Spirit of life and all that is good, you teach us to pour out our lives for our neighbors and risking presence to those who do not know you, grant us your grace and peace pushing us out the doors into your world. Amen.
Sometimes we saints of the church seem to be the greatest scaredy cats of all. We are just like the original disciples cooped up in the upper room. We are afraid of risking life, going out into the world and encountering people who do not believe as we do. We are hiding from people who do not know or believe in the power of Christ changing lives and breathing wholeness into us and all who believe. We want to stay hidden in the room, hiding from anything that scares us. We believe we are safe there in our brokenness, tucked away from the even more broken world outside.
The upper room is bigger today but often we still want to make our lives safe and define who is inside the doors of the kingdom and who is outside. Parents still want books banned from schools to keep their children safe from the world. Safely pure and hidden away from uncomfortable topics. The power of this fear even drives some people into temptation reconsidering the definitions of our national Constitution and the governance we have lived under for 200+ years.
During the past week I have heard of at least three national legal and political figures suggesting ways to make America more "Christian," more whatever. David Barton, pseudo historian, who is so offended by many Founding Fathers deistism he rewrites their stories, suggested banning women from voting. Justice Clarence Thomas suggested that states could make Christianity their state religion ignoring Thomas Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists assuring them that the Congregationalists could not oppress the Baptists with undue taxation, and Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore offered that it may be possible to argue that only Christians might have their speech protected since not everyone believes in a "creator" who gave these inalienable rights.
What these people seem to want is a social "safe room" against the brokenness of society and the world, or at least a world where their own opinion is safe if not the speech of all others. They fail to appreciate that Jesus has said to us as he prayed that we who believe in Christ are " in the world but not of the world." This idea in no way implies we are to reshape or make the world safe for Christians. We are instead sent into the world as bearers of the story of Christ and the grace of God. We are to go without fear or death beyond the safety of locked doors. Christ has died, Christ is risen and we live beyond the hold of death.
Hear that again, we are to go into the world not making it over into God's kingdom but instead as witnesses to Christ and God's grace. We are to, "Go into all the world making disciples, teaching them all that Jesus has taught us and baptzing them. Luther tells us in his explanations to the Lord's Prayer that we can do nothing to hasten or delay the kingdom of God we can simply pray that it comes to us.
Jesus sends us out of the locked room into the world. Jesus doesn't say make the world look like my kingdom. He says that we are to be in the world, not of it. To me that means we encounter the world as it is. A world filled with sinners, broken lives, and even evil and we are to stand there not forcing compliance to some new higher social standard but instead to engage the sinners, the broken, and yes, even the evil. We are to be Christlike in our encounters holding others in the same life giving love we first received from God.
There is an old saying, "People need to know that you care before they will care what you know." I run afoul of that idea everyday but when I am at my best I listen and I hear people and I hear their pain and their suffering and I know that Jesus hears them, too.
It is not my job to make them over into refections of my own poor example of Christ. The world will be a tragic place indeed if it is made in Bill's image. What I simply need to do is be present to them as Christ is present to both of us.
If this presense in the world is our calling as Christians then I am free to be as Christ: Christ present to the atheist, Christ present to the pagan, Christ present to the druid and theodish, Christ present to the Jew and to the Muslim, Christ present to everyone. And listening to them to be Christ is not to put some demand of the law upon them to be this way or that way because that is how the world or the kingdom of God must be. No, no, listening to them I learn how to be a sign of Christ in their lives. It is Christ who will save through his Spirit, not me.
I am simply a broken saint, a sinner of his own redeeming, maybe as I move outside the limits and walls that I have used for locking out the world God's grace will heal both me and the one with whom I share Christ.
Sometimes we saints of the church seem to be the greatest scaredy cats of all. We are just like the original disciples cooped up in the upper room. We are afraid of risking life, going out into the world and encountering people who do not believe as we do. We are hiding from people who do not know or believe in the power of Christ changing lives and breathing wholeness into us and all who believe. We want to stay hidden in the room, hiding from anything that scares us. We believe we are safe there in our brokenness, tucked away from the even more broken world outside.
The upper room is bigger today but often we still want to make our lives safe and define who is inside the doors of the kingdom and who is outside. Parents still want books banned from schools to keep their children safe from the world. Safely pure and hidden away from uncomfortable topics. The power of this fear even drives some people into temptation reconsidering the definitions of our national Constitution and the governance we have lived under for 200+ years.
During the past week I have heard of at least three national legal and political figures suggesting ways to make America more "Christian," more whatever. David Barton, pseudo historian, who is so offended by many Founding Fathers deistism he rewrites their stories, suggested banning women from voting. Justice Clarence Thomas suggested that states could make Christianity their state religion ignoring Thomas Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists assuring them that the Congregationalists could not oppress the Baptists with undue taxation, and Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore offered that it may be possible to argue that only Christians might have their speech protected since not everyone believes in a "creator" who gave these inalienable rights.
What these people seem to want is a social "safe room" against the brokenness of society and the world, or at least a world where their own opinion is safe if not the speech of all others. They fail to appreciate that Jesus has said to us as he prayed that we who believe in Christ are " in the world but not of the world." This idea in no way implies we are to reshape or make the world safe for Christians. We are instead sent into the world as bearers of the story of Christ and the grace of God. We are to go without fear or death beyond the safety of locked doors. Christ has died, Christ is risen and we live beyond the hold of death.
Hear that again, we are to go into the world not making it over into God's kingdom but instead as witnesses to Christ and God's grace. We are to, "Go into all the world making disciples, teaching them all that Jesus has taught us and baptzing them. Luther tells us in his explanations to the Lord's Prayer that we can do nothing to hasten or delay the kingdom of God we can simply pray that it comes to us.
Jesus sends us out of the locked room into the world. Jesus doesn't say make the world look like my kingdom. He says that we are to be in the world, not of it. To me that means we encounter the world as it is. A world filled with sinners, broken lives, and even evil and we are to stand there not forcing compliance to some new higher social standard but instead to engage the sinners, the broken, and yes, even the evil. We are to be Christlike in our encounters holding others in the same life giving love we first received from God.
There is an old saying, "People need to know that you care before they will care what you know." I run afoul of that idea everyday but when I am at my best I listen and I hear people and I hear their pain and their suffering and I know that Jesus hears them, too.
It is not my job to make them over into refections of my own poor example of Christ. The world will be a tragic place indeed if it is made in Bill's image. What I simply need to do is be present to them as Christ is present to both of us.
If this presense in the world is our calling as Christians then I am free to be as Christ: Christ present to the atheist, Christ present to the pagan, Christ present to the druid and theodish, Christ present to the Jew and to the Muslim, Christ present to everyone. And listening to them to be Christ is not to put some demand of the law upon them to be this way or that way because that is how the world or the kingdom of God must be. No, no, listening to them I learn how to be a sign of Christ in their lives. It is Christ who will save through his Spirit, not me.
I am simply a broken saint, a sinner of his own redeeming, maybe as I move outside the limits and walls that I have used for locking out the world God's grace will heal both me and the one with whom I share Christ.
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