SCRIPTURE: Romans 8:6-11
TEXT: 11If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you. THEME: The creative force of God influencing our lives. INTRODUCTION It is easy for us to read passages as if it stands alone, apart from the context that they are found in. But the Apostle Paul has methodically built up a foundation to this point in chapter 8 in his letter to the church in Rome. He has taken the reader to the beginnings of grace and forgiveness with the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden. As they mature to an age where they are not children anymore but are responsible for the choices that they make; good or evil. This is not sin, or disobedience, as much as it is about being human. Within the context of relationships, the effect of our choices are times of great joy and disappointment. Love, grace, and forgiveness. Relational dynamics that get played over and over again with God and each other. Paul made note of our family origins of faith with Abraham and Sara. Called out of a community of people to be the parents of God’s nation, God’s people, God’s family, theirs is a journey of discovery, experimentation, guessing, and human ingenuity that is credited to them as faith. Faith does not mean that we are perfect, it is more that we hold on to a promise and a hope. And on some days, we are better at it than others. Contrary to popular belief, God does not punish us for that, but journeys along with us. So then our relationship is just as much about God as it is about us. We can see God’s character as creating, loving, committed, forgiving, gracious and hopeful relationships. As Jesus comes to us, God in flesh to live among us. Not because we are bad, not to punish us, but because we are good. Because we are loved, because there is so much more for us to live in relationship with God and others. Which brings us to the Spirit of Christ in today’s passage. This is the incarnation of the Spirit of God inside of us. Not that we are gods by any means, but that we are good and God give to us the Spirit, to help us live the best life possible, in order to create, to love, and to be in relationship with God and others. SCRIPTURE Paul doesn’t write in a box either. He is greatly influence by Greek philosopher trying figuring out how to get a handle on what is in the world. As the super power of the day, the Roman Empire conquered Greece and renamed all of their gods with Roman names. Jesus whom Paul detested at first, has now become the one in whom he has places his belief, trust, and faith. So, taking his lead from Greek philosophy, which his audience would have been aquatinted with, the flesh, with its gross desires and passions are seen as the downfall of humans. Or so it seems. If we read this carefully, the paradox is that Paul recognizes the flesh with all of its faults as ‘good’, just as God see creation and the world as ‘good’ and comes to it in the incarnation. But God, through Christ, goes one step further in having God’s Spirit dwell within us. Sort of an incarnation of God’s Spirit inside of us. Again, saying that we are Good, the world is good, and God comes to dwell in it through us. APPLICATION We are both flesh and Spirit. Both are good with the potential for change, transformation and participating in God’s continuing work of creation. How do we have that internal dialogue that enables us to choose to live by the Spirit? We need time in our day to be silent. To be still. To be open and to see if God’s Spirit may be speaking to us. The Buddhist have this whole ceremony for making tea, I can spend 4 minutes in silence before God, while I wait for my coffee to be brewed. Silence will lead to other things such as a reassurance of God’s love. Or an idea that will set a course in a new direction. Bringing to mind people, places or issues to be in prayer about. Sometimes the silence will reorder all of the things going on in our mind, with priorities, and clarity. We need time spent contemplating God’s word in scripture. The discovery of God’s heart informs our living. We have inherited theological ideas that need to be challenged, questioned, tested, and evolved. We need to be conversations with others about what we believe so we can learn and grow by others experiences with God. Our theology needs to continuing to develop and change with the new things or perspective we gain. Culture, science, history, politics, crisis, a compassionate heart towards others helps our theology to mature, and gives is the ability to wrestle with the issues in our world today, so the Word of God can continue to give life, call people to the heart of God and inform our living. The Spirit in us, helps us to do and live in the ways of God beyond what we can do on our own. I am a cook but not a baker. I had a hankering for scones, but my favorite scone bakery was no longer operating out of the Safeway shopping center. So on one of my Ross shopping adventures, I found a just add water mix for scones. Wow really good. But the batter is so sticky, I have a hard time getting it off the fork and spoon to drop it on the baking sheet. Then Jann told me to use a vegetable spray on the spoon. Voila! I was able to arrange scones perfectly for baking on one sheet with no mess. Vegetable spray is like the Holy Spirit being inside of us making our lives lived for God easier. Whenever I preach, I ask God what God wants me to say. I trust that God has something for me to say each Sunday, otherwise God wouldn’t have called me into the ministry. There are times on Saturday night that I am so tired that I have to go to sleep, even before my sermon finished. By that time, I have written myself into a box and I have writer’s block. Then God wakes up from my sleep with enough time to finish the sermon. With a different slant, a new perspective, and a way to finish. This has Gotta be the Spirit of God in me that speaks while I sleep and enables me to have something to say each Sunday. CONCLUSION The Spirit of God in us is a paradox. We are not gods but have God’s Spirit of inside of us to help us live in God’s ways, to participate in God’s mission, to have the strength, courage, fortitude, to resist temptation and continue in God’s way. The Spirit rings in our hearts to God’s ways and keeps us on track and on task. But when we are not, and have drifted away, the Spirit is that conscience, voice, nagging, that spark in us and tells us we are loved, it will be alright and we. Belong to the family of God. When we believe in Jesus, Faith in God comes and the Spirit lives in us.
