Letting Go

...he who watches over you will not fall asleep.

 - Psalm 121

This is a comforting thought.

A preacher once said that our attitude should be, when we have fretful, sleepless nights: "Lord, this is your problem now. I'm going to bed."

The statement is Scriptural., and is found right here in the referenced passage.

We really should cast all our cares on Him. The time to do this is at bedtime. If your faith is strong, you should be able to relax and go to sleep.

But now, our trust and our faith - our letting go - often requires some action on our part. You can't let go without loosening your grip. You have to move your hands to let go. You have to move.

And getting into God's work, letting Him go to work, means we have to do something, usually let go of something, so that He can move us.

Lent is about giving up and letting go. Deny things to ourselves. Sacrifice. And this is what faith is all about. It's okay. He never sleeps.

Getting from A to B

So Abram went . . . 

 - Genesis 12

I have dwelt a lot lately, on the topic of following God's will.

God's plan for us is a short, straight line. That is, to get where He ultimately wants us, is not a great distance, and is not fraught with obstacles.

Does that sound naive? Well, I may be wrong. But I think that the final goal is actually very simple indeed. But God's plan involves a growth plan, in which we still go off on our own way. We may even see the final outcome that God wants, and we may even be desiring to attain it. But we want to do it our way, like children. 

Rather than going from Point A to Point B (God's perfect will for us), we choose to get to Point B, via Points C, D, E, F, . . . and Z. We make it harder on ourselves. When all we need to do in the first place, is just . . . go.

It happened that way for me. I am finally ending up where God wanted me in the first place: in full-time ministry. But it's taking so long to get there. And it's my fault.

A to B

After Jesus was baptized, he was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.

 - Matthew 4

Our big tests always occur immediately following our moments of victory. You reach a goal, and then rest . . . which is the same as letting down your guard.

Not only had Jesus just been baptized, but he next goes to a wilderness place, near mountains. I can imagine it was a place of natural beauty; a retreat setting. But it was there, separated from others, fasting for forty days and forty nights, that He was at His physically weakest.

God has a plan for us. And getting to His will, I have come to believe, could be a short, straight-line process. In God's perfect will, we can go from Point A to Point B. Easy; and then it's done.

But we choose our own way. And therein comes the testing, the disappointments, the discouragements. We give up. But we lose heart at exactly the moment when we should veer back to the easy task of collecting God's prize for us. And we know we're being disobedient. Yet we persist in doing it our way.

Instead of going from Point A to Point B, we end up going to Point C, and then D, and all the way to Z, before getting to B, which is where we should have gone in  the first place.

How does this tie in to Christ's temptation in the wilderness? This didn't seem easy for Him! Well, it wasn't. But between his baptism and the launch of His ministry, he came to a crossroad where he could have chosen C, D, or E; and these were what the devil offered Him. Choosing the right path does indeed give us tests, and trials. And we may become discouraged. But the discouragement (illness, financial loss, etc.) need not defeat us. 

A to B is the shortest way. It may require us to go through swamps, brambles, snares. But we get to the end sooner, and we end up not hurting others along the way.

God gets us where He wants us. We just tend to make it harder than it needs to be.

Christ, Even as Adam

...but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification.

 - Romans 5

Imagine the chaos if each one of us had to act for ourselves, and make our own case, as to whether or not we should have our sins forgiven and our lives made eternal!

The disobedience of Adam, representing all of us (for we all are present in his genetic makeup), lead to his death, and his death was then passed on to, or inherited by, all of us. We are born mortal. Why? Because we are sinners. Before there was death, there was sin. There is evil and wickedness in the world, because of sin, and we all sin.

But the obedience of Christ brought forgiveness and life to all of us. The entire passage of Romans 5 repeats the concept that sin and death started with one man, and passed on to all of us. But likewise, the concept of justification and life started with one man, and passed on to us. The statements are structured accordingly: "Even as in one man death reigned, even so in one man eternal life was passed to all of humanity." 

If our DNA is in Adam, then it must be in Christ as well, since Christ was our representative, even as Adam was. And Adam was ours, because our DNA is in him.

So it came down to one man, for each situation. This is simplicity. We know that we act an awful lot like Adam . . . but we also know that we are capable of acting like Christ.

And so Christ, The Second Adam, must have been born, in the fullness of time, as a complete DNA match to Adam. And so, this is how it works.

