present for others to support them in what they go through.  It is to help them stand in grace empowered.  It so often means tough love and that we will suffer rejection in its many forms because inexplicably so many people find the Good News of their belovedness to be threatening.  Love helps others find the peace with God, the calm, the good that they so desperately need.  Love helps people be free of their ”unclean” spirits and to discover rest in the presence of God where they are clothed in dignity and thinking clearly about themselves.  Love is to be “present to” and to “for” others so that they find peace with God and can rest in a sense of belovedness.

Peace, grace, and living in the love of God; these are at the core of our relationship with God.  Enjoy the peace God has freely given you.  Be “for” others and seek their good just as God is for you and seeks your good.  Devote your life to helping others discover their own sense of belovedness.  Amen.

Beloved Children of God

 Romans 8:14-17

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As a minister, one of those things I’m supposed to do is suggest ways that we as individual disciples of Jesus can understand ourselves.  I choose to use specific terms like “disciple of Jesus” or “follower of Jesus” as opposed to the blanket, generic term of “Christian” or “believer”.  The reason for that is that it is possible in our culture to identify oneself as a “Christian” or a “believer”, but not really be a “disciple” or “follower” of Jesus.  Disciples are students of a person, particularly their way of life.  To truly learn the way of life of another is to take on that way of life yourself and become like that person.  The same can be said about what it is to follow another person.  The term “follower” entails a great sense of personal loyalty to that person, to walk the same roads no matter how difficult they may be.

The self-understanding I most wholeheartedly want those who sit and listen to me natter on about this Jesus stuff is to understand oneself as a beloved child of God.  For me, this is where the rubber hits the road.  My personal experience of the presence of God in my life has thus far culminated in understanding, in knowing myself to be a beloved child of God.  Though he has always been with me and hand his hand in my life and a hold on me, I began to realize that God is with me when I was 19.  I have felt God’s presence richly in congregations gathered for worship, in small Bible studies, when I am alone in devotions, but I sense he is always with me.  I have also had some very profound emotional healings by God’s personal involvement with me.  I have always found God faithful to me, to bring about what is best for me.  The most difficult things I have gone through, God has worked for my good.  When things have happened to me that seem like all I did was show up for life and all Hell has broken loose around me, God has proved his great love.  Then in my 30’s one of my Doctor of Ministry professors put it all into words that just made sense to me.  He used to say “God the Father loves you as much as he loves his own begotten Son Jesus.”  And he would go on to further teach their relationship of love is what the Holy Spirit leads us to share in.

  Since it’s Pentecost we need to talk about the Holy Spirit.  A large part of the conversation we need to have about the Holy Spirit is to talk about the presence of God with us and how we personally experience God particularly as God’s beloved children.  So much of the talk about God the last 500 or more years has been centered on how we are sinners deserving of Hell yet Jesus died to forgive our sins so that we can go to Heaven.  The result is that Christianity largely became about attending to our own personal behaviour so as not to lose the eternal reward.  It became about duty.  The overwhelming cultural image of God we gained was this bearded old man who judges us.  Talk of God was so centered on moralism and duty that all talk of personal encounter with God was largely thrown out with the bathwater.  There is a big difference, indeed an eternal, infinite difference, between performing a duty and feeling beloved.  Quite frankly, this is what I believe has killed the Church of North America.

Paul says here that “All who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.”  Let’s consider that.  What are we meaning when we say children?  Does it mean that I should have a sort of “Jesus loves me, this I know”, feel like a small child utterly dependent, go play with my toys and be a good kid sort of relationship with God?  Well, if you are a small child that’s okay, but what does it mean for someone 70+, or someone midlife-ing?  You’ve had kids and grandkids you don’t feel so much like a child.  Are we supposed to feel like a little child in the presence of God?  

