In a time when populations are being displaced by war and famine, when economic stagnation results in fewer government services, with a potential environmental crisis looming over the world, one can note the rise of a harsher attitude towards the poor, the sick, the unemployed, and the dispossessed.

Scripture (Wisdom: 2) also noted this very human temptation and gives voice to it before condemning it in the last verse:

“10 Let us oppress the righteous poor man [they say]; let us not spare the widow or regard the gray hairs of the aged. 11 But let our might be our law of right, for what is weak proves itself to be useless. 12 “Let us lie in wait for the righteous man, because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions; he reproaches us for sins against the law, and accuses us of sins against our training. 13 He professes to have knowledge of God, and calls himself a child of the Lord. 14 He became to us a reproof of our thoughts; 15 the very sight of him is a burden to us, because his manner of life is unlike that of others, and his ways are strange. 16 We are considered by him as something base, and he avoids our ways as unclean; he calls the last end of the righteous happy, and boasts that God is his father. 17 Let us see if his words are true, and let us test what will happen at the end of his life; 18 for if the righteous man is God’s child, he will help him, and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries. 19 Let us test him with insult and torture, so that we may find out how gentle he is, and make trial of his forbearance. 20 Let us condemn him to a shameful death, for, according to what he says, he will be protected.” 21 Thus they reasoned, but they were led astray, for their wickedness blinded them….”

“The premise of most urban church work, it seems, is that in order for the Church to minister among the poor, the church has to be rich, that is, to have specially trained personnel, huge funds and many facilities, rummage to distribute, and a whole battery of social services. Just the opposite is the case. The Church must be free to be poor in order to minister among the poor. The Church must trust the Gospel enough to come among the poor with nothing to offer the poor except the Gospel, except the power to apprehend and the courage to reveal the Word of God as it is already mediated in the life of the poor. When the Church has the freedom itself to be poor among the poor, it will know how to use what riches it has. When the Church has that freedom, it will be a missionary people again in all the world.”
William Stringfellow

“A king’s existence is demonstrated by way of subjection and submissiveness.  Do you want to try and demonstrate that the king exists?  Will you do so by offering a string of proofs, a series of arguments?  No.  If you are serious, you will demonstrate the king’s existence by your submission, by the way you live.  And so it is with demonstrating God’s existence.  It is accomplished not by proofs but by worship.”

Soren Kierkegaard

“Let it suffice for the present that this star [the Gospel] is the visible sermon and the bright revelation of Christ as he is concealed and foreshadowed in the promises of the Scriptures. Therefore, whoever sees the star certainly recognizes the king of the Jews, the newly-born Christ. For the Gospel teaches nothing else but Christ and therefore the Scripture contains nothing else than Christ. But he who does not recognize Christ may hear the Gospel, or indeed carry the book in his hands, but he has not yet its real meaning. To have the Gospel without its meaning is to have no Gospel; and to have the Scripture without recognizing Christ means to have no Scripture and is nothing else than to let this star shine and yet not see it.”

“Why was Luther not satisfied  with lecturing and preaching?  Why did he take up the pen?  The primary reason was not the urge of the scholar nor the controversial zeal of a reformer, but the responsibility of a pastor for a pure, clear, comprehensible, convincing and liberating proclamation of the gospel.  He had himself struggled to understand the righteousness of God, which, as the gospel reveals, means that the righteous live by faith.  This struggle had to be proclaimed publicly to the language in which they spoke….”

(Luther:  An Introduction to his Thought)

I

“The will of God is not a system of rules which is established form the outset; it is something new and different in each different situation in life, and for this reason a [person] must ever anew examine what the will of God may be.”

Ethics

Gracious God, in your love you created us in your image and made us care for all the animals that live in the skies, the earth, and the sea. Bless our pets and all your animals, wild and tame. Help us recognize your power and wisdom in all the creatures that live in our world. Bless their variety and their own created beauty. Protect your creatures, and guard them from evil, and hear our prayer for all that suffer overwork, hunger, and ill-treatment.
Amen

Cruciformity: The Heart of Paul’s Experience of Christ

Paul was nothing if not someone overwhelmed by the love of God. He experienced the divine love, according to his letters, in Christ and by the working of the Spirit. In the visionary encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus Paul discovered a love that affirmed, deepened, and went beyond the love he already knew God had shown to Abraham and his Israelite descendants. In reflecting on this experience Paul felt ”taken over/apprehended/overwhelmed” by Christ Jesus (Phil. 3:12) and with awe exclaims, ”the Son of God loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20). This love became the driving force of Paul’s life when he came to understand how encompassing it was. Divine love experienced had to become divine love expressed.

What mattered most for Paul was not the experiences themselves, but what they meant for his life and the lives of others. Paul saw himself as a participant in and a continuation of the life-giving death of Christ Jesus, his Lord, that was narrated in the Gospel he preached and enacted in the worship of the communities he founded or with which he was involved. However, Paul does not limit this participatory experience in Christ’s death to himself and the other apostles. Paul makes it clear that conformity in the death of Christ—cruciformity–is for all believers.

Our Bible study this year will focus on Paul’s experience of Christ, his understanding of the experience, and what he thinks this means for all who follow Jesus as their Lord. Our study is a reflection on what it means for us to be ”in” Christ, ”with” Christ, ”according to” Christ, and ”for” Christ. We meet on the first and third Thursdays of the month.

“Therefore you will be the best philosophers and the best explorers of the nature of things if you will learn from the apostle to consider creation as it waits, groans, and travails, that is, as it turns aways in disgust from what now is and desires that which is still in the future. For then the study of the nature of things, their accidents and their differences, will quickly grow worthless. As a result the foolishness of the philosophers is like a man who, joining himself to a builder and marveling at the cutting and hewing and measuring of the wood and beans, is foolishly content and quiet among these things, without concern as to what the builder finally intends to make by all these exertions. This man is empty-headed, and the work of such an assistant is meaningless. So all the creation of God, which is skillfully prepared for the future glory, is gazed upon by stupid people who look only at the mechanics but never see its final goals…Look how we esteem the study of the essences and actions and inactions of things, and the things themselves reject and groan over their own essences and actions and inactions! We praise and glorify the knowledge of that very thing which is sad about itself and is displeased with itself!…But now it is wise men and theologians, infected by the same ‘prudence of the flesh’ who derive a happy science out of a sad creation….” Martin Luther, Lectures on Romans