One man's obedience. We are in Him and He in us (and I think this is the greatest symbolism of Communion). And when he obeyed, it was enough to make pure and holy . . . all of us.

But Then . . .

Then I acknowledged my sin to you,

 - Psalm 32

I know a young person that is stressing about college and career choices. She has endured several years of developing her skills, building her talents, preparing for the application process into a college program of her choice.

She gets close to the goal. She can see it and even begins to imagine the relief when she is finally accepted into a program she has set her heart on.

But almost every time, she gets pushed back down again, by forces outside her control.

I have noticed that this person has left God out of the equation. I wonder about her choices in her private life. Church is not a habit now. She does not seem happy, as she was just a few years ago when she was very active in Church. God has given her talents. He planted the vision in her mind and heart. Yet as she gets closer and closer to making it a reality, she relies less and less on God to get her there. And then it slips through her grasp.

But, what do you expect?

It reminds me of me. So many times in my life, I have failed in some objective, even a good one . . . only to realize that I was leaving God out of it. But if God is the giver of gifts, how can I hope to make progress without Him? How can I fully prepare myself, without at least acknowledging God?

The Psalmist gives us the starting point: "Then I acknowledged my sin to you . . . " He is talking about being in a very low part of life. He felt like his life was fading away, like death was overtaking him. And then at once the Psalmist realizes, and admits his sinfulness to God. Instantly, things got better.

And then in my own life, and in the life of this young woman, there is always a side door out of the situation. You see that the vision was correct, it was there all along. You were just refusing to focus on it, and let it become more clear in your eyes, like seeing a 3D image materialize from an image of complex patterns.

You must always make things right with God, before embarking on any great thing.

The Root of Sin

...but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.

 - Genesis 2

We enter Lent.

And the first reading of the season goes straight to the root of the origin of sin. Unfortunately I cannot adequately address this topic in one short reflection.

The concept of sin is deceptively simple, yet it has layers of complexity. God took thousands of years, and 66 books of The Bible, to demonstrate and define it; it's motivations, it's manifestations, it's consequences. It is still being tested, studied, and mocked even today.

I believe there is a sexual component to basic sin. The sex act is a decidedly selfish one. There likely has never been the person born, with any kind of interest in sex, that would be willing to give another person sexual pleasure indefinitely, without getting any mutual stimulation in return. People engage in it, not because they really, truly love the other person; but because they want what it can get for them. Sound ludicrous? Think about it. If there was nothing in it for us, we absolutely would not engage in it totally for the benefit of another person. Absent some climactic animal response, the whole thing comes across as quite silly.

As Jack Miles suggests in his superb work Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God, sex is integrally linked with death. We know the being is mortal, because the being is sexual. Interesting . . . 

And so we could go on now, with all of the symbolism in Genesis, linking sex and the Tree of Knowledge. But that would take too long. But let that presumption color how we look at the rest of Scripture. We shall see if God actually does treat sex and its misuse as a serious thing. And well might we wonder why God would establish such an expectation for his human children, and in what way the proper attention to sex actually ennobles and immortalizes us (for we all want to live forever).

And maybe that's it: You can have your sex, but you will die. If you want to live forever, the price is giving up sex. Perhaps one channel of discovery open to us . . . 

Jesus Alone

And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone.

 - Matthew 17

This is the last week of Epiphany. We move into Lent, next. Lent is the preparation for Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter. In Lent, we look ahead to the Cross. But in Epiphany, we have been learning about the "coming out," if you will, of Christ. He launched His ministry, He made Himself known. He established Himself as the Promised One.

And so in this last reference, from the book of Matthew, we read of the Transfiguration, which I believe was the experience of Christ's Second Coming, for the eyes of Peter, John, and James. They were the ones that "would not see death," without seeing the Son of Man coming in the clouds, with Angels. (Moses and Elijah are God's servants and messengers, they count as angels.).

And Christ ordered them not to tell anybody about what they have seen, until after He would be raised from the dead. This is another topic for discussion, which we will have to do another time!

We want our denominations and sects. We create labels that define us as "good," and others as "bad." We all want to belong to something. It is natural for us to belong to loving families that accept us. Barring that, we turn to worldly systems that may include us: clubs, fraternities, political parties, churches, denominations . . . 

But Christ says, forget about all that. In the end the Three Disciples saw only Jesus. This should be our only identifier. 

Would you turn over your life for the sake of Christ? Then you are my brother and sister.