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SCRIPTURE: Romans 5:1-11
TEXT: 11But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation. THEME: How we are able to navigate through suffering can help others with compassion and understanding. INTRODUCTION During the Pandemic, we had to figure out what it meant to be the church without contact. We modified our service with the essentials of worship online. We visited with each other through texted, emailed and Zoom. We put our prayers in text messages that trespassed the boundaries of isolation, hospital rules, quarantine and reached out to the shut ins. We were denied the usual and found time to do other things. Now that the pandemic is being managed, some of these new habits, that we have formed are hard to give up. Even though it has been only two years, we are finding that it is impossible go back to live exactly as we did before the pandemic. In the same way, we think about the essentials of the church. The church is a source of comfort for our faith. The church is it a community that helps us to live our relationship with God faithfully within our families and in the community. The church nurtures our faith, that so that we can take our relationship with God into their world and the future. Being the church has an edge to it that moves us beyond what we want, and towards what others need. Sometimes suffering is a part of what it means to the church and to live by God’s ways. SCRIPTURE There are two parts to this passage in Romans. The first part is about Christ and how peace with God opens up glorious possibilities in how we choose to live. While the second part describes the boundless dynamics of God’s love through Jesus. Our words are inadequate to describe God’s love for us. We want to add value to what God does with the forgiveness of our hurtful behavior but we use financial words like, price, justification, reconciliation, righteousness, and sacrifice to describe the work of God. These are all code, for God’s love, that forgives us and heals our relationship with God. Previously the Apostle Paul used the story of Adam and Eve to highlight God’s grace and forgiveness. He also recalled the story of Abraham and Sara to highlight how faith begins our relationship with God and holds us through our times of belief, doubt and promise. Today we see Jesus the Christ and how love holds us in relationship with God and others. There are times of love and hate, suffering and compassion that develop character in our living. APPLICATION How does what we learn during our sufferings, enable us to be compassionate with others? The Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh, revered Zen master, teacher, and poet, died on January 22, 2022, in his native Vietnam. Thich Nhat Hanh said, “If you continue with concentration and insight, you’ll be able to transform the suffering inside and help transform the suffering around you. And that is a miracle, because you understand the nature of the suffering, you know that role of suffering that suffering plays in life, and you are not trying to run away from suffering anymore, and you know how to make use of suffering in order to build peace and happiness.” This is what Paul was describing, as suffering produces endurance, and endurance character, and character hope and hope reveals God’s love that has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.” Thich Nhat Hanh continues by saying, “Without suffering, we have no ways in order to learn how to be understanding and compassionate.” Krista Tippets’ On Being interview with Zen master Thich That Hang revealed this view, of the Kingdom of God. “The Kingdom of God is not a place where suffering is not; where there is no suffering…because in such a place there is no way to learn how to be understanding and compassionate. And the Kingdom of God is a place where there is understanding and compassion; and therefore, suffering should exist.” Regent College has podcasts on their webpage for Life Long Learners. On a Podcast about the influence of Christianity in the 21st Century, they also talked about its influence in the ancient world. When people were fleeing the cities to escape the plague, some Christians made an impact, by staying behind to care for the people left behind. They showed generosity and love towards all. Even to those beyond their own. God helps us when we suffer, so we can be compassionate and understanding with others who are suffering and bring the help of God to them. This shows love and brings peace. We have learned that God listens to us and answers our prayers. We have learned that when we help others, there are others who come to our aide. We have learned that things don’t always go according to our timing and we can be productive during those times of waiting. We have learned to doing some other things instead of worrying. We have learned that when we try to understand what is going on, that sometimes it makes it easier for us to be forgiving. We have learned that we can get by with far less that what we think we need, and have the ability to be more generous with what we have, when we decide to be stewards of God’s good gifts. We have learned about how God forgives us because of love, so we can forgive others, even when they hurt us, just because we love them. How God has helped us through our suffering, gives us the ability to be understanding and compassionate, as agents of happiness and peace. CONCLUSION The last line of this passage can be paraphrased, “It is God, through Jesus that we can receive a loving relationship with God”. This does not lock us in to living only one way, but opens up the possibilities, of many expressions, from all kind of people, who make up the People of God, living in loving ways with God and with each other. Our faith is real by the character of how we live our relationship with God and our relationships with our neighbors. The suffering we have gone through during the worst of the pandemic, has helped us to reset towards what is important and essential. It gave us permission to change from the usual and into somethings that were different. We will use this to build upon as we move forward as a church and a people of God. SCRIPTURE: Romans 4:1—5, 13-17