Well no.  The word translated as children there is not the one in the Greek language for small child.  It’s actually the word for sons and this is one of those places where trying to use inclusive language in translation falls short because there’s something about the role and status of a son in the culture back then that gets missed. In that culture it was actually quite liberating and empowering for women because Paul is inferring the social status that a son would have had back then to women in the church.  He was equalizing the genders and elevating the status of women.  Paul isn’t writing just to the men of the church and calling them sons.  He is saying that both men and women who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.  The rest of the times we see children here the word used is reflective of all the children of the family, but also not the term for small children.

In Paul’s culture, adult sons had special family privileges.  They shared in the family business and wealth from it and they were entitled to the inheritance.  Paul notes this in our reading.  Our inheritance is resurrected life in a healed Creation full of the glory of God.  We taste of it now, share in it now by God’s gift of his very self – The Holy Spirit with us working to comfort and heal us.  

When it came to family matters, the father respected the opinions of adult sons and gave them a say in family matters.  Wrap your head around this: God respects our opinions, takes into consideration what we think is best in the matters of our lives and those we pray for.  The desires of our hearts matter to God.  He respects our opinions. He listens to our wants and respects the personal wisdom he’s given to us.  

Here’s something else to consider.  I had a doctor tell me once while giving me a pep talk on being a father.  He said, “How you felt about your dad is how your son feels about you.”  Let me say something similar coming from a different angle.  How you feel about your adult children since they’ve gotten out and made something of themselves and done right by the family name and become their own persons of whom you are quite proud, how you feel about your now grown-up children is how God feels about you.  God respects your opinions and trusts your judgment.  God is proud of you and will still do whatever he can to help you.  You’ve a great inheritance awaiting you.  There’s a lot of responsibility with being an adult child and God trusts you with it.  So, bear the family name respectfully and do the work that the family of God is vested in.  You’ve a great inheritance awaiting you.  

Back to what that doctor said to me, that the way I felt about my dad is how my children feel about me.  So also, the way my father as a parent felt about me as a child is how God feels about us as well.  Parents and grandparents can appreciate this.  With our children we have to give them a foundation of love upon which to find themselves.  We just don’t throw kids into life to figure it out for themselves.  They need coaching, direction, and our presence with them.  They need us to invite and lead them into life.  Paul wrote, “All those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.”  This thing of being led by the Spirit is difficult for us to understand, but at the root of it is that the Holy Spirit leads us to understand, to experience deep within our self’s that sense of “I am God’s beloved child.” This is how I try to explain it to my daughter.

I was driving her to school the other day and she noticed a bird flying with a flower in its beak and pointed it out.  So, I took advantage of the opportunity and said, “You know Alice, this world is full of beauty and you should take the time to just notice that beauty.  When you do, you will likely start to feel a sense of joy there.  As you spend more time with that beauty and joy you will start to feel a sense of love and at some time in that experience beauty, joy, and love you may come to realize that there is someone there, a presence who loves you and that’s God however you come to understand him and this is all you really need to know about yourself.”  And I said to her, “Alice you are a beautiful person and you give a lot of joy to a lot of people.  Your mother and I love you very much and are very proud of you.”  She was smiling ear to ear.  Then I said, “Sometimes a bird carrying a flower means something.”  And she laughed, “What did that mean?”  I said, “Oh, I don’t know.  Look at my flower, It’s beautiful.”

To be led by the Spirit goes like that.  In all circumstances in life let your eye be open to see the beauty that’s everywhere around you.  Let the joy well up in you.  Let love flow through you.  This is entering into the worship that God’s good creation always gives to our Maker.  At some time, at some point, you will begin to sense God’s presence and God’s love for you, that you are beloved.  Imbibe deeply of the beauty, joy, and love that everywhere surrounds you, and take your Belovedness to heart.  These things are the core of who we each are and nothing can separate us from them. Go forth and be a moment of beauty, joy, love, and belovedness for the people in your lives to discover and be changed. Children of God be led by the Spirit of God.  Amen.