TEXT: 17as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”) —in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. THEME: We all become a community through our faith in God. INTRODUCTION Lent is a season that prepares us to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus at Easter. The Lenten lectionary readings remind us of the capabilities of God through Jesus and calls us to live the life Jesus has shown us through his love for us. We are using the Apostle Paul’s letters to the church in Rome for our lenten journey. Lent traditionally assumes we have something to work on spiritually and begins with the ashes of God’s creating and the ashes of our mortality. Often there is a fast where we give up a vice to focus on prayer, reading God’s word or add on a healthy/spiritual habit. Last week’s reading turned our attention to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and God’s grace through forgiveness. This week we are looking at the faith of Abraham and Sara. SCRIPTURE There is a difference between belief and faith. We have those experiences in our lives when we believe God and Jesus, and times when we struggle. As Rachel Held Evans puts it, “Some days I believe in God; other days, I want to believe in God.” Our lives, as illustrated by the lives of Abraham and Sara are a series of faith, belief, unbelief and faith. Paul’s main warning in this passage is to keep us away from acts of devotion that gives to us a false sense of God obligating God’s self to us. This sort of arrangement would cancel out God’s gracious love that forgives us and leave us subject to living in obedience to the 10 Commandments. The 10 Commandments are a description of how God wants us to live in relationship with God and each other. Simple enough but hard to do. Our humanness gets in the way from being the people we would want to be. The writing in this passage is a little dense. It is written as a legal argument for grace over works. The logic follows but we need a few helps to decipher it. Whenever it mentions righteousness, or justification is actually talking about a relationship with God. As we discussed this in last week’s sermon, grace a matter of unmerited forgiveness and not as a result of superhuman obedience. The story of Abraham and Sara is the calling out of a couple who are sensitive to the movement of God. They are called out from the community they are in to be in relationship with God and be the parents of the people of God, and heirs to real estate. Abraham and Sara believe God and gather their belongings and servants and away they go to parts unknown. The other challenge is that they are an older couple, meaning beyond their child bearing years but are willing to live believing in God and God’s promises for them to be parents. The rest of their lives is epic; struggle, doubt, mistrust, MacGyvering God’s promise, jealousy, deception, manipulation, fear, strange visitors, birth, sacrifice, Evil choices, following along with evil choices and through everything God’s promises come true. There were many times they disqualified themselves from God’s promises, but they were not. God was committed to them and loved them all along the way. This is very similar to the story of Adam and Eve and how much God loved them and treated Adam and Eve with compassion, forgiveness, grace, life, commitment and promise. Sacrifices in the Bible have been to show devotion, remorse and appreciation but never as a straight-out payment to settle a debt. When our relationships are based on love and forgiveness, we don’t need sacrifices. But when they are based on payments, reckoning, and sacrifice then they are contractual and maybe not really relationships, we are coworkers, employees and staff but not partners, family or the people of God. The last verse of this passage speaks to this as it says, “God gives life to the dead and calls into existence things that do not exist.” In regards to Jesus, whom Paul is writing about, God through Jesus gives the dead resurrected life and calls a people, community, a church into existence. A community of those who believe God, a community of people who live with the reality of the resurrection over death. A community of those who have been forgiven by grace and love and not by works or sacrifice. APPLICATION What kind of community is God trying this build through our belief? Jesus’ ministry invited all people to be part of the People of God. From carpenters, homemakers, lawyers, synagogue leaders, tax collectors, rabbis, sinners, infirm, lepers and shepherds. From temple worship with sacrifices, debates over the Law on the synagogue floor, in a litigious setting, to the church living their relationship with God and forming communities of respect, grace, diversity, love, caring and forgiveness. Paul is writing to the church in Rome, but his words are good for us to hear 2000 years later and worlds apart. We get Paul’s vision of the kind of community God wants us to build, as the People of God from the letters he writes to the church. Each generation needs to build on the foundations laid for them and interpret the gospel for the next generation. For the last few generations, we been passing down the same vision of the church. But with the pandemic, scientific advancements, technological advancements, our social climate, climate change and the political dishevel, our faith has become irrelevant, judgmental and mean to the upcoming skeptical, ‘not doing it just because you say so’ generation. We need to get back to the basis of grace and faith. Forgiveness and the inclusion of everyone. To make accommodations of welcome and to see the image of God in each human being. The fruits of Holy Spirit and its gifts are offered to us for building up the church. For having the abilities, we need to participate in God’s mission among us. Jesus talked about our neighbors, which becomes those we see who we can be kind to. These are the kind of things I see our church doing. Getting back to basics, praying, reading the word of God with new eyes. And questioning our traditional practices and being willing to move on a journey of discovery and faith. CONCLUSION “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” Hebrews 11:1 NIV. The work of ‘being sure of what we hope for’ is an ongoing process of questioning, change, exploration, experimentation, consultation, prayer, listening, modification, adjustment and practice. We have mistaken faith for stubbornness to one idea. With each new discovery, answered question, we adjust our belief and strengthen our faith. “Being certain of what we do not see” is filled with grace, missed steps, as well as mistakes, allowances for forgiveness and correction so we can get closer to the truth of God. Faith is not bull headed keeping of religious ideals, but tenacious in holding our doubts and moving us towards having more days where believe than days that we don’t. A life of journeying with God, not working for God. And the building of a community of traveling companions. Faith is the process of having certainty of what we know and hope for, as our belief, has us journeying with God. |
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April 2024
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